I was standing outside the front of church on Christmas day, when one congregation member thanked another for the gift they had received – a copy of The Shack. “Oh you didn’t get it from me” said the other, “but it’s a beautiful book isn’t it?” This was not the first time I had heard mention of The Shack. Several people had told me it was a once in a generation type of book, and I ought to read it. So in the post Christmas sales I went to Koorong and purchased a copy. I discover this ‘once in a generation’ claim plastered on the front cover, along with a comparison to Pilgrim’s Progress, both from the pen of Eugene Peterson. These are high claims. It’s a #1 New York Times best seller.
Having devoured the book in two days I must say it’s an eminently readable book, a page turner. Personally I cannot recall another Christian book that has left me with such mixed feelings. At times I was moved to tears as I empathised with ‘Mack’, the lead character. I found myself being taken on a journey, a road less travelled, but one I am conscious many would deeply benefit from. At other times I was very frustrated, annoyed, and agitated; as I listen in to Mack’s reflections and engagements with God. He arrives at profound ‘insights’, many of them just plainly wrong. We shall get that presently.
Briefly, for those who have not read it – the plot. Mack is flawed man, who as a child, in response to abuse, poisons his father’s alcohol. Having said that he has married a caring compassionate wife, and appears to have fathered a healthy family with five children – all things considered. That is, until Mack takes three of his children on a fateful camping trip. As they are packing up Mack allows two of his children to go canoeing. One falls in the water, and needs to be rescued by Mack (an ex-life saver). In going to save his son, Mack leaves behind his youngest daughter at the camp. She is abducted by a serial child killer, never to be seen alive again. This is all too much for Mack. His fragile and clunky personality is all at sea, his family is unravelling, and his simple faith is failing. In the face of his catastrophe and his inability to fix it; anger, judgementalism, depression, and disengagement take over. God then invites Mack to a weekend at the shack – the scene of the crime, where Mack freely engages with real personifications of the trinity. Mack works through his anger, his self and God blame, and emerges a transformed man, closer to God and able to lead his family and life as never before.
Being a preacher by profession, I will restrict myself (somehow that doesn’t sound like a preacher does it) to three things I love about this book, and three things I hate. First, my loves.
I love, no – that’s over the top, I like the way this book is written. Precisely because it’s written as a narrative, it circumnavigates the trap of being an abstract theological reflection on the nature of the trinity. On the contrary; it’s a personal exploration of what it means to believe in God in the light of intense and arbitrary tragedy. As I have already said, I found myself taken along on a journey. I found Mack’s experiences qualify him to existentially explore these profound questions. Many people have a simplistic view of God as someone whose job it is to bless the good and to discipline or punish the bad. Mack is such a man, and his faith cannot cope with his misfortune. He is loosing his faith, as do many who find themselves or their loved ones short changed in life. This book has the capacity to help move people through and beyond crisis, and into a new and deeper relationship with God. This is a book I want to give to many people who are stuck at the level of a Father Christmas ‘god’ as a Christmas present.
In this narrative framework, I like much of what the book says about suffering. Anger, judgementalism, and disengagement are normal and understandable responses, at least for those of us wired like Mack. There are no simple answers, and Mack struggles with and forgets himself often while in dialogue with God. God is portrayed as someone who is also hurt and angered by evil and its consequences. The way forward is not revenge. Somehow, as difficult as it is we need to move through these initial responses, and beyond them. God can somehow use suffering to bring good out of evil, life out of death. At the crux of all this is Jesus – God in the flesh, who has suffered and can be Mack’s (and our) companion and soul mate. When we go back and revisit our skeletons, our open and undealt with wounds, we will find God there with us. The Shack doesn’t say all that could be said about suffering, nor does it say everything as it should be said. Yet for the person who is stuck at the angry stage, it says enough, and it says it movingly.
I love, and here I am being genuine, the way this book explores the triune God as relational and loving at his core. If you can put aside the tacky Jesus kissing God on the lips (this did not work for me), the narrative rightly portrays God as a being who exists in perfect complete relationships. Young’s (the authors) exploration of the three human personas of the trinity interacting with mutual respect, love, and other person centeredness captures something of the dynamic and nature of God. The trinity is not an abstract theological concept – it is a reality that underwrites and gives shape to all creation. God has made us relational beings, and invited us into his family. Not because he is lacking, because he is loving. In an era where we try and paint on relationship as a veneer over our programs, our consumerism, our individualism, and our rationalism, this book is a timely reminder of who God is, what it means for us to be made in his image, and what it is that he is offering us – relationship with himself.
