John Eldredge - Wild at Heart

This is meant to be a book about men and what a man should look like psychologically. It's kind of like a Christianised version of a cross between half of Men are from Mars... and a self-help book. Except that the 'Christianisation' is very clearly American and very clearly charismatic, with some of the weaknesses of both.

It's worth saying at the outset that I think there may well be qualitative psychological difference between men and women as well as quantitative ones; the question is what they are. Although Eldredge is an experiences counsellor, I have yet to find any men who think that Wild at Heart is a good explanation of what it is to be a man. (I have, however, found quite a few women who think that the 'sequel', Captivating is a good explanation of what it is to be a woman.) And of course, when I judge a book like this, all I have to judge it against is myself and male friends of mine. I suspect that the book may well work better for 'average' men living in the Western US - I suspect that's who Eldredge knows and has counselled.

Of course, there are some good insights. Probably the best one is the idea that men benefit from being given permission to do what they think they ought to do. However, this seems to get slightly confused with Eldredge seeing what people think they ought to do as being what they are called to do by God, which is crazy. He does backtrack on it a little in the final chapter where he clarifies that it's true of people who are sufficiently spiritually mature (for which read that if it's not true of you, you just aren't mature enough yet).

Eldredge sees the three fundamental desires of men as being to fight a battle, to have an adventure, and to rescue a beauty. Of the three, I think it is the idea of having an adventure as a fundamental desire that I am most sceptical about. If he allowed it to become a metaphorical adventure, then that would probably be better, but his language remains pretty heavily literal on that one. Linked in with this is the whole idea of 'wildness'. In one story he recounts, he describes his young son as a 'wild man', and the son asks him if he really means it. Now without tones of voice, I wouldn't know what answer the son would want to hear (but Eldredge assumes it has to be 'yes'). Wildness, which Eldredge very strongly associates with the outdoorsy aspects of US culture, has implications of strength and freedom, but also of lack of civilisation and inability to relate - kind of like Crocodile Dundee, only more so. Would a wild man live in a house, or outside? Would he use cutlery at a nice restaurant? And so on. I think there probably is something under all the rubbish, but I wish he'd made a better job of explaining it.

The area I find most interesting / disturbing is Eldredge's conception of 'the Wound'. According to Eldredge, boys at some stage receive a single put down, usually from their fathers, which makes them think they cannot be real men. What is needed is then for them to discover that and overcome it. All sorts of questions arise:

• Why is it 'wound' (singular)?
• Does that imply that they would be better (in some way even sinless?) if their father had not done that? - I think it seems to stem from a Rogerian conception that says that sin is all about us not feeling good enough about ourselves (which doesn't work).
• Eldredge is right in his (eventual) insistence that we need God's approval not man's, but I don't think his message has anything to hold out to the man who is already well-adjusted.
• Why is it so programmatic?

All in all, there are some interesting insights here, but a lot of muck as well. If he thought through questions like "Why has the Church said for over 1000 years that men's fundamental problem is their pride?" and "Do these patterns manifest themselves in the same way in every man?", the book could be a lot better.

Brazil 9 - Football / Futebol / Idolatry

My host (and some of his family) very kindly took me to see a football game the other day. It was Santa Cruz v Campinese in the Brazillian 3rd division. Tickets, by the way, cost about £10 for a good seat, or about £2 for a standing place.

Santa Cruz seem to be a lot like Manchester United, except without the money and Sir Alec. In other words, they used to be successful, but have dropped two divisions in the last two years and are most notable for having the largest stadium in this bit of Brazil (though some of it is being refurbished, and other bits are closed due to having been trashed) and for being very nasty to opponents, often using Hell-type imagery.

This is the so-called "Inferno Coral", where the hardest-core fans stand. Note that in Portuguese, "Inferno" means "Hell". Lots of songs about doing nasty things to their opponents... Lots of drums, jumping, and waving big flags too. At times the whole area looked like a living organism, because everyone was jumping to the beat of the drums.

