The Shack. Is it a Curse or a Blessing?

[Jeff Greening]

I have put this blog off for a few weeks now. Trying to survey my reasons and intentions for why I would speak out a warning about a certain book that millions of “Christians” have read and think they is nothing wrong with it. Did I just wake up on the wrong side of the bed and didn’t really give “The Shack” a fair reading. But I have attempted to treat this book the same way that “The Da Vinci Code was addressed by church and it’s leaders. So here are a few thoughts about you should question, “The Shack” as a Biblical based fiction. The same way we questioned the Historical and Biblical bases of “The Da Vinci Code.

First here are some comments from http://herescope.blogspot.com/2008/12/in-my-fathers-house-there-are-many.html
A “FACTION” NOVEL

During the DaVinci Code furor a few years ago, I discovered a new word that encapsulated that particular debate perfectly; the word was “faction.”[1] Dan Brown used places like Rome and Paris, names such as Leonardo DaVinci and the Pope, as well as historic works of art to frame a “fiction” book that made serious accusations against the identity of the Lord Jesus Christ, the integrity of the Apostles, and the veracity of the Bible. Since Brown employed literal people and places, his “fictional” thesis became entwined with them, thus creating “faction;” an indistinguishable blend of truth and untruth.

This is what I believe William Paul Young has done within the story line of The Shack. On page 14, he begins by setting the wintry scene by describing how “A cold front out of Canada then descended and was held in place by a swirling wind that roared down the Gorge from eastern Oregon.” Later on in chapter two, the reader is told about the last trip made by the family to their favorite Labor Day camping area. He recounts, “Nan (headed) north up Interstate 205 to Washington, and Mack and the three amigos east on Interstate 84” (p.27). In the next paragraph he mentions the natural beauty of the Columbia River Gorge.

Why is this important? Simply because Young purposes to give us an inspirational story that is intertwined with actual reality. However, when authors of such “faction” novels make substantive theological assertions within their stories, they cannot simply retreat into the magical forest of make-believe, hoping to sidestep the scrutiny of Scripture.

One sincere believer recently told me that they thought the book was just like The Wizard of Oz; meant only to encourage and entertain people. I am so glad that analogy was raised! Let’s take a look at it for a moment before going any further with our discussion. In “Oz” we find a real little girl on a farm somewhere in the state of Kansas in the world of black and white. However, after encountering a massive twister, she is struck on the head by a window sill, rendering her unconscious. When she awakens and opens the door of her “mobile home,” she finds that she is “not in Kansas anymore,” but rather a magical kingdom (not to mention a Technicolor one!) inhabited by munchkins, witches, and three special friends that embody the human quest for a brain, a heart, and courage. Down the yellow brick road they go, encountering and overcoming untold challenges on their way to see the Wizard in The Emerald City. When they ultimately discover the Wizard to be simply smoke and mirrors, they are told that they already possessed and exhibited the very character traits for which they were questing! The little girl then wakes up in her bed back in black and white world with the revelation that “there’s no place like home.”

Why do I risk boring you with a summary of a story that you all already know? BECAUSE I WANT TO DEMONSTRATE TO YOU THAT IT IS JUST THAT… A STORY! If the writer of “OZ” had been a Christian attempting to write the new “Pilgrim’s Progress” for his generation, he would have faced the same questions we are asking Mr. Young."Is Dorothy a type of the church?" one might say. Someone else may ask, "Hey, if you meant the Wizard is meant to be a type of God, are you saying that He’s all smoke and mirrors?" Or, "Is the Cowardly Lion a picture of Christ?"[2]

The Shack, however, is not couched in a land far, far away with a princess longing for her prince to come and take her to his kingdom; Mr. Young hides behind the rules of fiction while dabbling in the dangerous issues of the REAL WORLD of God, man, sin, suffering and redemption. If one takes Mack’s path of subjective, existential self-discovery, I fear they will find themselves “over the rainbow” in a land from which no amount of heel-clicking can ever return them.



Here are ten reasons to be careful when reading the Shack from http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/2009/02/02/the-shack-four-walls-four-reviews/
1. The Shack, in its central images, metaphors, and scenes, systematically de-emphasizes Scripture and teaches readers to prefer any other form of revelation over biblical revelation.
2. The Shack ridicules formal education in biblical and theological subjects and uses the word “theology” as a pejorative term. To call something “theological,” in the vocabulary of The Shack, is to call it artificial, humanly constructed, and mechanical rather than personal. This is presented as if the author of The Shack does not have a theology, though clearly he does.
3. The actual theology of The Shack promotes an abstract notion of relationship to the status of highest good. “Relationship” means a fulfilling interpersonal relationship of mutual trust, affirmation, and commitment. For the theology of The Shack, nothing has value except as the bearer of this good. In fact, The Shack shows a suspicion that enduring social forms (”institutions,” another pejorative word) could be bearers of relationship.
4. The Jesus of The Shack speaks a psychologized therapeutic language jarringly different from the words of the biblical Jesus. Even if we take this Jesus to be a character in a book, he is a different character from the other book, the Bible.
5. Depicting God as three characters in conversation illustrates a strongly social trinitarian conception of God. This could be permissible in a literary context. But when the three characters discuss their relationships with each other, they report a kind of egalitarianism that has almost nothing in common with the biblical account of the Trinity. It may be an imaginative portrayal of the ontological equality of the persons as confessed in historic theological accounts, but it flattens out the Father-Son relationship in particular.
6. “When we three spoke ourself into human existence as the Son of God, we became fully human.” p. 99. Though many other problematic statements can be found in the book, this one perfectly illustrates the sloppiness and confusion which the author puts into the mouth of his God characters. In my judgment, “heresy” may be too heavy a charge for a book that tries to do the right thing so often, but Mr. Young should admit that with statements like this, he is teaching his readers, and teaching comes with high standards of responsibility.
7. Presenting God, or one of the persons of the Trinity, as revealing himself to us in forms that we can accept and understand tends to loosen the connection between God’s self-revelation and God’s actual identity. A god who can appear as a motherly woman or a fatherly man indifferently, depending on what we need to perceive, is the god of our many understandings. Even in fiction, it is unhelpful to loosen the cords of metaphor in this way. The Wisdom character introduced in the middle of the book would have been a better vehicle for this kind of shape-shifting.
8. The Shack’s view of the church is anti-church. When it attempts to say something good about the church, it exploits biblical imagery as symbols of relationship. It commends an anti-ecclesiology in which real, local churches are the enemy of a personal relationship with God.
9. The hard topics of judgment and punishment are subjected to a conceptual redefinition which renders their biblical meanings unrecognizable. The author repeatedly refuses to explain the objective accomplishment of redemption, and makes everything depend on the subjective reception of redemption. God, in other words, is entirely reconciled to everybody for reasons having something unspecified to do with the cross. But people continue to live with God as their enemy because they have not opened up to relationship with him.
10. With such an incomplete and vague account of salvation, The Shack is unable to accomplish what it undertakes in its teaching with regard to the status of unbelievers. Since the Jesus of The Shack doesn’t want people to be Christians, there are no terms available within the vocabulary of The Shack for having a clear discussion of non-Christians. Young has taken the slogan “It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship,” and attempted incoherently to make a worldview out of it. The Shack may not cross the line into unscriptural affirmations of universal salvation, but it rushes right up to the line and only avoids crossing it by by sacrificing clarity.


