The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity
by William P. Young
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Book Reviews of The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity
Book Review: I've Been Shacked!
Summary: 2 Stars
As a work of fiction and a theological narrative, and for a book so highly touted by well-respected critics, this book was a huge disappointment.
The Fiction.
If I was merely grading the book for the sake of its fiction, I'd have to give The Shack a C+.
Now to Young's credit the book's plot is provocative and excellent. It's the perfect set-up to inject the kind of encounter Young wants his central character to endure. Here's the nuts and bolts of the setup: A runaway teenager grows up, goes to seminary and gets married all while battling the demons of an abusive father and family he leaves behind at the age of 13. The central character, Mack Phillips, moves to Oregon, finds some success in life and marries a down-to-earth Christian woman with sense and sensitivity. While in his early 50s, Mack undergoes the tragic abduction of his six-year-old girl at the hands of infamous serial killer. Four years later, Mack gets a mysterious note in his mail box during a fierce ice storm that sets in motion his return to the cabin (hundreds of miles away from his home) where his young daughter was murdered and his faith was left behind. Mack returns to ultimately discover God and has a long face-to-face chat with his Maker while being sent a few "neatly wrapped gifts" to help bring closure to his grief ravaged life.
Young's setup unfortunately unravels in the details. The first two chapters of the book read like a special presentation on The Hallmark Channel. And the last two chapters read like a Left Behind novel. The book is dripping with sentimental goo and unnecessary adjectives, as Young waxes eloquent (tries anyway) about ice storms in the Pacific Northwest and the majestic beauty of the Eagle Cap Wilderness area in Northeastern Oregon. Now don't get me wrong, as a native of the area I can tell you first hand that our region is beautiful. But Young over-labors and belabors his imagery and works extra hard to pull you in and instead leaves you behind. It's not until the chapter "The Great Sadness" where Young finally settles down and tells a good story, and in doing so, he finally does pull you in - before he loses you again later. After Mack encounters the Shack the story starts to fall apart as the rest of the book plods along, sometimes akwardly, sometimes strangely, with Mack's encounter with the Trinity. And let me tell you about Young's preception of The Trinith. The Trinity is represented by terribly conventional characters (never mind all that stuffy Old Testament imagery depicting God in a cloud, the wind or fire - you know, that stuff that's actually in the Bible). Mack's amazement over the characters leave you shaking your head.
The end of the story is clumsy and predictable, but with a few near redeeming moments. But overall, alas, the emotionalism works in keeping the story memorable while working it against it.
The Theology.
If I had to grade this book purely on Young's theology, that he painfully tries to convince you is orthodox and revolutionary, I'd be charitable in giving it a D+. Since many reviews here deal with Young's defunct views on the Trinity as it relates to Scripture, I'll refrain from beating a dead horse. But I do have several more subtle, yet deeply important, theological bones to pick with Mr. Young.
First, it's deeply ironic that Young tries hard to paint the picture that God is nothing like we can imagine by making God as ordinary as possible. Jesus spills some sauce. Each of the members of the Trinity engage in ordinary household chores. Dinner conversations between the Trinity are as normal (and dysfuctional) as any modern family. The banter throughout the book between and this "trinitarian three" is surprisingly glib. Sometimes it's irreverent. Sometimes it's even crass. God is crass?
The images Young paints of the "trinitarian three" shows us how much he desperately wants us to see how God lovingly condescended for Mack, but Young takes it too far and kills any hope for awe. For what exactly is supposed to be so otherwordly about an African American, an Asian woman and a Middle Eastern man speaking glibly with each other? The God of Scripture is described as terribly beautiful and amazing outwardly, not just inwardly, no? Young does some quick covering for this deficency in the book, but it leaves with you with the kind of grimace and head shaking that says you just aren't buying it.
Probably the most tragic part of this book is Young's depictoin of how God (in all persons) is not just tolerant of Mack's self-absorption, but rather encourages it. Young quickly dances back-and-forth between Scripture and personal philosophies here. Sometimes he tells us that salvation requires us to go to Jesus to find God and other times he hints at finding this path to God through self-discovery apart from Jesus. So what the reader is left with is the kind of eastern mystic mumbo-jumbo that has you wondering if Papa (the character depicting God the Father) wasn't just a wholesale lift from the Oracle's persona found in the movie The Matrix. Seriously, I half expected at some the point for Papa to blurt out: "Mack, take a cookie and go fishing on the lake. I promise you that as soon you go through that door you'll feel as right as rain."
The end result of Young's portrayals is a very low view of the sinfulness of humanity. Despite sin being the very root cause of Mack's inability to submit himself to God, and the source of his distrust of Jesus, it's completely swept aside in the book. For example, in one scene Mack gets to judge God, and not surprsingly Mack even finds God guilty, but through the process Mack isn't really asked to consider his sin nature as the true reason he is unable to see and trust in God. Instead, Mack is asked to shun authority, individuality and modern thinking as the true evils of life. What? How about Mack's lack of acknowledgement of God's authority through his persistent disobedience and self-pity? Nope. It's just a brief lecture about the "evils of society and then it's off to join a relationship with God in spite of ignoring the big white elephant in the room.