This is the top worn by many in the Inferno Coral. Note the loving attitude it displays to his fellow man. The snake, by the way, is the emblem of the club, but it doesnt't usually carry guns. Note how incongruous the state flag (at the top, with the cross and the rainbow) looks, just like Christians wearing a Man Utd shirt...

Lots of food and drink was available, some of the more conventional kind (crisps, popcorn, etc.) and some of the less conventional kind. This, for example, is raw sugar cane, which is meant to be sucked on, then spat out. Given the local industries, maybe eating so much sugar is simply a patriotic thing...

At half time, the score being 0-0, the players and officials went off. Please note the following security features:

• There are very few (if any) stewards in the crowd
• There is a deep moat between the crowd and the pitch
• On the other side of the moat, there are policemen with big dogs
• The referree has police with riot shields guarding him while he goes down his tunnel

After the break, Campinese scored with a free-kick.

But shortly afterwards, Santa Cruz were awarded a penalty. Full marks to the penalty taker for being cheeky. He stopped most of the way into his run-up, pointed something out to the goalie, then kicked the ball into the net while the goalie was distracted. The crowd went wild.

One of the good things about being in a different culture is that it gives me a good opportunity to reflect on my own. This was a regular Brazillian third division match, and they treated it like a cup final. Here, football often seems so clearly to be a matter of worship. And that got me thinking about England...

Is the reason that there are so many more women than men in church in England (and in Brazil) linked to the fact that so many men worship sports?

What does it mean to support a football team? If Liverpool and Man Utd swapped 60% of their players over a period of a few years, why would I still support Liverpool? Is it because what is actually happening is worship (however half-hearted) for something underlying what actually goes on on the pitch?

Has sport provided us with a new pantheon of gods to worship, except where there is continually more information to process so that people don't get bored?

I can see that it can be right and good to enjoy watching people use the skills God has given them. But if supporting a football team is fundamentally about worshipping a non-physical entity, can a Christian consistently do it?

I know there's various reasons why people support the teams they do - attachment to roots, glory seeking, and so on. But they all seem like bad reasons to me.

So often we wrongly interpret the first commandment to say "You shall have no other gods before me" - i.e. "Make God number 1". But that isn't what it actually says. It actually says "You shall have no other gods before my face." It's commanding a complete absence of other gods, not just them being taken down to numbers 2, 3 and 4.

Why do people not see (a la Isaiah 44) that football is something people invented, and therefore it cannot be worthy of our devotion?

Why is it that the people at the top of the game (players, managers, etc) don't seem to show anywhere near the level of support or loyalty that the fans do? Answer - because they know it isn't worth it. For them it's a business - a way of making money.

Hopefully, it's kind of obvious I'm still wrestling with this question. Just to show how inconsistent I am, here's a photo of me with the European Champions' League Trophy...

And here's a good cartoon from Dave Walker on the subject.

Men and Women

This stuff mostly seems obvious to me, but it also seems that it isn't obvious to lots of people, so it's worth saying.

There have been lots of books about the (alleged) differences between men and women, and quite a few books arguing that those differences don't exist. As far as I can tell, both are obviously wrong. And things get a lot clearer if we discuss issues there is much less argument about, like height or strength.

Biology versus Psychology

There are obviously difference between men and women in terms of genitals and so on. But it seems to me utterly mad to say that those are the only differences, because the different sex organs produce different hormones. For example, men have a much higher average level of testosterone than women, and it is well documented that testosterone increases muscle mass and aggression, which is part of the reason athletes sometimes use it to cheat. Because men's bodies produce much larger amounts of testosterone than women's bodies, you'd expect this to affect their psychology too.

Normal Distributions

Many continuous variables (like height, strength, IQ, etc) are pretty much normally distributed - if you plot a graph of height against how many people are that tall, you get something like this:

But when you try plotting men and women separately, you find something like this:

The green line represents the total - the red line represents women and the blue line represents men.