I do not like not knowing exactly what this book is! Is it fiction? The Shack maybe found in the fiction section of Koorong. Is it biography based on real events? The foreword and after words suggest so. Or is it theology? Any book that devotes much of itself to exploring the trinity and our relationship to a triune God in the face of suffering necessarily explores many fundamental theological issues. Yet the genre of this book is left up in the air. When choosing a genre in which to write, an author sets up an unspoken contract with the reader as to how this piece of literature is to be interpreted. Young unhelpfully blurs across three genres, and the contract from him is unclear at best, unhelpful at worst. I have concluded The Shack is extended parable, like Pilgrim Progress. But that does not allay all my fears. My concern with the story like conversations within the Godhead, and from God to Mack, where God reveals and corrects fundamental ‘truths’ about him self. How do these revelations relate God’s word as inscripturated revelation? Or to the history and traditions of Christian thought? Alarmingly the nature and perspectives of God are explored without any reference to Scripture, or historical theology. Pilgrims Progress works because it is written from the perspective of a pilgrim, from our perspective. The Shacks puts many ideas as coming from the very mouth of God. This is a level of authority, albeit parabolic, unwarranted and undeserved.
I do not like that this book is simplistically and unhelpfully dualistic. In the unfolding story Mack moves from the stereotypical guy who knows goes to church and know things about God, to someone who meets God in the flesh, who experiences and relates freely with him in ways that his previous theology (Mack is a graduate of a theological seminary) and religiosity mitigated against. Theology is pitted against experience, thoughts against feelings, religion against relationship, being against doing, love against justice, freewill against determinism, Christianity against - well I’m not sure, but Young’s Jesus denies not only being religious, even being Christian. On the one hand I can appreciate where Young is coming from. Mack appears to have been on this journey from head to heart, from doing to being. It’s a journey that I myself have been on, and found that leg perhaps the most fruitful of all my spiritual voyages. It a leg that many ‘Macks’ out their need to take. But at the extreme the dichotomies are false, even heretical. Too often this book is about ‘either ors’ and not enough about ‘both ands’ and the mystery of paradox.
Finally I do not like The Shack because in it Mack (or Young?) explores many fundamental issues in an unsatisfactory way. Ideas are presented as if they are new fresh revelations about the nature or character of God. In reality they are old ideas that have been found wanting and by and large discarded by orthodoxy. Space does not permit I do justice to this claim. Brief examples will have to suffice to make my point. According to Sarayu (the Holy Spirit) evil is the absence of good. Humans use their freewill and power to make selfish choices, resulting in bad or ‘evil’ consequences. This is theologising of no less than Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Yet theologically and existentially we are all too aware that evil is more than the absence of good. It is a destructive force intent on undermining God’s good purposes. We see this not only in Scripture (in the work of Satan, in demons, in the enemies of God’s people), but even in The Shack. The abductor and murderer of Mack’s daughter Missy – he is clearly evil beyond the absence of good. Young’s reflections on this do not do justice to the gravity of the evil committed.
Young’s Jesus is also lacking. He is presented as a young carpenter with a heightened ever present God consciousness. He is thoroughly human, self limiting to the point of being unable to fly. This is the Jesus of, among others, Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher’s Jesus has also failed the test of time. A Jesus who can walk on the water can fly. Jesus does not loose or limits his divinity in the incarnation so that he must lean on God to do the miraculous. Jesus is both fully God and fully man in the flesh. More alarmingly – where is the cross? Beyond some vague reference to scars on his wrists, the Jesus we meet in The Shack is a young carpenter, not a crucified and risen saviour. Mack’s salvation from depression (as opposed to sin and death) comes from his own personal growth and enlightenment (as opposed to Jesus death).
And what is going on at the end of the book? Mack’s father (who is dead) comes back from somewhere, but not hell, is reconciled to his son Mack. He too is able to partake in the divine. This sounds like a purgatory where those who have failed to reach reconciliation and release in life can achieve it in the afterlife. If Mack’s father died an unrepentant man, why has he not come under God’s judgement? And why is Papa so unwilling to judge Missy’s murderer. The Shack is sounding more and more like it fits Neibuhr’s 1938 assessment of mainline liberal theology, where “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross”. Ouch! But if the shoe fits….
So, will I give The Shack to someone next Christmas? Yes – I think I might. Mack’s journey is a journey, as I said, that is a road less travelled that many need to take. Guy meets God is a great love story, and to my dismay sometimes the liberals appreciate and tell a better love story better than evangelicals do. But it’s also a dangerous book, bursting of half truths and heresy. It’s liberalism dressed up in parable. I would be doing coffee with anybody I gave the book so as to sort out the wisdom from the folly.