On other occasions, Mack is then taught that all humans are God's children and that none will likely see hell in the end - at least we are given no reason to suspect any will be sent to hell in Young's world. This seemingly subtle, yet massive shift in Young' portrayal of the Gospel, unveils a gospel presentation that removes the Gospel itself. That is to say, it removes Mack's essential need for a Savior to begin with. After all, this is what Mack came to the cabin looking for: Reconciliation and release from his guilt and all his doubts about God, yes? Surprisingly, Young fails to see and deal with the original problem by the end of his book.
In another instance Young's Jesus says, "Papa, I loved watching you today as you made yourself fully available to take Mack's pain into yourself and then give him space to choose his own timing. You honored him and you honored me." But beyond the immediate Scriptural problems this presents, it also reveals Mack's whole problem. HE has been choosing HIS timing and wanting HIS own space his whole life and Mack is just as spiritually miserable and lost now after the death of his little girl as he was before - so Papa ends up teaching him nothing that he hasn't already learned - he's just telling Mack that everything's a-okay. The message is simply: just be a sinner and be my child in a way you think best and we'll worry about all that wrath, sin and hell stuff Jesus died for later. Huh?
Now it's obvious that Young is using The Shack to vent his own theological frustrations well before you get deeply into the book. And the end of book has him saying as much. I for one, applaud Young for using this kind of medium to express his feelings in an entertaining heart-felt way. But what's disappointing and disturbing is that Young tosses his ideas about hell (his universalism?) and God's sovereign will (his open theism?) around without a great deal of thought and all while contradicting himself to boot.
Given the subject matter, there is no anticipation of the objections he had to know would be coming, and there is no effort to resolve them anything deeper than surface level.
Here's a few examples.
One example of this involves a scene where Mack is condemning his little girl's killer to hell and then is asked to decide which two of his five children should go to hell a few moments later. Young makes a good emotional appeal here to get an unrepentant serial killer out of hell, but he never resolves the contradiction between Mack's dilemma and Jesus' constant warnings of hell that are found repeatedly throughout the Gospel.
On another occasion, we have Mack and Papa talking about his little girl's death that leads Papa to say that he doesn't orchestrate evil to accomplish his purposes. Again, this is another wonderful emotional appeal, but it doesn't align with Scripture. The greatest evils ever committed on earth were orchestrated by God (they were foretold by prophets hundreds of years earlier no less) so that the death and resurrection of his Son could take place as meticulously as he had planned. So if God had planned the greatest of all evils in order to rescue those who would believe in him, wouldn't he use "lesser evils" to accomplish his purposes in bringing his children to him as well? Sadly, Young is silent.
But here's the creme de la creme. Young writes as part of his conclusion: "Our dream is to sell enough copies of this book to open the door for a feature film that the world would want to see and that will present an accurate understanding of God's character and nature to a world that longs in the deepest places of their hearts for such a God." Uh, shouldn't the medium that accurately reveals the God of the Universe be the Bible itself? And why does Mr. Young seem to be suggest that The Shack is a better vehicle than Scripture to accomplish this? This is an old trap with success, and no matter how well you tug the heart strings, a half-truth is still a lie and a contradiction is still a contradiction. The proof of Young's claim here will take at least 50 years to judge, but if history is any indication, what you'll see is yet another flash-in-the-pan fad excite the masses only to wane and die as it bears no lasting long-term fruit for the Kingdom of God.
All that said, there are a few redeeming qualities about the book, but only a few. For instance, individuality needs to be left behind in the Christian life. God seeks relationship with us, though in a far different manner than Young suggests. And Young's constant prompts for us to love one another is good stuff.
In the end, the Shack may indeed turn out to be this generation's Pilgrim's Progress (as Eugene Peterson suggests it will be) but if it is, it is I fear it's likely to be the allegory of the spiritual shallowness that dominates and firmly grips the American Church today.
Book Review: A well-written book that serves a nasty purpose.
Summary: 1 Stars
In my review of the book Daemon, I made a big deal about it going from self-published to hugely successful in a matter of years. Imagine this: William Paul Young wrote The Shack with no plans of ever publishing the book at all-and it now has over 5 million copies in print. It is a publication history similar to Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Young wrote The Shack for his 6 children, but friends soon clamored for general publication. With a modest website, $300 in promotion, and a chorus of thousands of congregations, the book went to the top of bestseller lists.
While I was reading my copy over the weekend, I could see precisely why this book took off and continues to soar. It is written for an entire generation of believers who feel their faith slipping away from them. A generation that is finding itself in a parochial minority for possibly the first time in human history. Dozens of non-fiction bestsellers over the past few years have been outright rejections of religion as superstitious nonsense, some even making the argument that religion is evil.
Beset by this rise in secularism, with a world on the verge of celebrating Darwin's 200-year anniversary, church attendance down, losses for a religiously-motivated Republican party, legalized abortion, Intelligent Design stricken from the curriculum, and even a general lack of interest from its moderate members, it is not a celebratory era for Christians.
