The Shock (er)

As promised, here is my first stab at a proper review of The Shack.

*** Spoiler warning - plot details will be given away ***

Essentially the book is a theodicy. "Why does God allow suffering?" is a question that Christians have asked ever since ... well, ever since there were Christians.

The book takes a long time to answer the question but does it by making God more human. Suffering and evil is outside of God's control but he can make good things come out of it.

Therefore the incarnation takes centre stage. All three members of the trinity are represented in more or less human ways. And the thing to notice is that Mack (the main character) finds Jesus the nicest and easiest to get on with. Instead of our preconceptions about God we need to realise that 'God' is more like Jesus than the other way round. Now there is some truth in this. Of course, Jesus reveals God to us and we need to look at him to understand God. And yet the Scriptures wrestle with the tension between the immanence and transcendence of God. He is imminent in the human person of the Son but he is also transcendent in the person of God the Father. The Shack goes full out to portray God as imminent with no (or very little) transcendence.

So, God emphatically does not punish sin (p 120), rather he cures it. That's PSA out the window then. God just got nicer and more cuddly, but smaller at the same time.

And when Mack brings the toughest question of all to God - where was he when his daughter was kidnapped and killed? - God was comforting his daughter apparently. This was, IMHO, the weakest part of the book. It seemed an attempt to make palatable the unpalatable. Sometimes human wickedness and suffering is so evil that all we can do is cry out, "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?"

All in all the novel (in both senses of the word!) approach to the book makes it a tricky one to tackle. How do you deal with fiction that describes someone talking to the Trinity? When you have the very person of God talking to a man then revelation must be taking place ... or not as the case may be. In other words it is easy to forget what is at stake here. Wm. Paul Young is writing a doctrine of God. People are lapping it up because our culture (at the moment) wants a God like this - a much more human God.

The problem is he is not revealed like that in scripture.

(Maybe I'll come back later to look at the pop psychology in the book.)