In words, men are on average taller than women, but there are some men who are shorter than most women, and some women who are taller than most men. That doesn't mean that the shorter men are more feminine or the taller women are more masculine - it's perfectly normal to have a distribution like that.

As I understand it, the situation is slightly different with IQs.

Women, I am led to believe, have a higher average IQ than men, but men are more spread out. So it's not just the mean that can be different between the sexes, the standard deviation can also be different.

My suggestion therefore is this:

Roughly this phenomenon is true for pretty much all continuously measurable attributes.

I'd include in that things like love of science fiction, dress sense, relationality, rationality, etc.

In some cases, the average man will be better than the average woman at things. In some cases, it will be the other way round. In all cases, if women are better at it on average, there will be men who are better than the average woman and women who are worse than the average man.

Because of those cases, it is a bad idea to describe one trait (e.g. love of science fiction) as distinctly male or distinctly female. Yes, it might be more predominant among men, but that doesn't mean that a woman who likes sci-fi is less of a woman or a man who doesn't is less of a man.

In some cases, e.g. pitch of voice, there might well be such a gap that there are very few women whose voices are as deep as the average man's, or men whose voices are as high as the average woman's. But there might be.

As I said, this all just seems obvious.

Now whether there are underlying ontological differences - whether it is genuinely different being a woman to being a man in some inbuilt sense which isn't due to society or whatever and which isn't just something where there's a scale and there's overlap - that's a different question...

Where are all the Men?

This post arises out of several conversations I've had in the last few months, most recently last night.

One of the tragedies of modern evangelicalism is the women. Or is it the men?

There seem to be far more young women than young men in many churches, which means that the women are often faced with a very difficult choice. Either they marry people they have big differences with theologically, often even non-Christians, or they stay single. I know people who have done each. Generally it seems that those who are struggling more in their faith tend to marry, but it is a horrible decision to have to make.

So the question is - where are all the men? In the discussion, we came up with three reasons why there are often so many more young women than young men (older women, there's a difference because of the different life expectancies, as in the population at large). There's probably lots more too.

Reason 1 - Friendships

An important part of how people come to faith is through friendships. Our society is a lot better on female-female friendships than on male-male friendships or male-female friendships. Women have friends. Men have people they do things with. So I might have friends I do sports with, or go to the pub with, or whatever, but they aren't friends I'd talk to about stuff or friends in the abstract. So because women have better friendships, they're more likely to come to Christ through their friends.

Proposed solution: church-based football leagues, church-based activities generally with a very gentle evangelistic focus.

Reason 2 - Lack of Acceptable Role Models

Christian leadership is seen more and more as being relational (and that's important). However, because the leadership is gentle, relational and so on, it's often also seen by society as being more feminine, and the men who do it are less accessible as role models for other men. It's notable that the one societal cross-section of British evangelicalism where men aren't under-represented is the one where there is a strong archetypal role model still in place - the posh public-school section.

Proposed solution: male leaders - listen to Mark Driscoll on this one.

Reason 3 - Feminisation of the Gospel

We tend to emphasise some bits of the Bible over others. Specifically, we tend to emphasise the bits about God loving us and accepting us, which can be seen as fitting in with stereotypically female concerns. And we don't tend to emphasise the bits which fit in with characteristically male concerns - the risk taking, the pictures of the soldier and the athlete, the heroes of the faith, the pressing on to win the prize, the eschatological goal of the faith, and so on. Which means that, because we present an unbalanced view, we get an unbalanced group of people in.

I'm not saying that the facts that God loves us and accepts us and so on aren't important - of course they are. I'm saying that they're not the whole story.

And a quick note on stereotypes - of course men and women do not all precisely follow their stereotypes, and some of the stereotypes are culturally conditioned. But they're still sometimes useful generalisations for getting a big picture.

Gender

There's an interesting discussion of gender differences (partly from an evolutionary biological perspective) here. It's interesting - the idea that men have a higher standard deviation in most traits explaining why women do better at things such as GCSEs where the distribution is squashed down at the top end (a decent proportion get A*, there is no A****, more get A*s than Fs) and why men do better when it is squashed up at the bottom end (e.g. wages, where there is no upper bound but there is often a minimum wage).