And these attacks are as often from within as without. Evil in the world is harder to rationalize. Flaws in religious dogma are becoming more difficult to integrate into one's faith. Much of the history of the Church is shameful. The pedophilia lawsuits are horrifying. The battle for membership between the denominations, and the offshoots such as Mormonism, leave a stain on all who participate in the mud-slinging. Many Christians today do not know how to raise their children in a church that seems behind the times and unable to account for its mistakes and inconsistencies.
William Paul Young seems extraordinarily in touch with these problems, and his solution was to write a book for his children that would attempt to resolve them. He does this through the story of Mackenzie Alan Phillips, a man of faith that is having serious doubts after the abduction and murder of his daughter by a serial child-killer. When Mack gets a letter in the mail, purporting to be from God and inviting him to the scene of his daughter's death, Mack accepts the invitation and rushes off to spend a weekend with the Holy Trinity.
The book is entirely about this weekend in the "shack", and the early chapters are very much in a rush to get there. The first part of the book contains the bare minimum required to set up the gist: Mack hanging out with God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. Most Christians won't mind skipping the veggies and getting more meat, but I thought that the build-up could have used more attention. This is one of the rare books that I didn't love which would have benefited from giving me more of itself. But since the events before and after the getaway with God are just props to support the theological discussion, I completely understand the light treatment and will concentrate my critique on the main course.
The central purpose of The Shack is to help Christians with a few weaknesses present in their religion. The biggest one being the existence of evil, which is why the story features the abduction and murder of an innocent child. An entire school of philosophy entitled Theodicy is devoted to this difficult question. The reason that Christianity struggles with the presence of evil is because of its strong desire to be a monotheistic religion. Despite the worship of the virgin Mary, the pantheon of saints that are prayed to, the Trinity, and various levels of powerful angels, Christianity faces a difficulty common to all monotheistic creeds: there is no badguy to blame evil on.
Satan, the devil, Beelzebub, Lucifer... none of these guys feature in modern Christianity the way they once did. And none of them are mentioned in The Shack. Besides, they posed their own problems for the idea of an all-powerful deity anyway. Why could God not just wave them away? Young's answer for the presence of evil is not a satisfactory replacement. God tells Mack:
We created you to share in that. But then Adam chose to go it on his own, as we knew he would, and everything got messed up. But instead of scrapping the whole Creation we rolled up our sleeves and entered into the middle of the mess-that's what we have done in Jesus.
This sort of rationalizing, familiar to anyone who has tried to ask difficult questions from a Christian, make up a good third of the book. Circular, inconsistent logic, is how the creator of the universe reasons, we are led to believe. Often, just as in the Bible, the contradictions occur on a single page.
At one point Jesus says "this blue-green ball in black space belongs to me". When Mack asks, "So why don't you fix it?", Jesus' responds, "Because we gave it to you". If this sort of thinking clears up your hazy faith, The Shack was written for you. If it makes you shake your head and wonder how people can buttress their superstition with logic that would make stoned hippies sitting around a campfire proud, join the club.
The shame of The Shack is that Young has ideas for creating a system of ethics but he saddles himself with religious tradition too ridiculous to rationalize. The Trinity, invented over 350 years after Jesus died and a clear violation of the first Commandment, is central to Young's story. He also succumbs to the "man is sinner" nonsense that is not conducive to a society which can evolve an improved morality. Not when, pages later, Young explains that all humans deserve to be loved equally no matter what their actions are.
Not judging others is a central theme in The Shack, and for someone such as myself, who really enjoys throwing stones at those that deserve to be struck down, the lesson does not sit well. Moral equivocation is the sign of an ethically-flawed system, and this book equivocates ad naseum. The touching moment, when Mack forgives the man who abducts and kills children, strikes me as a complete moral failure. As does the book's escape-clause of blaming Adam for every injustice unleashed upon mankind. Not that I can't applaud heaping all the sins of the universe on a sort-white male, I just find the notion that all generations are doomed for the actions of one man to be reprehensible. Especially when the all-powerful creator of that man saw it coming well in advance.
One of Mack's eureka moments in The Shack was when he realized that "responsibility" and "expectation" are "rules we are no longer under". If you have ever wondered why Christianity is popular in prisons, and with pedophiles, here you go. Calls for absolute forgiveness for any action carry this grotesque theme forward. The model citizen under this regime being... well... all citizens. The myth that all children are loved equally is meant to reassure us with the happy thought that our Maker's love for Saddam Hussein and Barack Hussein are equal, just "different".
So, even when Young does supply pat answers for shaky Christians, he gives them fuel for more irresponsibility followed by easy forgiveness. It would have been a far better book if Young had taken his obvious philosophical and literary talents and directed them to a complete overthrow of modern Christianity. Sure, he wouldn't have sold 5 million copies, but perhaps he could have inspired a few kids to grow up not beating the snot out of homosexuals. Or promoted a new religious tradition that allowed men and women, married or gay, to achieve the highest offices, rather than the current tradition of celebrating men for not feeling attracted to women and seeing how such a clergy does when they are left alone with young, compliant boys.
