I realise I am way behind the curve on this one, but I have just read
The Shack.
I didn’t have any particular desire to read it, but in the end felt compelled to because of the number of other people who have. It is difficult to comment intelligently on something I haven’t read. So read it I have, along with hundreds of thousands of others. And now I am adding my comments to the thousands of reviews others have already posted.
Probably the one thing that can be said about
The Shack without fear of contradiction is that it is a publishing phenomenon.
As so much has already been said and written I will try to keep this review brief…
Firstly, on the positive side, there are moments in the book that I found quite powerful and moving. These were in chapters 11 and 16 when a picture is painted of the new creation. I felt the writing came alive at these points, and it was a fairly helpful picture of what we can look forward to.
I can also understand why this book is so appealing to so many. It does appear to provide a lot of answers to difficult questions, and to do so in a style that is easy reading. So I can understand why people find it is satisfying. But this is where my first criticism comes in – our need is for something that is not merely satisfying, but true.
Buddhism can be satisfying. Mormonism can be satisfying. Atheistic materialism can be satisfying. But they are not true. And neither is
The Shack.
The points at which
The Shack is not true have been well dissected (probably the most thorough of such reviews, and itself most commented on, is that by
Tim Challies) so I won’t bother to run through all the arguments again here – I’ll just give a quick overview.
For the benefit of the handful of people who haven’t actually read
The Shack the main characters in the book are:
Mack – the chief protagonist, who’s story this is
Missy – Mack’s daughter
Papa – God the Father
Jesus – that would be, um, Jesus
Sarayu – God the Spirit
Some of the things I don’t like are:
• God being represented as a woman/women
• ‘Papa’ bearing the marks of the cross – the Father doesn’t; Jesus does!
• The all too typical fluffy evangelical sentiment that, “I love you so much I would have died for you even if you had been the only person on earth,” completely ignoring the hard-edged truth that even if I were the only person on earth my
sin would require Christ’s sacrifice in order for sin to be dealt with
• The attack on the biblical teachings of headship and hierarchy (hierarchy isn’t a dirty word – it just needs to be unpacked)
• A very fuzzy view of the Church
• Some silly comments about politics and ‘Christians’
• A misunderstanding of the freedom that rules can give (ever tried playing rugby without any rules? want to try living in a world without the law of gravity?)
Having put down my list of gripes let me now try to unpack some bigger picture issues which make me very uncomfortable with this book.
The first one would be the one already mentioned above – that we need not only to be satisfied but to hear the truth. If all we have is satisfaction without truth we have fallen victim to the placebo effect. Imagine you have cancer. You go to your doctor and rather than giving you appropriate chemo he gives you a chalk pill, which he tells you is the appropriate chemo. You might begin to feel better – mentally at least – but you are not going to get better; in fact you will die.
I fear that
The Shack offers a placebo effect.
My next big picture concern is the number of people who have said to me, “You read this for the story, not for theology.” I really cannot understand this sentiment. More than half of the book is taken up with a dialogue between Mack and God, with God explaining to Mack many massively important areas (the nature of God, judgement, reconciliation, and so on) which by definition make this a work of theology.
The Shack is deeply theological. And it is deeply theologically flawed. If
The Shack is what shapes your thinking your thinking will be warped.
Following on from the, “You read this for the story, not for theology” comment, people tend to say, “Its no different from
Narnia, or
Pilgrim’s Progress.” No, it is massively different from those books! Both are entirely different literary forms.
The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory of the Christian life. And it does not represent God in ways that are counter to biblical revelation. The Narnia stories are set in an imagined world and Lewis seeks to imagine how redemption would work in such a world. In a world that has flying horses and talking beavers how would the Saviour appear? In such a world it is appropriate to imagine the saviour in the form of a lion, because to do so is consistent with the narrative form (sorry if I’m getting a bit technical here…). And – importantly – even that imagining is biblically faithful as Jesus is described in the Bible as a lion!
My next complaint, and this might be the most serious one, is that
The Shack undermines biblical revelation because a central theme of the book is that biblical revelation is insufficient. Papa explains to Mack that she appears to him as a woman because that is how Mack needs God to appear. But this is entirely contrary to biblical revelation in which God always reveals himself in the masculine and as Father! What Young is basically doing is saying, the Biblical revelation of God as Father is inadequate, so lets create another revelation.
Very dangerous.
Related to this is the books total disregard for the Bible’s warnings against creating a graven image. I think we struggle to grasp the importance of this as we live in a visual culture in which we assume that everything can and should be represented visually. But God the Father cannot be represented visually! At the end of the book, in a section titled, “the Missy project,” there is a stated aim to produce a film of the book. When this happens (as it undoubtedly will) we will have a false representation of God on our screens – false because God will be an Oprah Winfrey type figure, and blasphemous because it will be a graven image.
You might not get that, but think about it…!
To wrap all these concerns up, I fear that Young has fallen into the same trap as did Philip, who said, “Lord, show us the Father and it is enough for us” (John 14:8). Jesus’ rebuke of Philip was strong, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” The point is, we are not meant to see the Father, except in the light of Jesus Christ, which is why Paul describes God as, “He who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.” (1 Timothy 6:16) We cannot see him! He is not an African-American woman!
So, those are some of my theological concerns – sorry it has taken longer than I had intended, but there is just so much that is troubling. Theology aside, I also didn’t like the book because I think it is a poor work of literature. As I know from
my own attempts, creative writing is extraordinarily difficult to do well, and Young doesn’t do it well. His technique seems to be, “take a kitsch statement, add a cliché, build a paragraph.” I began to scream internally when on page after page there is someone “chuckling.” Mack chuckles, Jesus chuckles, Papa chuckles, Sarayu chuckles – its enough to drive you to tears.
And then there is the indescribable naffness of making Papa an “Oracle of the Matrix” type figure (because we all know that such a figure is incredibly wise, and kind, and gentle, and non-threatening), and Sarayu an oriental female figure (because we all know that women from the East are naturally spiritual and intuitive).
But enough!
Final thought: If you haven’t read this, don’t bother. If you have, please don’t pass it on to anyone else, especially not to the young or the spiritually immature. It is not good medicine.
When we get back it will be all systems go for the launch of Gateway Church, Poole on January 4th. 2009 is going to be another busy year...
