Book Review: The Shack

As our introductory post indicates, this blog was set up to discuss and try to resolve difficulties that Christians may experience in their academic studies and projects. One way of meeting this goal is to draw attention to works by Christian scientists, apologists, and theologians who have addressed this kind of issue. We hope occasionally to review such books; we also intend to deal with publications that we believe Christians should be warned against. A case in point is Jitse van der Meer’s recent review of the Bible-critical work Meeting Jesus For the First Time, by Marcus Borg, a member of the notorious Jesus Seminar. The book with which we are introducing this thread, namely the recent bestseller The Shack, is on a rather different level. It is popularly written and offers no academic challenges, although it does offer theological ones. In any case, its popularity and often uncritical acceptance among believers suggests that a brief analysis may be called for. Comments on the initiative are invited.

Wm. Paul Young, The Shack: When Tragedy Confronts Eternity, first appeared in 2007. The copy I have in front of me states that the book is now “The #1 New York Times Bestseller,” with over 5 million copies in print. Although widely acclaimed by many Christians, it is a controversial book among orthodox believers. Some church members I have discussed it with recommend it highly, but others reject it as unbiblical and spiritually dangerous. The description “blasphemous” has even been used. Who is right? What is the book’s message?

First something about the story. The back cover gives the following summary of the book’s contents: “Mackenzie Allen Philip’s youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later…Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.”

What he does find is a pleasant cottage situated in a beautiful natural landscape (symbolizing heaven? the new earth?). The cottage is inhabited by what are presented to us as human manifestations of the three Persons of the Trinity. They are a kind, motherly, beaming African-American woman (who is, paradoxically, referred to as “Papa”), a middle-aged carpenter, and a small breezy woman of Asian descent. There is some crude symbolism in this portrayal of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. One of the author’s aims is to challenge the reader’s “religious stereotypes,” and he obviously counts among these the idea that God is male and white and western (true, we are told later that He is not female either, and toward the end He is portrayed as male). Other apparent “stereotypes” are God’s holiness and transcendence. Young portrays the persons of the Trinity as ordinary human beings. In fact, we are told that with Christ’s incarnation the Father and the Spirit also “became fully human,” and even that the Father shared in the Son’s suffering and still bears the physical scars of the crucifixion. God’s humanity and humility are paramount throughout. Mack can converse with the Persons of the Trinity as their equal. He is even told that just as man must submit to God, so God submits to man, in order to draw him into the divine “circle of relationship.” And so Mack feels free to blame God for human suffering, to snap at Him, and to demand explanations. He does all this with impunity. God’s friendliness and willingness to explain Himself and to mollify His inquisitor never cease.

Much of the book’s appeal no doubt results from its political correctness, its emphasis on relationship, and its portrayal of God as non-judgmental, ever-kind, very human, non-transcendent. It is true that not all the book’s contents are of the same caliber. Good things are said about the cause of evil and of human suffering, about man’s error in insisting upon his autonomy, about human freedom and responsibility, divine grace, and forgiveness. Also biblical is the stress on the future restoration of all things – the fact that the believer’s ultimate destiny is not heaven but a renewed earth.

But these positive aspects do not make up for the negative ones. Much of the biblical message is ignored and God is portrayed as humans might like Him to be, not as He has revealed Himself. This is, I believe, a transgression of the second commandment. There are, as we have seen, additional theological errors – the portrayal of the Godhead in visible form (again a transgression of the second commandment), the teaching that the Father and the Spirit have assumed a human nature, and the ancient heresies of modalism and patripassionism (the Father’s sharing in the Son’s suffering and death). There are hints of universalism and also of Pelagianism – for example when Mack is told that God is fully reconciled to the world but that this is as much as He can do; it is up to mankind to accept the “new relationship” He offers.

More could be said, but this review is not meant to be exhaustive. I merely want to draw attention to the questionable message of a book that is widely read among Christians. For additional critical reviews I refer to one by Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church, Seattle, and especially to that of Tim Challies, who wrote a lengthy, balanced, and thoroughly biblical analysis of The Shack. I further mention a recent article by the Rev. Wes Bredenhof [“Emergent: A Brief Introduction”, Clarion v. 58, n. 13 (19 June 2009) pp. 301-3], wherein, like Tim Challies, he relates the message of The Shack to that of the emergent church movement.