My job is to applaud a book when it does its job well, but what do I do when I think that job, well-done, is in service of a poor cause? I can not celebrate a book that spends more time justifying the evil that God allows than it does instructing ways that we can be better to one another. The only models for treatment of others provided by Young is the hedonistic interplay between the Trinity, who all act like spoiled children, full of gaiety, and unable to comprehend the human condition. They all flash the scars of crucifixion as if this compares to what Mack's daughter went through. The rest is a celebration of how perfect their existence is and why can't Mack shut up and just be happy all the time the way they are?
The only thing sadder to me than the mythology detailed in the book is the rabid manner in which it is being snatched up and lauded by its believers. If this were science fiction, and the Trinity was three space aliens that created all around us, they would be an enemy to be overcome. The imperfect human, as our protagonist, would find a way to shrug off the Utopian nightmare of an eternal existence and overcome the meddlesome shenanigans of this three-headed hegemony. Instead we are given more justifications for placing our trust in a non-entity, for turning the other cheek when we are unfairly treated, and for forgiving the worst among us. The promise for compliance is an eternity of frolicking in flowered fields and pond fishing.
I have a better idea: Let's be good to one another because it is the RIGHT thing. Not out of fear of punishment or promise of a bribe. Let's not be quick to forgive, so people will consider their actions carefully. Let's not hope for a better life beyond this one when we can instead keep striving to make what we know exists as fair and wonderful as possible. And instead of worrying about what comes after this life, let's keep in mind that everything we ever do will always have happened, whether anyone is around to remember those actions or not. Our decisions are eternal whether or not we are. And when it comes to ethics, let us improve them over time, and not rely on ancient traditions that claim a divine truth that can not be questioned. Religion has been used to justify torture and slavery, and today it is a reason to shame and abuse homosexuals and people of other faiths. That William Paul Young could not exert himself to overthrow these superstitions, rather than prop them, means that even his success is a failure, and I have to rate the book as such.
Book Review: the Problem of Evil is still unanswered
Summary: 3 Stars
This book attempts to answer the old question of why there is evil in the world with an all-powerful and benevolent God. I was hoping that the author would actually come up with something new. But I guess since humans have been asking this question for hundreds of years all the options have already been thought through.
This book is obviously written to an audience already indoctrinated with Christianity, although the author's theology improves on traditional Christianity. The author portrays a nicer God that fits our culture better (which is the only reason I gave the book as many as 3 stars). But what is he basing this nicer God on? His own personal experience at a shack? How do we know the author is right and the ancient Hebrews were wrong? Or has God evolved with civilization? Kind of makes you wonder who created whom.
The following are my observations:
1. I quickly became exhausted with the repetitive extreme emotion attributed to the protagonist. Yes, the plot calls for emotion and even intense emotion. But an author shouldn't try to whip the reader around and around and around. It is just fiction after all.
2. This is a subtle but very irritating flaw. The very first chapter opens with the protagonist experiencing an ice storm. And the author tells us that almost everyone enjoys a good (or bad, depending on your perspective) ice storm that shuts everything down because we're all ". . . weary humans slogging it out . . ."p15 and we enjoy the break. Sorry, but I'll decide what I like and don't like. I live where there have been several ice storms just this year and I know I don't like ice storms. Why would someone try to tell me that I do? What else is the author going to try to make me believe? That evil doesn't really exist?
3. Breaking stuffy stereotypes is good. God is supposably a gender-neutral spirit, which leaves a blank slate for imaginative fiction. The author introduces the trinity p82-87 as Papa, a big black woman; Sarayu, a small Asian woman; and Jesus of course is a Hebrew man, by which the author means Jew.
4. p101 The author explains the Trinity as necessary. God has to have a relationship with him/her/itself to be able to love anything else. Humans need decent self-esteem before they can really love someone else. But we certainly don't need to split ourselves into different persons to accomplish this. Does God have multiple personality disorder?
5. p106 The author portrays God as simply wanting to have a relationship with humanity not being our sovereign king. "Relationships are never about power, . . ." I think the author is saying humans should have a friendship with God, not a servant-master relationship. But true friendship requires equality.
6. p120 God speaking, "I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is it's own punishment . . It's not my purpose to punish it . . ." The author still hasn't answered why God allows suffering. I read the book hoping for a new insight. Simply saying that God doesn't punish people explains nothing.
7. p122-123 The author says there is no hierarchy or "chain of command" within the Trinity (i.e. Jesus the Son doesn't obey God the Father) and that God wants the same "circle of love" non-authoritative relationship with humans. I'm all for not obeying God but can't help notice the author is redefining God. My Webster dictionary defines god as a being conceived of as supernatural, immortal, and having power over the lives and affairs of people and the course of nature. I like the author's new God better but fail to see why we need him anymore than we needed the old God.
8. "Humans are so lost and damaged" p122 and throughout the rest of the book. Say it enough times and you'll start to believe it.
9. p126 God speaking "If you knew I was good and that everything . . . is covered by my goodness, then . . . you would trust me." "Because you do not know that I love you, you cannot trust me." How am I suppose to know that God is good and that he loves me? What evidence do I use to decide that God is good? I can only truly know something by independently verifiable evidence. p136 Humans "must give up your right to decide what is good and evil . . " Why should I? Because there is no evidence to show that God is good? The author is saying that I should just know and trust by faith.
