More on The Shack
Including a response to Lynn Barton’s review of the popular book, with her reply, and another spot-on review by Doug WilsonLast month we published Lynn Barton’s review of the popular book, “The Shack.” (Find the initial review here.) It spurred a lot of responses. Almost all were similar to, though not as brief as, this one: “The book made me feel icky, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Thanks, Lynn, for your insightful review.”
We also heard from people who disagreed with Lynn’s review. Most were very kind. Below you’ll find one written by a nice person, along with Lynn’s answer (be sure to note what she removed from her review). Following those is one more review of the book, this one from Doug Wilson. Lynn thinks his review is better than hers. We agree that Doug correctly identifies the issue as one of fatherlessness: most of the people who love “The Shack” had a problem with their father, or with some other authority.
Wilson’s conclusion (from his “Blog and Mablog”) rings true to our experience: “The Shack” seems particularly to appeal to people who have had some problem with authority. Sexually abused as a child, “The Shack’s” author attended a school for missionary kids in Papua New Guinea. My wife went to the same school, and she remembers that it was awfully hard for these MKs to be separated from their mothers and fathers at very early ages, so that the parents could go off and do “God’s work.” Understandably, it would be hard not to grow up without some hard feelings toward God under those circumstances. Young coped with it, in part, by having an affair with his wife’s best friend, and then by writing “The Shack.”
Lynn and I would insist that the best answer to all life’s hurts, especially disappointment in our fathers or other authorities is to point people to the actual God of the Bible. The answer is not the anti-biblical, fantasy god of “The Shack” (who says things that contradict the Word) but the real, loving, just and merciful God of scripture: it is actually unloving to try and help people by fabricating one (unless the imagined one faithfully depicts the actual one: think Aslan from Chronicles of Narnia).
None of the responses we received disagreeing with Lynn cited any scripture. I think this is telling, and important. I think they did not cite scripture in support of their enthusiasm for “The Shack” because there isn’t any scripture in support of the Shackian theology: you can’t write a book about God and put words into his mouth (or, in the case of “The Shack,” her mouth) that actually contradict God’s revelation of himself found in the Bible.
A side note: we’ve been encouraging folks from our church to join a “Read the Bible in a year” club. Kind of a tough sell. It’s a shame, isn’t it, that we have to work at reading the Bible over 365 days, while millions will devour a tale like “The Shack” in a week? How much better to know and fall in love with the real God than a fantasy one. Note that my beef is hardly with the gender or race of the God in “The Shack.” It’s what he (or, she) says, as Lynn’s review noted.
With this, our examination of “The Shack” will conclude. Your comments continue to be welcome.
Here is the response to Lynn’s review:
Hi Pastor Dale! I’m sure you will get many comments on the review of, "The Shack." What I find interesting is that people pick this book apart as though it was written to be a source of truth equal to the Bible. I would no more go to Paul Young as my spiritual guide than I would Oprah Winfrey. As with any book besides the Bible, I rely on the Holy Spirit to point out truth, much more so than the review of another person because each person’s life experience will interpret their perception of the book, i.e. I came from a very conservative background where God did only speak on paper. We were taught that certain gifts of the Spirit were dead and that God is done speaking audibly. Our son went off to a Christian university where the Religious Studies teacher actually turned him away from following Christianity as the only way to a relationship with God and he started on his own journey to find "truth." A heartbreak for these parents but after 6 years, he’s come back. Perhaps Lynn has not had those experiences.
While reading, The Shack, I had several moments where I actually felt the very presence of God so near to me that He felt tangible. I can’t explain that or tell you why it happened other than, while reading, that’s where my heart turned, to my loving Father. As the story described heaven, I had to stop reading, tears running down my cheeks, knowing this was only what the human mind could imagine but God’s heaven would be far greater, beyond what our human mind could imagine and it took my breath away.
