The Sacred Romance, by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, claims that it will “invite us to see what God is doing behind the scenes of our lives to woo us to Himself. A glimpse of His wild beauty arouses our desire and puts us on a journey to capture or be captured by love. It calls us to recognize our heart’s deepest longing and invites us on a journey toward fulfillment.” If that is not clear, it is a book about Christian living and becoming more like Christ.
After being published in 1997, the book gained great acclaim in the Christian world and has spawned several sequels following the same theme (though the sequels are written only by Eldredge as Curtis died since the publication of this first book). The book is written in the flowery, verbose prose so loved by mystics. Stories fill almost as many pages as teachings, and popular movies and books are analyzed in great detail. I will provide first a synopsis of the teachings of the book and then an analysis of it.
Synopsis
The basis of the book is that God calls every human to join in a Sacred Romance with Him. Every human has the longing to form such a relationship with God. Our hearts tell us that we need such a relationship, but we constantly suppress the need and desire, opting instead to do life on our own. The authors “hope to help you discover your soul’s deepest longing and invite you to embrace it as the most important part of your life” (page 10). It is their aim to help us guide our hearts. Every experience we have, every longing for romance or love, every fragment of chivalry and beauty is really us seeking this Sacred Romance.
The authors spend a lot of the book discussing what they call the ‘Message of the Arrows’ (chapter 3). This term describes the experiences of our pasts that have pulled us from God and have kept us from seeing, understanding or believing that God wants to romance us. By looking back at the stories of our lives we should be able to see how every story is really about God teaching us to join in His romance.
In order to understand the world we need to see history as a play — a play where God is not only the author but also the main character. The play goes like this:
- Act I: His Eternal Heart – The story begins with God as Trinity, already experiencing love and intimacy.
- Act II: His Heart Betrayal – God created angels but they betrayed God’s heart by rebelling against Him. This called God’s heart and His intentions into question. How would God react to this and what would that say about His character?
- Act III: His Heart on Trial – God created a beautiful world in order to woo humans to Himself. Because true love can only exist where there is freedom to choose between love and rejection, God took a great risk in creating humans, in that He gave them free will to love Him or reject Him. God was surprised when Adam and Eve rejected Him. He was dismayed when humans continued to reject Him and the authors say that in the 400-year period between the Old and New Testaments ‘you can almost imagine [God] nursing his wounds, wondering where it all went wrong’ (page 80). Fortunately, God sent His son to die and rescue us. God now pursues us as a Lover, trying to woo us to Himself (page 81).
The authors then introduce the role of Satan in this great drama. Satan, being unable to defeat God, decided to wound Him by stealing the love of His beloved ones through seduction. Satan’s strategy is to disconnect us from our hearts. When we are disconnected from our hearts, the heart becomes deceitful and desperately wicked.
The role of each human, then, is to embark on a journey. It is a journey where we can learn to see that God is looking for a Sacred Romance with each of us, or a journey where we can reject Him. We can learn that God does not want our obedience, sacrifice, adherence or busyness, but wants us, our hearts and very beings. The process of this journey rests on our ability to see life from the basis of the question of ‘what does God have to do with the experiences of my life?’
Analysis
This book is full of error, especially when viewed from a Reformed viewpoint. It is indicative of the sorry state of the Christian world that such a book can gain so great a following. The authors misuse the Bible, equate experience with Scripture, and make God into something He is not. They are mystics, relying on their own thoughts more prominently than Scripture. They rely heavily on other mystics, mainly Catholic, such as C.S. Lewis, St John of the Cross, G.K. Chesterton and Phillip Yancey.
The authors have two grave misunderstandings that pollute the entire book. First, they have no understanding of human depravity. Where the Bible says that the heart is deceitful and full of wickedness, the authors believe it to be essentially good as long as we understand the importance of a Sacred Romance. Where the Bible teaches that no one seeks after God, the authors teach that all of us seek after God. They quote G.K. Chesterton who said, ‘every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.’ In their view, all we do, whether good or bad, is really a search for God. We all seek after Him, whether we know it or not. Inside of each of us is the desire to know and experience goodness. The second great misunderstanding is in God’s omniscience — His ability to see everything, whether past, present or future. They teach a form of ‘open theism’ which says that God can only see certain things in the future, but is unable to see what decisions or choices humans will make. Hence God was surprised when humans rejected Him and did not know that Adam and Eve would sin. Of course this contradicts the Bible which says that God knew who would love Him before the world was even created.
There are literally hundreds of errors in this book but I will focus only on some of the major ones.
- The book is based on the importance of the heart, yet the authors never identify what the heart is. It seems that in their view it represents only good. This blatantly ignores what the Bible teaches about the heart being deceitful and wicked. They teach that it is only wicked when we are outside of the Sacred Romance with God.
- The authors paint God as being sad and heartbroken, hoping against hope that we will choose to love Him. It smacks of Arminian theology taken to its fullest extent and reduces God almost to the extent of making Him sound like a whining child.
- The teaching that is based on the Bible is often dubious or plain wrong. The authors often quote from The Message, relying on that poor paraphrase when it suits their purposes and when the proper translations do not. This shows especially in Ephesians 1 which they use to say God created the world for our purposes, not God’s. The authors use The Message to teach that Job lost faith in God when a better translation shows he clearly did not. They also say that in Matthew 24 Jesus tells us that in the Last Days people will have lost the Sacred Romance. This is a ridiculous misinterpretation of this chapter.
- The book paints God and our relationship with Him in sexual terms. This far exceeds what we read in Song of Solomon and other places in the Bible. The portray God as One who seeks to have an almost sexual relationship with us. He ‘desires from us — an intimacy much more sensuous, more exotic than sex itself’ (page 161)
- The authors say that ‘God’s love is not based on what we’ve done, but who we are’ (page 98) Of course God’s love for us is based on who He is, not who we are!
- ‘God is not after obedience, sacrifice or adherence — He is after us’ (page 91) Teaching like this downplays the importance of following God’s decrees for us. This, of course, is a necessary symptom of teaching that does not follow the Bible. When we rely on our minds more than the Bible this type of teaching is inevitable.
- The authors rely heavily on the teachings of others as well as books and songs, much more so than they do on the Bible. For example, several pages are dedicated to showing how Lieutenant Jim from Forrest Gump was actually discovering the Sacred Romance through drugs, alcohol and sex with prostitutes.
- There is almost no importance placed on studying the Bible or praying. The tools God gives us to be transformed into His image are ignored in favor of just understanding our hearts and God’s heart. This is a book dedicated to sanctification — the process of living as God desires us to live — that ignores what God Himself teaches about this.
- There is no mention of Jesus coming to atone for our sins. The authors seem to say that Jesus had to come to seeks us out and find us — not to save us from hell and take our punishment upon Himself.
- A knowledge of God, in the view of the authors, is less important then feeling, experiencing and romanticizing Him. The book bears this out as there is little within it to increase the reader’s knowledge of God. Yet classic Christianity teaches that we can best learn God’s will for us by having knowledge of Him and what He commands of us.
One major annoyance I found with the book was that the authors quoted many sources without citations. This is usually a sign that an author has quoted inaccurately or far out of context. Even many Bible passages are quoted without citations.
In the end analysis, the authors have created an inaccurate metaphor for God’s relationship towards us, have attempted to prove it with the Bible and being unable to do so have had to rely on poor paraphrases and mysticism (which can be defined as ‘trying to know God outside of the Bible’). Their teaching bears only a vague resemblance to the Christianity of the Bible and should be avoided at all costs!