10. p132 Lost and damaged humans are "dragging the entire Creation along with you." What's that suppose to mean? That Adam and Eve's disobedience in the garden caused all the evil in the world? I wonder if the good people of New Orleans noticed a half-eaten apple in the eye of Katrina.
11. p144 We can't drink the water from most of the rivers and lakes in our country because we've abused the earth. But earthquakes and volcanoes are in no way a consequence of human decisions.
12. p145 "Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience" "In fact, we [God] are submitted to you [humans] in the same way." And what does that mean?
13. p159 "Judging requires that you think yourself superior over the one you judge." Is the author suggesting that we not make any judgments? That isn't practical. We should do our best to be fair and consider all the evidence but then we must make a judgment. How else can we determine if anything is good or bad including God. (see #9)
14. p161-165 Sophia, God's Wisdom personified, says "if you are able to judge God so easily, then you certainly can judge the world." So "you must chose two of your children to spend eternity in" heaven and "choose three of your children to spend eternity in hell." The protagonist understandably can't send any of his five children to Hell and says p163 "if you need someone to torture for eternity , I'll go in their place." I must confess that I don't follow the author's reasoning in this section. Is he saying that God is not sending anyone to Hell because Jesus was already tortured (but not eternally) even though everyone deserves Hell? Anyway you slice this section it amounts to nonsense. The bottom line is nobody (including Jesus) should be punished for someone else's sin and nobody (including Stalin) deserves to be tortured. Punishment should not be vindictive. Oh, but I forgot, God doesn't punish anyone. (see #6)
15. p136 The author says Evil is the absence of God. Papa God assures the protagonist that He was with the six year old girl the entire time she was being abducted and killed. p173 "I never left her; we never left her not for one instant." Therefore, she did not have an absence of God. But she did have evil. So . . . excuse me, but why is there evil with an all-powerful benevolent God? If someone told me they were with my daughter while she was being murdered and did not try to prevent it then it would take all the self-restraint I had not to kill that person on the spot. I have no use for this god.
16. p179 Jesus says "I don't create institutions--never have, never will." "I'm not too big on religion." Religion is a "man-created . . . terror that ravages the earth and deceives those I care about." And on page 182 Jesus says, "I'm not a Christian." "Those who love me come from every system that exists." And speaking about Americans, Iraqis, Jews, Palestinians and people in general "I have no desire to make them Christian". The author forgets that the only reason Christianity made it to the 21st century is because Constantine institutionalized it in the 4th century. But I applaud his tolerance just the same.
17. p190 God says "All evil flows from independence [from God], and independence is your [humans] choice." This is a contrived dilemma. Independence from God is not the cause of evil. Atheists are just as moral as Christians are. Anyway, free will does not explain the problem of evil. A benevolent God should set limits on our independence. Your freedom to swing your arm stops at the end of my nose. Any parent knows that love toward your children requires limits be set. Instead, God just whines on page 191 "You demand your independence, but then complain that I actually love you enough to give it to you."
18. p190 God still rambling on. "If I take away the consequences of people's choices, I destroy the possibility of love. Love that is forced is no love at all." Love me or suffer horribly. Wow, what an unforced love. But back to the real world, people often make good choices and suffer evil anyway. Or make bad choices and get away with it.
19. p197 Sarayu, the Holy Spirit says "Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe." Amen. I used to be a devout Christian but after reexamination I realized there is nothing there.
20. p206 God says "I've never placed an expectation on you or anyone else." And "because I have no expectations, you never disappoint me." And, p202, obviously the Ten Commandments weren't given in the expectation of being obeyed. (Why aren't they called the Ten Suggestions then?). One of the commandments is not to murder. A little girl is kidnapped and brutally murdered in the story. Is the author saying that God doesn't expect killers to stop murdering? If so, that makes him a pretty lousy god.
21. p224 God is asking the protagonist to forgive his daughter's abductor. "Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat" Forgiveness releases you "from something that will eat you" and "that will destroy your joy". And forgiveness does not "pretend what he did never happened." I agree you shouldn't let hatred consume you. But it's for your own sake not the sake of the one who abducted your daughter. The abductor should go to prison where he belongs. Justice demands it. So if forgiveness means approving while they cart the creep off to prison and then not thinking about him anymore then sure, go ahead and forgive him. But whether or not we forgive evil doers has nothing to do with why God allows evil in the first place.
22. p102 God says "there is more going on than you could imagine or understand, even if I told you." The author argues throughout the book that we can not really understand why God allows evil but that we should just "rest" and trust in God. Of course I don't understand. Faith is a cop out. It means there is no rational explanation.
My conclusion at the end of this book is an all-good and all-powerful God has no reason for allowing evil. It seems to me such a god can not exist.
Book Review: Thought Provoking Questions For ALL Christians
Summary: 4 Stars
These are all statements from the book and I'd like to understand them better - not with superficial fluffy Christian answers but true deep thinking.
