Masculinity caricatures, part 1

Brandon O'Brien's Christianity Today column, "A Jesus for Real Men," puts the masculinity of the incarnate Jesus into question. In attacking the so-called "new masculinity movement," O'Brien constructs an unfair, unbalanced caricature of men like Mark Driscoll, David Murrow, and John Eldredge and then seeks to tear down metaphors that do not agree with his more sophisticated pallet. While giving lip service to the contributions of these men he essentially argues against the straw man.

O'Brien first gives an historical error. He claims that the first writer to popularize the masculinity crisis in the church was John Eldredge. False. The first ones to raise the issue were writers like Leane Payne author of Crisis in Masculinity (1995) and Harvard Divinity school graduate and psychologist Sam Keen author of Fire in the Belly: On Being A Man (1992). There was a substantial national discussion about men in the church for years in mainline Protestant and Catholic circles before Eldredge struck the keyboard.

O'Brien then aims his caricature at David Murrow, author of Why Men Hate Going To Church; Brad Stine, a comedian, who began a ministry called GodMen; and Mark Driscoll, pastor of Seattle's Mars Hill Church. What is most bizarre about the critique of Stine is that one might assume, since Stine is a comedian, that many of his comments would be interpreted as comedic hyperbole. No so for O'Brien. He critiques Stein's comedic hyperbole as if it were biblical theology.

Perfecting the art of out-of-context critiques, O'Brien takes a few quotes from a Driscoll sermon and caricatures his point as well. Although Driscoll has written an entire book on Christology, called Vintage Jesus, O'Brien seems content to assume the worst from a sermon clip. Why not reference the book?

What is most profoundly distorting about O'Brien's critique of John Eldredge is the fact that Eldredge has directly addressed women's discipleship issues in Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul, co-authored with his wife. Moreover, in his latest book, The Way of Wild Heart: A Map of the Masculine Journey, Eldredge spends an entire chapter developing the need for men to have an aesthetic conversion and to become lovers of beauty, the poetic, and so on.

O'Brien's convenient caricatures miss the point that the goal of the recent masculinity reflections is not to "re-masculate Jesus" but to "re-masculate" the church's men to be conformed to the Bible's whole teaching about Jesus in his incarnation and exaltation. Then the church's men can offer their needed strength to their families, the church, and work of the Kingdom.

O'Brien's column should be taken with the smallest grain of salt because it lacks a fair assessment of the men he caricatures, fails to understand the rhetorical use of hyperbole, and is biased toward affinities of men who are among educated class's Christian elite.