Attempting to explain God in fiction is dealed with from http://herescope.blogspot.com/2008/07/shack-elousia-mythical-mystical-black.html


God is Truth. That He is Truth distinguishes Him from idols which are false. Of the Lord, the prophet declared, “There is none like Thee, O Lord; Thou art great, and great is Thy name in might,” and explained of those who create idols, “But they are altogether stupid and foolish In their discipline of delusion—their idol is wood!” The prophetic commentary which follows then states, “Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish, And gold from Uphaz, The work of a craftsman and of the hands of a goldsmith; Violet and purple are their clothing; They are all the work of skilled men. But the Lord is the true God . . .” (Jeremiah 10:6-10, NASB).[1] In this vein, A.W. Tozer once wrote: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”[2]

But idols arise out of human imagination. Humanoids make god however they want him/her/it to be. In the description of the declension into idolatry, the Apostle Paul wrote, “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man” (Emphasis mine, Romans 1:21-23a, KJV). Imagination creates images — even idolatrous images — and the images can either be material or mental, actual or verbal.[3]

Words can create mental pictures. Someone once said that a picture is worth a thousand words. In an image-oriented age where people watch more and read less, this statement makes its point. But words can also create images. Through the mind’s eye, we see. Someone once defined idolatry as thinking wrong thoughts about God. So the question becomes, with the stroke of his verbal brush and in his bestselling novel The Shack, what picture of God does William P. Young create? I am fearful that the book’s painting of God, even though fictional, might promote the wrong image of Him.

IN CONCLUSION, The Shack, under the cover of biblical allusion, presents a god which may be likened to a deity of eastern mythology and mysticism. The reader ought to beware lest biblical allusion be used to peddle theological illusion. But you ask, “How can that happen?” How can scriptural allusion promote spiritual delusion? I would point out that Satan used biblical allusion to tempt Jesus. In the second phase of the temptation of Christ, Satan alluded to Psalm 91:11-12, to which Jesus responded by quoting Deuteronomy 6:16, “It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (See Matthew 4:5-6, KJV.). Presenting a potpourri of spirituality combining biblical allusion with mystical illusion and mythological delusion, The Shack will surely resonate with an Emergent Christian mindset that attempts to flirt with the New Age/New Spirituality of postmodernism. The fact that the novel is fiction makes no difference — it communicates wrong ideas about God. As A.W. Tozer wrote,

"Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

"Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. The long career of Israel demonstrates this clearly enough, and the history of the Church confirms it. So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards decline along with it. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God.

"Before the Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, ‘What is God like?’ and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is, and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind." [4]
. A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 9.



Footnotes:
1 The Apostle Paul also remarked of the reputation of the church at Thessalonica how they, “turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God” (I Thessalonians 1:9). Scripture also records that both Jesus and the Holy Spirit are also Truth (John 14:6; 1 John 5:7, 20). In this vein, one must note John’s closing word: “Little children, guard yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).
2. A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1961) 12.
3. The word “imagination” (Greek, dialogismos) literally means, “the thinking of a man deliberating with himself” (Romans 1:21, KJV). On this point, it is appropriate to note that William P. Young accounts for the origin of his novel for reason of personal and private conversations he had with God on his daily work-commute from Gresham to Portland, Oregon. World magazine reports that, “Young used 80 minutes each day . . . to fill yellow legal pads with imagined conversations with God focused on suffering, pain, and evil.” (See Susan Olasky, “Commuter-driven bestseller,” World, June 28/July 5, 2008, 49.) Paul, the apostle states that idolatry germinates out of people “deliberating” within themselves. This is gnosis spirituality which is ever in contest with the Logos spirituality of the Bible. The Word finds its origin with God (John 1:1, 14). Gnosis, the basis of the New Age/New Spirituality, finds its origin in the mind of man, or perhaps might even be received from demons (1 Timothy 4:1).
4.A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 9.

Please take these words into serious consiederation. Please be careful out there.

I have posted a video from Mark Driscoll concerning The Shack and a audio from Pastor Michael Youssef


"But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him." (2 Corinthians 11:3-4)