- When the earth is over, EVERYTHING will have happened according to God's will - including pain and suffering.
- What God wanted from the beginning, He will get in the end. He is all powerful so nothing could have happened that He did not want to allow to happen.
- I just don't understand how God could love Missy and let her go through that horror.
- God could have chosen to interfere and save Missy but it was not an option or reasons humans cannot possibly understand now.
==== To me this is a typical copout Christian response for I don't know. Trust even though there is no reason to trust. "We can't possibly understand." I say, try me. God could explain it at our level. The Bible shows people always questioning God and trying to understand. Aren't we able to glorify God more when we understand the beauty of His ways?
- Does this somehow make God responsible? He could have chosen to "not allow" it. God may not have caused bad things but He certainly didn't stop them.
- We are judging the man who preys on little girls. And his father who beat him. All the way back to Adam, Why stop there? What about God? God started the whole thing. Is God to blame?
- It all sounds like the end justifies the means, that to get what you want you will go to any length, even if it costs billions of lives in eternal torture.
==== This is also what I run into and have difficulty with. It DOES seem like God says the end justifies the means and when you get to heaven you will see the beauty and agree. So is it true the end CAN justify the means? Aren't we taught the end would justify the means if the means were good. But if the means used to get to an end were not good, then they would not perfectly achieve the end in mind. So in other words, if God wanted this redemption story, He could have done it in a less horrible way - with less pain and suffering. I don't see any good from eternal hell (why not 1 year hell?) or the horror of human torture and rape (I cringe when I see pregnant women raped and their babies cut from their stomachs). God could have put a limit on the horrors humans could inflict upon one another and still achieved his end.
- The consequences are part of the process that brings us to the end of our delusions and helps us find you. Is that why you don't stop evil?
==== So then are we here on earth to go through trials so that we will build character and form ourselves into glorious people? I don't see people becoming that great - is it even working? If the goal is redeeming ALL people, surely this method/life doesn't lead to the most being saved. It leads to the least being saved. As the Bible says, God hides himself so that it is hard to notice him so that only few are saved. As a Calvinist, I do understand God only DOES want the few. But then obviously He doesn't want ALL saved. So I guess this all works out perfectly for a God who only wants to save 5% of the world.
- All evil flows form independence - your choices. If I removed you choice, love would have no meaning. If I take away the consequences of people's choices, I destroy the possibility of love. Love that is forced is no love at all.
==== Does love really have no meaning without choice? Can that be true? Do the angels have choice? Will we have choice when we get to heaven? I'm not sure I agree with this statement. Love is the recognition of beauty and worth and the desireability of it. Like if we actually were in heaven and saw God for his true beauty, we would ALL BE SAVED. No one could deny God if they truly saw him. They would still have choice but the choice could not be a negative? With the splendor of God, one could not deny God? Either this or there is no free will in heaven and after we are in heaven some can still fall since we will have free will???
- It is not the nature of love to force a relationship but it is the nature of love to open the way.
==== This is an Arminianist way of thinking - God gave humans the offer of Jesus and they get to chose to accept or not accept. If it were true, then I guess 5% of the humans were smart enough to recognize God and believe and get saved. But if they hadn't been so smart, 100% would have perished and God's goal of redemption would have failed because God has no control past his offer of salvation. So if it is true that God wants ALL people saved, His plan is pretty poor because only 5% get saved. So if God is all powerful then something doesn't fit. Maybe in the end God didn't want ALL people to be saved or he would have come up with a better plan? Would the "God wanted all people saved through their free will" even work? Because this still leads to poorer results than saving people by God drawing them to himself (Calvinist view) rather than leaving humans to be clever enough to notice God.
- Even though you call me Lord and King, I have never taken control or forced you to do anything, even when you were about to do something destructive.
- I would prefer that God took control sometimes. To force my will on you is exactly what love does not do. True love never forces.
==== God forcing Himself on humans occured many times in the OT - He interfered all the time. So either this statement isn't true or the OT isn't true/being interpreted correctly. And is there actually something unloving about "forcing God's will on someone?" Is it unloving for a father to stop his little girl against her free will from going across the street to the man waiting to rape and kill her? So the same way humans WISH God would stop us from stupidly missing Him and ending up in eternal punishment. Isn't it more loving to "violate her free will" than let your daughter experience the horror? Isn't it more loving for God to save people despite themselves? To me, this is love - to save others despite themselves because they have lack of knowledge and if they knew better they would agree with God/wish he violated their free will. Does that come back to the end (being saved) justifies the means (violating free will)?
- You demanded your independence and now you are angry with God who loved you enough to give it to you. (Do we demand our independence?)
==== I never demanded my independence. I wish God would control me and make me the best and happiest. Well... in my mind I do but I guess this isn't exactly how we as humans live? We don't give God 100% control over our lives, do we? So then... I don't give him my 100% because I don't trust Him to look out for my best? Because I see horrors happen to Christians and I'm afraid that will happen to me and my God will let it happen and He will say "the end will justify this torture" and I won't be able to bear the torture because it is too horrible.
