The book is not half over as I'd previously thought. My apologies. Of course you have the freedom to stop reading when you're bored.
"Romanced"
After conversations with Nick and reading Ryan's comment, I'll be honest that I had no expectation that I'd find anything I agreed with in here. On the other hand, I wanted to be slapped-in-the-face wrong.
This is how it began:
"A cool breeze whispered by, one of the first to speak of the winter to come. As I walked, I was dazzled by the splendor of it all, and I began to compliment God on the great job he had done. 'It's beautiful, Lord! The stars are amazing!'
I'm glad you like it, my Darling.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I blushed. Did the God of the universe just call me 'Darling?' Was that okay? I was warmed to the depths of my soul by the endearment, but I also wondered if I had made it up. And was it sacrilegious to believe God would use such a loving name?"
Of course he didn't call you "darling," dimwit.
(That was what I thought.)
And then I was slapped in the face -- by my own arrogance. As Nick said, many of the Eldredges' arguments are using pathos, and my "educated" (conceited) mind puts little value in anything but logos. That's not to say the Eldredges aren't educated people, but chances are that I'm not in their target market. You are probably not in their target market (since 80 percent of those reading this are male anyhow). Their intended audience is not looking for solid reasoning. They're looking for something that makes sense but echoes with their own troubles and desires.
"It's unwise to fall for the pathetic," we say. And yet they are writing to women about women -- women who are eaten up, tearing out their hair about their craving for the pathetic that they can't manage to suffocate or explain or rationalize or own up to or live with. We're here in the 21st century and now we're men, just like we wanted, in everything but physical traits and this this self-centered neediness that will not go away. What we want desperately is to want no thing, no one. Just like a god?
The Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." And then she helped him eat the apple.
As rational as we would like to be, Jesus is a perfect example of throwing logos out the window.
Why does the pathetic drive us insane?
(So this is off track. Better luck next chapter.)
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Furthermore, Adam didn't know he needed a helper. He knew life without one. But Eve was engineered specifically as a helper. She was the service pack, if you will, to Human 1.0, designed to be the finishing piece to the human program. So after the fall, part of Eve's punishment is that her desire will be for her husband. She finds that her help -- and she feels therefore she herself -- is not wanted, because helping is her entire reason for existing.
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