The whole thing reminds me that I have yet to come across a good theology of gender. Anyone got any ideas?

Some of the basics are clear - male and female are different but of equal value. There's something called "headship" which men have in marriage, but the exact nature of that is disputed. Men and women are mutually dependent upon one another.

But so many of the details are obscure. I think the Bible doesn't spend a lot of time on it, partly because stereotyping doesn't work. Maybe that's the answer - that each situation needs to be worked out individually, on the basis of some very broad principles and wisdom.

Any ideas? Helpful books on theology of gender?

Is It Time for Women Bishops in the C of E?

Last night, I was at a debate with that title, which was organised by the Chester Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship. Ian Enticott (Kelsall) spoke for, Simon Gales (Lindow) spoke against, Donald Allister (archdeacon) spoke about the current situation and the way forwards. Mike Smith (Hartford) chaired the meeting.

I'm not going to report exactly what was said - it's not really my style. I'm going to synthesise and reflect a bit too...

Points of Agreement

It was generally agreed that, as evangelicals, the key question was whether women bishops were permitted by the Bible. The main speakers also agreed on the key passages, partularly 1 Timothy 2, 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Corinthians 14. They also agreed that women should be allowed and encouraged to take some positions of responsibility within the church, for example praying or prophesying in the congregation (1 Cor 11:5) or deacon (whatever that is, Rom 16:1). Both agreed that in 1 Timothy 2, Paul's command to let women learn in v11 was the main shock for the original readers, though disagreed with the significance of v12 in that light. Both also agreed that Jesus appointing only male disciples did not lead to a solid argument against women bishops, and both agreed that if women presbyters should be allowed, so should women bishops be, with Mr Gales saying the ordination of women to the presbyterate had been a mistake. The debate was conducted in a friendly and polite way.

Arguments for Women Bishops

Mr Enticott spent some time looking at 1 Tim 2:11-12, specifically highlighting that both "woman" and "man" were singular (and why should this be so if Paul is commanding a general men over women thing?) and that they could be equally well translated "husband" and "wife". He also highlighted that "exercise authority over" is not the usual Biblical word for "authority" and might well be better translated "lord it over".

Furthermore, he pointed out a number of women in leadership positions in the early church, including Priscilla correcting Apollos in Acts 18:26 and seeming to take more of a leadership role than her husband Aquila. He also mentioned Junais and Pheobe in Romans 16, drawing attention to the fact that Pheobe takes the masculine form of the word "deacon", suggesting that male titles could be and were used of women in the Church.

He then went on to a much weaker (in my opinion) section, where he argued from Galatians 3, etc, that there is no male or female in Christ and that we all, men and women are sons of God. I know it's a commonly used argument, but it's pretty clear that it's referring to salvation, where God makes no distinction between men and women, but that while men and women are equal, we aren't identical (as the sections in the NT on marriage show). His most interesting comment was that the male/female distinction doesn't exist in terms of the Holy Spirit, which would probably repay a little more thought.

He then went on more briefly to look at 1 Corinthians 11, where he questioned the nature of headship, specifically showing it involved an element of equality, and then 1 Corinthians 14:34, where he showed the word "silent" was used in the passage not for permanant silence, but for being quiet when someone else was speaking.

My Reflections

I think that Mr Enticott might have fallen slightly too much for the equal = identical mistake. Specifically, the way he worded things made it look as if he advocated men and women having identical roles in the church and in marriage, and he didn't provide an adequate explanation of the nature of headship in 1 Corinthians 11. We all agree (or should) that men and women are equal; the question is whether both can be bishops, which is altogether different. He was also sometimes slightly too quick to jump to his conclusion. For example, in 1 Timothy 2, he went straight from women learning to women therefore being meant to teach men. I didn't get that conceptual leap at all. On the other hand, I thought some of his arguments were good - particularly in terms of 1 Timothy 2.

Part 2...