- Choose two of your children to spend eternity in heaven and three to spend eternity in hell. I am only asking you to do what you believe God does. There was no way Mack could sentence Katie to eternity in hell just because she had sinned against him. (But is this because Mack is also imperfect?) For Mack, it wasn't about their performance, it was about his love for them. (Does God really love the unsaved?) You have judged them worthy of love even if it costs you everything.
==== So God's plan results in only 5% of his children being saved in the end. So either He doesn't love them all and doesn't TRULY ABOVE ALL ELSE (free will) want them to be saved or the end justifies the means? Our Christian God is all about performance yes? First performance of faith, the performance that proves our faith. In the OT our same God struck people down for not performing 100% perfectly - like the guys who stopped the ark from falling. And what of the people who were killed in Moses' camp because 1 person sinned? Mack may not be able to sentence Katie to eternity in hell for sinning against him but is that because he is also falling and errors? Because God says He will send 95% to hell for not believing - so He doesn't love all his children the same or their free will is worth letting them go to hell? So I'm leaning towards believing God does not love the unsaved or He would have found a way to save them. He would have a 2nd redemption chance - something out Bible says does NOT happen.
- God is not Christian. Those who love me come from everywhere: Buddhist, Mormon, Baptist, Catholic, Democrat, murderers, Indians. God has no desire to make them Christian but wants to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters and brothers and sisters. So all roads lead to God? No, most lead no where. But God will travel any road to find you. Read the Bible but don't look for rules, look for relationship - a way of uniting with God.
==== So which is a more worship worthy God? The one you create in your mind through your highest picture of God (a God to saves all people) or the Christian Bible God? Do we trust a book or do we trust our beliefs? Or do we find a relationship close enough to God that through experience we may know the TRUE God and can then ignore the parts of the Bible that doesn't fit our God? So then is relationship more important than the laws and the Bible?
- Why does God love me when I have nothing to offer? It is freeing to know you have nothing to offer and can add nothing to God. Do you love your own children more when they perform well? (Kinda yes). You mean God has no expectations of us and has never been disappointed by us?
==== The Bible tells us God cares about performance - sins. If you don't perform and believe and have faith you go to hell.
This book paints some nice ideas.... but is our God in the Bible as loving as these ideals?
Lastly, the way I've learned of Calvinism, man's free will is NOT violated. It is changed by God because God draws man and changes his hear to give man the desire to come to God. So since man can now see God as beautiful and worthy of love (instead of boring), man of his free will does come to God.
[...].
Book Review: GOOD BEGINNING, BUT LACKS BALANCE
Summary: 3 Stars
In brief: by "lacks balance," I mean it needs more truth mixed with the wonderful elements of grace, more active faith mixed with the relational elements of love. It is heavy on conversation and light on action; heavy on God's "soft" qualities and light on His "hard" qualities; heavy on fantasy and light on reality; heavy on explanations and light on mystery. A better balance of these would have made a better novel.
My first response to the idea of someone trying to depict the Trinity in a novel is, either they're a fool or they're really bold. I mean, "Fools rush in..." and all that. The Trinity is the greatest mystery of Christendom. To include it in a novel as three of its characters, you would have to understand it pretty thoroughly, right? But what human has that kind of understanding about the things of God? William Young thinks he does.
Second, if you substitute a human being for God the Father - "a large beaming African-American woman" (p. 82), in this case - you're stripping Him of His divine nature and all that goes with it. No matter how wonderful that human is, and even though we're created in God's image, you are substituting an image of God for God. That is, at worst, idolatry, according to the second commandment; and, at best, a huge let-down.
Third, you're also stripping God of His mystery by trying to explain and understand Him. We're not supposed to understand God. That's why He is God and we are His creatures. As someone once said, "To explain something, you have to be greater than the thing you want to explain." I wouldn't want to be the one presuming to be able to explain God, would you? I have a feeling God is standing behind Young with a look on His face that would cause Young to turn sheepishly red if he turned around.
Now, someone is going to say, "The Shack is an allegory. It's not supposed to be taken literally." Chronicles Of Narnia is an allegory. Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory. The Shack is not. To be an allegory, a work of fiction has to be "an extended metaphor: a narrative in which objects, persons or actions have meanings that lie outside the narrative itself." Papa might be considered an allegorical character if it weren't for the fact that he/she is called God and thought of as God, literally, throughout the novel. No, even though The Shack has strong elements of fantasy, which allegories often do, it is more along the lines of The Da Vinci Code: a novel that attempts to redefine God.
In The Shack, William Young errs the way Randy Alcorn, in The Grace And Truth Paradox, says most Christians err: he makes a choice between grace and truth - two things that are supposed to be taken together, and both of which Jesus came to bring (John 1:17). Young chooses grace over truth, even though it takes both to be Christ-like. He chooses a forgiving Father over a disciplining one, when Scripture says that God is both. He chooses the God he wants over the God who is. He chooses a buddy.
