Waking The Dead: The Glory of a Ransomed Heart (Hardcover)

Many Christian books advocate living robotically moralistic lives - and indeed, the Scriptures place a great deal of emphasis on our morality. However, when morality in and of itself becomes the end goal the result is generally a plethora of very disfunctional, unhappy people. One only has to compare some of the Joyous, Bible-believing Christians one finds on the African continent, with the judgemental, dour and 'moralistic miseries' of the fundamentalist right wing churches of the 'Bible belt' to see what I mean.

One of the leading Christian, Biblical scholars in the UK (and a close friend of mine), fluent in Biblical Greek and Hebrew, Aramaic and a smattering of Arabic, maintains that one's faith should be written in Pen, but our theology written in pencil. This is too much for some of our modern day Pharisees. Anyway, on to Eldredge:

The crux, I believe, of this book is that if one awakens one's heart, a heart which has been stomped on by this world, the devil and our 'flesh', to the full potential that God allows us whilst here on earth, we will become much closer to God and much more complete as 'friends'/'children' of God. It is the Joy and Love of God in our hearts that attracts the unbeliever to God through us, not the moralising miseries so common in today's churches.

Eldredge seeks to bring out the best in us, our true potential as Christians through his writings. He quotes the Scriptures as well as many renowned authors such as G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis in his effort to persuade us that God wants people who are truly alive, and alive and joyous because they are fully aware of the amazing thing that God has done for us through Jesus Christ. Alive and Joyous because they are filled with God's Spirit and walking closely with Him.

One of the most successful evangelists I ever came across was a young Spanish Catholic man who was a member of Opus Dei. His incredible love of God and absolute joy in God was incredibly infectious and he was one of the few Christians whom non Christians in our college respected. My Protestant friends with their church evangelism agendas were invariably denied the time of day. Indeed, in my experience, it is those filled with unfettered Joy in God who are best at persuading unbelievers of the Gospel and its Wonder. Eldredge seeks to help us to get into a relationship of such closeness and intensity with God, a relationship desired by God, that we will emanate this Love and Joy that the Bible speaks about so often.

It is by freeing our hearts from the lies and contstraints of this world that we can get to that place where God desires us to be. We need to become the kind of people that we want to spend eternity with. People who adore God and their fellow man - people like the Spanish Guy from Opus Dei, and the zestful, non-materialistic people from some of the African churches - these people have extremely high biblical morals - but they're also exceedingly joyful and interesting people - and they don't spend their lives judging everyone around them, because they're too busy loving everyone around them, even if their theology isn't quite what the fundamentalists demand.

Some critcs below have completely misinterpreted Eldredge. Eldredge doesn't deny that we will face trials and tribulations, indeed the death of his closest friend must have been incredibly traumatic, both for him and for the family of his friend. This is not a book indulging in denial, and neither is it a book filled with 'New Age Philosophy,' as "a reader" from the mid-West would have us believe.

John Zxerce (below) also misses the point. He says, "Eldridge's book ultimately focuses on the realization of human glory...Eldridge argues that there is glory hidden in each Christian's heart, and the goal is to capture and maintain a sense of liberation through a realization of human glory..."

I didn't get this from Eldredge's book at all. Reading this book brought me closer to God, filled me with a desire to spend more time reading His Word and more time in prayer, and to devote much more energy to serving my fellow man. It did this by convincing me that I mattered to God and that I wasn't a bit of lowlife pondscum that God had 'saved' on a whim. It helped me to see that God had created me to be in relationship with Him and that I matter deeply to Him. It is through our knowledge of His character that we begin to see our character in relation to Him (as we read in Proverbs and Calvin's Institutes).

In conclusion, Eldredge is no threat to a belief and life based on the infallability of the Bible and the Gospel of Christ. He may be a threat to some imprisoning theologies and church practices of our times - and hence the bleating from the cheap seats, but this book, and indeed his other publications, will only serve to bring you closer to being the child that our Great God desires you to be, and to bring you closer into a relationship with Him.

However, I must respond to a comment made earlier by another reader. John Eldredge does not say "whatever your heart desires is good". Instead, he says that at its core, "the heart is good". He never tells us to go do whatever our heart desires, but he's saying that anything that your heart wants that is wrong is not inherently part of the heart.

Beyond the fact that he makes things almost too spiritual (as in everything must immediately be blamed on spiritual forces, which i do not necessarily agree with), this book does rely a lot on secular media. However, the things he talks about (like "The Chronicles of Narnia") are known to have deep Christian overtones, so I don't find it to be a (huge) problem. I also do realise that the audience he's writing to will not necessarily be anti-secular media, and will probably find his analogies to be easily understandable.

I did like this bok a lot. It wasn't perfect, but it was perfect for my life at the time, and I think God used John's words mightily for me, if that makes sense. I mean, we do need to fight. We can't complacent. We can't let the enemy win. Unfortunately, that's where too many Christians are now.

Fortunately, this book is for them.