This book is in Spanish. The review that used to sit on this page was written entirely in English and never mentioned that.
Forjado por el padre: Aprende lo que tu padre jamás pudo enseñarte is the Spanish edition of John Eldredge’s Fathered by God, published by Grupo Nelson in 2018.
If you read English, you want the original. We have a separate review of the English edition on this site.
One book, three titles
Worth untangling, because it catches people out and can cost you the price of a book you already own.
Eldredge first published this material as The Way of the Wild Heart. It was later reissued in English as Fathered by God: Learning What Your Dad Could Never Teach You. The Spanish translation is Forjado por el padre.
Same book. If you have read any one of those, you have read all three.
The six stages
Eldredge’s frame is that a man is not made all at once but is fathered through stages, and that God is the one doing the fathering, particularly for men whose own fathers did not or could not.
The stages are beloved son, cowboy, warrior, lover, king, and sage.
The old version of this page said there were six and then listed only five, dropping beloved son. That omission matters more than a counting error normally would, because beloved son is the foundation of the whole argument. Eldredge’s point is that a man who skips it, who moves straight to being a warrior or a king without ever having been simply loved, builds everything on nothing. Leaving it off inverts the book.
Where CalledToBetter stands
Our position is that men and women have different but equal roles. Equal in worth and dignity before God, with distinct callings that Scripture describes. We hold that and we do not go further, and we do not publish definitions of manhood beyond what the Bible makes very clear.
Eldredge does go further. The six-stage progression is his framework, drawn from Scripture, story, and myth, and it is not a structure the Bible sets out. That is a legitimate thing for a writer to offer and a great many men have found it clarifying. It is still one man’s map rather than settled ground, and it should be weighed against Scripture rather than received as the shape God has assigned to every life.
Eldredge’s work generally attracts strong reactions, admiring and critical, and both camps include people who take the Bible seriously.
What we removed
A sentence in quotation marks attributed to Eldredge that we could not verify, and an endorsement attributed to a named reviewer called Gustavo Aguilar that we could not locate. Both are gone, along with a paragraph describing how men “in our community” responded.
The claim that the book contains reflection questions and Scripture tie-ins could not be confirmed for this edition either, so it is no longer stated as fact.
Who should buy it
Buy this edition if you read Spanish or are buying for someone who does. Grupo Nelson is Thomas Nelson’s Spanish-language imprint and this is a proper translation, not a machine job. Solid Spanish-language material for men is genuinely useful to have on hand.
Buy the English edition otherwise, and check first that you have not already read it under one of its other two titles.
Forjado por el padre en Amazon