Reformed critics located Eldredge’s warrior ideal in sin, not creation

Evidence

Calvin College professors Mark Mulder and James K. A. Smith also called out Eldredge’s failure to reckon with the reality of sin, but they considered it a more fundamental flaw. While Eldredge claimed to root his notion of masculinity in a theology of creation, in the God-given “essence” of men and women, Smith and Mulder insisted that “what Eldredge attributes to creation, biblical Christianity ascribes to the Fall!” War, conflict, and enmity resulted from humanity’s sinfulness, not from God’s good creation; thus “it cannot be the case that being a warrior is essential to being a man.” The Bible promised a coming kingdom of peace; endorsing this “warrior-ideal” would foster “sinfulness, not redemption,” they warned. Mulder and Smith, however, were in the minority, certainly if book sales were any measure. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 401

Categorization

• XREF: The Mulder/Smith critique is direct theological ammunition for the reader’s stated task of contesting whether Eldredge’s strand IS white evangelicalism — the counter-theology existed yet lost on book-sales grounds. This is the key methodological crux.
• SEED: Angle: book sales as the arbiter of evangelical theology — ‘the marketplace decides doctrine’ — supports Du Mez’s consumer-culture method and also exposes its limits.