The Shack: William Young
It's been so long since I got to read a book that didn't just involve Seminary reading (Greek, Church History, Text Criticism). I was really excited to get to read a book that was fiction again. The book that seemed to be all the buzz was this one, William Young's The Shack.
After reading it, I could see why so many of my friends liked it. This book is an outside the box sort of approach at God, reminded me of a C.S. Lewis type attempt in The Space Trilogy. Overall, I think we all love books that make us think things like "Wow, I never really looked at it that way before." Young is a great storyteller, the book was really captivating in a lot of places.
Overall though, I am going to have to give a thumbs down to this book, I just wanted to give you some reasons personally. If you are interested in hearing a better perspective on the book enter "Al Mohler shack" in a google search engine, and listen to the MP3 of him talking about it. He's Southern Seminary President and probably the leading intellectual evangelical in the USA in my opinion. Here are my thoughts though:
1. Young seems to bring in the Trinity in a way that he thinks will be the most different to popular thinking. No doubt God is not white, No doubt God is not man in the same way that I am, no doubt when we see God someday we will find that he is different than we thought. Having said that though, we have so much given in the Bible about the nature of God, and what I see Young doing doesn't just miss the mark of what any preconception I would have is, he also misses any mark that I see Scripture setting for the nature of God. This is the same kind of "Bruce Almighty" kind of mindset that "the true nature of God must be something that makes for snappy quotes, and new ways of thinking contrary to any previous ways of thought or precedent."
2. Another part that I don't really like so far is just this continued sort of knock on anything that anyone would have ever done to try to know God more as having been completely futile, and they should have just done some trivial thing instead. I'm really frustrated at the scene of "God" dancing to the beat of funk music, not because God is dancing, or because the music is funk music, but because the message underlying that whole conversation is something like "why did you ever try to listen to music or do anything that seemed to focus or honor me? If only you would have opened yourself up to the realm of everything, and see the good in everything the way that I do no matter what kind of things people are saying, you would know who I am more fully than you do now." What the Bible seems to say to me is that God wants people to know him desperately. He rejoices in nothing else. He never seems to take joy in "the heart and emotion of people" in a way that makes that less crucial or important. I don't even know specifically if Young was trying to say that he would, but I could easily see how someone reading this could take that message away. I just don't like that anytime Mack (main character) talks about things he was taught or learned, it ALWAYS ends up being something not just wrong, but somehow for the sake of plot is completely contradictory to what the true nature of God must be.
3. Eugene Peterson said something like "this book has the capability to do for this generation what Pilgrim's Progress did for Bunyan's generation." This book, I think, is not even in the same universe as Pilgrim's Progress. I honestly have no idea why Peterson would say that. The stories are not similar, and even the allegorical style is not similar, so this book is definitely not a modern Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress in prison because he would not attend or support the Anglican church because of it's heresy. He had the freedom to go anytime that he wanted, if he would only support the Anglican church, and he stayed in prison for years because he felt truth was that important. Pilgrim's Progress deals with the nature of man, sin, trials, Bible teaching, and amazing allegory. It never seeks to take away the glory and majesty of God to sell more books, or sound smart. Personally, I think that if the Shack is our generation's Pilgrim's Progress than we have no chance at true spiritual survival and integrity.
If anybody has thoughts, I would love to hear them. There is good in that book as well, I am not saying that all of it is wrong. But I have to say that taken as a whole, The Shack has some really dangerous views of God, and I have to say that I can't approve of it.
As Christians, we have to get out of this view of things that says "if it promotes diversity and new understanding then there is no way that it can't be true." Please can we have diversity, new understanding, and integrity at the same time...
Resources:
Mark Driscoll on The Shack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK65Jfny70Y
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