The Shack (Kindle Edition)

You'll find over a hundred superlatively glowing reviews of this book on Amazon.com, and I think it's because in two of its primary aims -- to challenge your notions of God's "personality" and to assert that He, in all three Persons, loves you deeply and wants an actual relationship with you -- it succeeds vividly. Its colorful language and poignant approach, not to mention its straightforward, "why-didn't-I-think-of-that?" theodicy, are apparently helping to change multitudes of people's minds about what God is like, thankfully liberating them from soul-constricting religion along the way.

Its vividness and popularity are unsettling to me, however, for the book is but one man's fictional and very incomplete depiction of God: God is love, yes, without doubt -- hallelujah! -- but what of the God who kills Ananias and Sapphira for lying (Acts 5:1ff)? Or He who has His angel strike down King Herod because he doesn't properly ascribe praise (Acts 12:19ff)? Let alone the God who "deals out retribution to those who do not know [Him]" in the form of "eternal destruction" (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9) and the Jesus who, robe dipped in blood, mouth filled with a sharp sword, eyes like a flame, "judges and wages war," "strike[s] down the nations," "rules...with a rod of iron," and "treads the winepress of the fierce wrath of God" (Revelation 19:11ff).

Without even a passing reference to God as ineffable King or worthy Judge, The Shack, despite its merits, is a simplistic, untrustworthy portrait of God. I think part of the reason for the growing hoopla surrounding the book is that in its pictorial writing style, The Shack is all too easily consumed and adopted by people who want their ears -- or eyes, to fit the mode of the prose more accurately -- tickled with images of a doting (if powerful), permanently good-humored god who makes them pancakes on the weekends. Certainly, it's easier to follow a God like this, but it's also delusional, if you take the Bible as truth.

Don't get me wrong: William Young's appreciation for and ability to communicate God's lovingkindness is wonderful, and necessary to a Christian world choked with Law. Nevertheless, if my criticism of The Shack is overly forceful -- and it is; I do like this book -- it's because I see the book being embraced with nothing but naive, uncritical, and untempered enthusiasm.

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