At first, the description of God being an African black woman bothered me as well, but then, as God became man before Mack, at the end of the book (I gave my book away, I wish I had it so I could be more accurate), suddenly, I got it, I just got it. I thought of the verse in Isaiah 66 that says, "As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you." The Bible says we were created in God’s image, all of us, male and female, in his image. Where did a mother come from with all of her nurturing instincts? The heart of the Father. Our heavenly Father does not only do those masculine things that we think of in a male, he also does the most loving and caring things which we human beings classify as "female." He is the source, he is the provider of those instincts because they come directly from Him, he didn’t create them and place them in a woman, He IS all that we are, he is the source, we are a reflection.
At first, I thought that perhaps the gender bending thing was where Paul was trying to take us but not after reading through the whole thing. I had a big, black woman living in my home for nearly a year as a kid while her son was hospitalized with a broken neck. She was the kindest, gentlest woman I have ever known. Guess what her name was- Johnny. Spelled differently but she was brought into my life the very same year I met Joni Eareckson. She was a spirit-filled woman who loved Jesus with all of her heart, one of the best mothers I have ever known. Many while Anglo-saxon Americans have had a very difficult time imagining God as a big black woman but I haven’t heard one black person complain. I find that interesting. The Holy Spirit Asian, cultivating the garden, I just don’t see these as Paul trying to suggest the trinity being found in these very images, I see them as a man’s creativity.
I’m in the process of writing a book. It won’t be a fictional story, it will be the story of this very rocky path that my husband and I have been on. It will be a story of God’s faithfulness, how he has answered prayer, how he has spoken to me, what he has shown me to do over the last 28 years and how I have tried to walk in obedience and how God has blessed those efforts and is now restoring the years the locusts have eaten. What I have learned from The Shack is that I hope my book will never become so popular! I don’t want to be the subject of every critics review because I’m sure they will find much fault in it! I have no training in journalism, I nearly flunked my grammar courses, all I know is that God has worked miracles and through it all, he has kept us together and we are blessed and if our story can help others understand God’s grace, his love and mercy, than I will write this book and do my best to listen to how the Lord is guiding me to write but I can only listen with these human ears, write with this human mind and I know my book will be flawed.
I would hate to discourage others from reading The Shack because I know what it did for me. I would strongly suggest to them that they pray and ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom and discernment. Take away what God reveals to you, and don’t put your faith in the writings of a man. We might think that a scary thing to suggest to someone whose not so strong spiritually or even a non-Christian, what if they believe God actually is a big black woman??? Ha! Then it’s something they have chosen to believe and they are not really seeking to know the truth. God will not allow someone who truly desires to know him to get stuck behind the beliefs of Paul Young or even Oprah Winfrey. Seek and you will find.
Here is Lynn’s response:
Pastor Dale forwarded your very gracious and heartfelt response to my review of The Shack. I could relate to a lot of what you wrote. You even reminded me of a favorite college philosophy professor I had. At the time I was very negative toward Christianity because of the dead church in which I was raised, but I was searching for truth. My childhood was pretty painful due to the very hostile divorce of my parents when I was 9 and a difficult stepfamily life...though mercifully, I didn’t go through the kind of trauma Paul Young did. But it wasn’t a very happy time growing up. Anyway, Mr. Menkiti was a Nigerian, a big man with a bigger smile and enormous warmth. I just loved him, and I actually thought to myself, if there is a God, his face must look like Mr. Menkiti’s. (Many years later, I found out he is a believer; I recognized the Holy Spirit in him, but didn’t know what it was.) That reminded me of your description of the woman who lived with you.
I didn’t come to the Lord till I was almost 30, so I’m very familiar with what it feels like to be walking in darkness and always confused by life. I majored in religion but mostly found where truth wasn’t, which isn’t entirely a waste. When I was converted, I was so thrilled to discover that not only there is a God after all, and my sins are forgiven through Christ, but also that truth really exists, rock solid truth that doesn’t change and that makes sense out of life. The lights went on and I’ve never looked back. My life experience has given me a passion for the truth as revealed in scripture. I think love makes no sense apart from truth, and it’s actually unloving to compromise truth for the sake of love. The two are inseperable. Jesus himself was full of grace and truth.
