Beautiful Outlaw—Eldredge

Beautiful OUTLAW: Experiencing the playful, disruptive, extravagant personality of Jesus ***
by: John Eldredge
(FaithWords:2011,225pp.)

Pitting the poison of dead religion (and its accomplice—'words on a page') against the delight of experiencing the 'real Jesus', John Eldredge invites the reader to re-discover and fall in love with Jesus. To do so, he elaborates on the human personality traits of Jesus we may have missed—his playfulness, intensity, generosity, honesty, cunning, humility and 'trueness' …. He then gives examples of what loving this very human Jesus will look like and practical suggestions on getting started. Running from anything that 'smacks of religion' is essential, as is being open to experiential 'encounters' with Jesus. The book concludes with an epilogue on the inevitability of suffering in the Christian life and the need to keep clinging to Jesus through it.

There are some things I loved about this book, some that raised warning flags, and at least one area that must be addressed as good-intentioned but in serious error.

I love Eldredge's inclusion of actual portions of Scripture to illustrate the various personality traits of Jesus that he has chosen to emphasize. Eldredge's commentary gives a fresh and convicting realness to these stories of Jesus' ministry and for the most part avoids the pitfall of assuming motives and undisclosed outcomes. I appreciate his evaluation of Jesus as 'cunning' in the way he woos, confronts, delivers, heals, shoots straight and uses intrigue to rescue human hearts and gain their allegiance, rather than resorting to the shortcut of an overwhelming power play to win followers.(103) His final chapter on 'Letting His Life Fill Yours' gets down to the 'how' of obeying, which is requisite to loving Jesus. He clarifies that this is not about trying harder but surrendering self-determination and allowing Jesus' life to accomplish in and through us what only He can. This was one of my favorite chapters!

Eldredge's aim throughout is to stir a fresh expectancy in people for 'encounters' with a living Jesus and to foment a discontent with 'dead religion'. I appreciate his intent but his methodology falls short.

In attempting to warn of the toxins of 'religious fog' he resorts to harshly characterizing people as 'Pharisees', 'churchy', having 'false reverence' and other labels which measure externals without necessarily seeing the heart.

In the process of encouraging people to fall in love with the Jesus they encounter in nature or in random everyday incidents, a reliance on Scripture as the primary communication of God with man is marginalized.

The love that is encouraged looks strangely like infatuation. "I love you for how you make me feel". This may be a starting point but is not the whole deal. Though he mentions that we should not compare or try to duplicate another's experience, the message is clear that to settle for a faith in Jesus not marked by regular subjective experiences and emotional moments is to settle for 'dead religion'.

But hurrah for the brief epilogue that attempts to balance these impressions by warning that even followers of Jesus will suffer at times and must keep clinging to Jesus when the love affair no longer seems rosy. He's onto something here that needs to be injected much earlier in the book—something about the true definition of love as more than  just responding with affection when Jesus makes me feel loved.

What are we to do when the feelings die? When bad things happen and it seems to be God's fault? Having faced this very scenario in praying with a hurting woman, Eldredge counsels that we need to forgive Jesus for letting these things happen to us! He acknowledges it's bad theology, wrong-headed doctrine and an alarmingly heretical concept but it doesn't matter, just so long as we go away feeling the love of Jesus again. In my opinion this kind of response to personal discomfort is a dead give-away that our love is really about us and not Jesus. This is a self-centered infatuation that resists bowing to the sovereignty of God, and will struggle to believe in in His goodness when circumstances make us feel otherwise. At some point the truth that we are sinners bent on rebellion against the God that loves us infinitely, must bring us to repentance and humility, not just a quick emotional fix with the 'guilt' pinned on Jesus. Herein lies the hazard of teaching an experiential relationship based on subjective feelings and human standards apart from objective Biblical truth. It is the most glaring error in Eldredge's book.

The chapter titled: Letting Jesus be Himself is likewise pre-occupied with Jesus as a human personality at the expense of introducing Him as Lord of the Universe. Both aspects must be part of a genuine relationship with this “Beautiful Outlaw”. The fact greatly understated in this book's treatment of Jesus is that this One we are invited to know as He is, is not merely a ‘beautiful outlaw’ but the King of Kings--both beautiful and sovereign! To replace dead religion with anything else is to trade one self-made religion for another.

--LS