A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original review appears below. Greg Dallimore is a student at Regent College, Vancouver.
Defeating the Dragons of the World: Resisting the Seduction of False Values. Stephen D. Eyre. Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1987; 154 pp.
Stephen Eyre’s book developed out of “ideas” he presented to a small group in the Fall of 1982. What Mr. Eyre thought would be a few weeks of material expanded into a full year of study and reflection. Stephen Eyre has a Masters degree in Divinity from Covenant Seminary in St. Louis and is currently a training director for InterVarsity for the South-East region.
This is a book which comes out of Eyre’s “. . . hunger to say something about God, the church and the culture in which we live.” The Dragons are those subtle seductions which keep us from being fully the children of God and from fully working out his purpose in the world. We might call these Dragons “worldliness” or “cultural values” and they take the following forms:
Materialism — Matter is all that matters
Activism — A life filled with “action”
Individualism — Depend on Self Conformism — Be recognized and liked by all
Relativism — Belief in something is better than nothing
Secularism — Religion is all right in its place
Eyre points out that we have all embraced at least one of these Dragons at some time in our lives — maybe we are addicted to some. They are attractive and can lure us into a gospel of prosperity: God must be really blessing you because you’re so successful. Face it, we secretly, if not openly, want the “good life” and Christ! In an age of the church where big is better, Eyre suggests that “Any church who proclaims the Dragons can expect to grow.” Yet, with each Dragon accepted, we put a greater distance between our life and an intimate relationship with the Father.
Activism, for example, pronounces to us and God that we are what we do. If we run around enough and exhaust ourselves at the end of the day, we are “doing a work for the Lord.” Eyre suggests we “do” so that we are no longer responsible to God. The outworking of activism is children driven from one after-school busyness to another and the pastor who burns out from taking on the whole church by himself. Another Dragon is Individualism. Eyre discusses individualism in society but also points the finger at the church, for its lack of real love and real depth of relationship due to the subtle acquisition of the individual. Robert Ringer’s quote is as true for society as it is for the church: “Our primary objective is really to be as happy as possible and all other objectives great and small are only means to that end.”
Conformism is a twin brother to Individualism. Conformism seeks desperately for public recognition and leads the unwary into what Eyre calls the “cult of chameleonism”: I will be a different person in different situations. The conformist is consumed with his or her image, how successful they are in the eyes of friends and how much influence they can wield. The Relativist’s slogan is “1 am what I believe” or “1 am whatever I want to be.” In Christian circles, it spawns positive thinking, “name it and claim it” and the most subtle — any kind of faith if OK as long as I believe something. The problem, as Eyre points out, is that all these doctrines are tested by the trials and disasters which tear our self-sufficient worlds apart. Finally, Eyre talks about the Dragon of Secularism, which proclaims: “I am sufficient without God.” With the New Age Movement, people redefine God as the “Energy” or the “Great Force of the Universe.” Yet, the church also allows secularism to creep in by compartmentalization — I am a Christian at church, but I leave it behind when at the office; I witness freely to strangers but never to my friends. Such, then, are the Dragons with which we contend, says Eyre.
In bringing these deceptions to light, the author introduces a necessary corrective. However, the book lacks some internal smoothness. There are long sections in the work which are choppy, so that the reader is left almost breathless. Eyre’s style of writing oscillates between being somewhat flippant, then suddenly serious. The book is filled with Eyre’s personal stories, which give the issues evaluated some life, yet these stories are sometimes left hanging. On page 31, he describes himself sitting in a pizza parlour, watching a football game and wondering how many people actually had good relationships in their lives. He then reflected how he could witness to those next to him, but that is where the story ends. Did he witness? We are left hanging. Finally, there are study questions at the end of each chapter which are useful for group study, but which do not explore these “Dragons” in any depth.
Having suggested some deficiencies, I am not suggesting that Defeating the Dragons of the World is of no value. For those who have not explored these false values before in other literature or for those who are relatively new to the faith, this book is an important introduction to the field. Eyre is bringing to our attention the “beams” which may appear in our own eyes. We defeat the Dragons with true repentance and,
If we seek to defeat the Dragons of the world by our own efforts and determination, we place ourselves more deeply in their clutches. They will grow in power fueled by our own self-generated focus on them. Our only hope is to cast ourselves on God.