Not only that, Young seems to divide God into two genetic halves: one male and the other female. He discounts the male half with all its "vices," and embraces the female half with all its "virtues." He does this in a number of ways, not the least of which is how he depicts Papa, the name one of his characters gives to God the Father. All of God's harder, or "male," character qualities - warrior (Exodus 15:3; Jeremiah 20:11), refuge (II Samuel 22:3; Psalm 46:1), disciplinarian (Hebrews 12; II Timothy 1:7), jealous lover (Exodus 20:5; Zechariah 1:14), avenger and judge (Nahum 1:2; Hebrews 10:30), to name a handful - are either ignored or denounced. The softer, or "female," qualities - love, grace and mercy, for example - are exalted.
Young makes all the strong characters in his novel female, and all the weak ones male - except for Jesus, maybe. Papa (God the Father), Sarayu (the Holy Spirit), Sophia (Wisdom), Nan (wife of Mack, the main character), the FBI agent "Sam," and even MIssy (Mack's daughter) are all strong females. Mack, his buddy Willie, Mack's father, the "Little Ladykiller," and police officer Tommy are all either weak or highly flawed males. Young even goes so far as to condemn men in general on pages 146-148, saying that, because women are more relational, they would have made better leaders than men and, if that had happened, "there would have been far fewer children sacrificed to the gods of greed and power." I guess he just forgot about the role women have played in abortion in America - something that has killed far more of its children than all the wars in its history combined. That is the problem with transferring our own prejudices to God: it blinds our eyes and gives our prejudices "justification." I find this "preference for the feminine" in The Shack to be very similar to Dan Brown's penchant for goddesses in The Da Vinci Code.
Then Young goes on the warpath against nations in general, and America in particular, denouncing everything from power and authority to institutions and economics - even patriotism. Are we to infer from that that he prefers nihilism and communism over godly order and republican democracy? It isn't clear because he doesn't give any practical examples. If he truly is condemning all governments, systems and institutions, then he condemns people like William Wilberforce, George Mueller and Mother Teresa - saints who worked within governments, systems and institutions to make life better for the poor and weak. In condemning armies, weapons and warfare, he condemns the men and women who have given their lives for freedom, - including the heroes of the Bible, our founding fathers, the heroes of WWII and our present military overseas. Instead of condemning those things wholesale, Young should have differentiated between those that are of this world, or of the evil one, and those that are of God. God also has power, authority, institutions, armies, weapons and warfare. Young seems to ignore these.
Something else that bothers me is how the author wants us to deal with our problems magically, in Alice-In-Wonderland or Matrix fashion - through dreams, visions or phenomenal events - rather than realistically and maturely through prayer, faith and discipline. He seems to believe that everything can be fixed with a hug, a treat and a cup of coffee. Eating and talking, relationally - as opposed to doing what's right, no matter how difficult it is - seem to be his solution. Love, as he defines it, is preferred over prayer, faith and discipleship - things that take work. Love and relationships are important - very important - but not to the exclusion of righteousness, or doing what's right. Often God calls on us to take a stand and fight - spiritually, mentally and sometimes physically - rather than hold hands and sing "Kumbaya." Just a cursory study of Jesus' life shows that.
There is so much good in The Shack, and it starts off so well, that it is really a shame it goes down a rabbit's hole once Mack gets back to the shack. It held so much potential, which a more mature writer would have known what to do with. For example, it could have turned into a really good spiritual thriller. Instead, it becomes a series of didactic conversations. I did like the chapter with Sarayu in the garden, and with Sophia in the cave. Notice that every chapter is basically just a conversation - nothing really "happens" at the shack. Yet, notice how much does happen in the first four chapters. They are the part of the book that is most like real life and, therefore, most believable. If only the whole book could have been that real, that believable.
I was especially disappointed in the walking-on-water chapter with Jesus. Young turns what was a miracle that caused the disciples to shake with awe into a neat little magic trick. Which brings me to this point: where is the awe, the reverence that is always evident in any conversation with God in the Bible? Even the disciples were continually in awe of Jesus. Psalms 111:10 says that the fear (awe, reverence) of God is the beginning of wisdom. Where is that at the shack? Mack should have been falling all over himself with wonder and awe, fear and reverence - which would have added another rich layer to the book. Instead, he has an unexplainable non-chalance about the whole thing. There should have been equal amounts of awe and wonder to go with the warm, fuzzy feelings.
For a first novel, I think Young does a decent job writing; but he bites off far, far more than he can chew subject-wise. It is obviously biographical, and I would say that Mack, not Willie, is the character that represents Young. He is obviously dealing with some issues from his past, which authors often do in their first novel. But I'm not happy with the way he deals with them. A wound received in childhood from a father can only be healed through another father-like relationship - not through a relationship with "a large beaming African-American woman." Even though a strong, "male" Father God could fill that role and heal that wound, He would also choose to work through people - so there should also have been one or more strong male characters in Mack's real world that came into his life and befriended him. That's the way it happens in real life, as God designed it.
For what it's worth, The Shack is a promise of what could be done if a writer followed the encouragement of CS Lewis: "We don't need more people writing 'Christian books' [but] what we need is more Christians writing good books." What that says to me, in light of The Shack, is "we need better writers with better theology writing better stories; not more writers writing more stories with more theology." A good goal to continue shooting for.
Waitsel Smith