My kids are just entering their teenage years, so I haven’t had the experience of a child walking away from the Lord. That must be one of the most painful things that can happen as a parent, and I am so thrilled to know that your son has has come back. I do know what it’s like to be on a college campus that is hostile to Christianity, and I’ve heard stories like yours about Christian colleges too.
When I wrote the review, I really didn’t want to. I have many other things to do and no interest in picking apart something just to be critical, especially something that will make many of my friends mad at me. It’s been nine months in the making, never sure I would actually complete it, and having to squeeze in working on it into rare moments of free time. It was, I hope, love of the truth, love of God and love of fellow believers that drove me to do it.
I can see that the book connected with you deeply in many experiences that you have had. I believe you when you say that God’s presence ministered to you, especially at the scene in heaven. I think that is where Mack reconciles with his father? I actually loved that part, I thought it was moving and beautiful and originally had put it in my review. But the article was already so long, I had to take things out (it was almost twice as long at first). I suppose if I had left that part in, it might have seemed more fair to those who loved the book.
But anyway, I give you that, it was a lovely scene. By the way, I don’t question Paul Young’s faith. We are all on a journey, and all in error to some degree. As far as I can tell, his faith seems genuine to me. And it’s not for me to judge anyway.
Even so, given all of these things, is it right to misrepresent God, even for a good motivation? You wrote about how the book ministered to you, but did you consider the actual points that I raised? Young really does present those three characters as the Trinity, not man’s creativity. And what these three said almost always directly contradicted God’s Word. Do you think that matters?
I felt kind of sad when you wrote about worrying that the book you are writing will be criticized, mentioning grammar is not your strong suit. (Not to worry, an editor will fix all that.) Do you really think that the problems I raised were as small as grammar mistakes?
Isn’t it really important how God is portrayed, since God has chosen to reveal himself in a particular way? I acknowledged in the article that God definitely has feminine characteristics. He comforts and nurtures us, and this is found in scripture. As women, we reflect that aspect of his character. But since that is true, does it then make it ok to present God as a woman (mother) when in the Bible he always reveals himself as a Father? Isn’t that presumptuous on our part?
I’m actually not too worried that people will think God is a big black woman. But I am very worried about the things that come out of her mouth in the book. If "Papa" spoke words that confirmed God’s Word, I would perhaps not have been a big fan of God being presented that way, but I wouldn’t have written about it. But it’s all a package, and all tends to discourage people from seeing church as integral to the life of faith, from revering what scripture says, taking sin seriously and appreciating what Jesus has done in saving us. Is it ok to disdain all of those things, even if the book does make God’s love for us very real?
I pray God will guide and bless the book you are writing. I doubt it will come up for a lot of criticism if it is you telling the story of God’s faithfulness in your life. I wrote my review of the Shack because I see it as leading people away from biblical Christianity in very serious ways. Churches, being made up of sinners, are always flawed and in need of reformation. I grew up in one that led me to walk away from the faith for many many years, quite a few more than your son. But isn’t the answer not to throw away church itself, as well as what has always been biblical faith? Shouldn’t the response to problems in the church be to reform them by taking scripture more seriously, not less?
Thank you again for expressing your thoughts, and especially for being so kind about it. Please feel free to answer if you want to.
In Christ’s love, Lynn
Finally, for those of you still with us, here is Doug Wilson’s review.
I had been asked by several different people what I thought of The Shack, a hot selling book by William Young. It is a book that is currently selling like crazy (I saw a great, big stack of them in an airport bookstore last week), and while it appears to be a big event centered in the broad evangelical world, there have been significant repercussions in our circles as well. So I (dutifully) got the book and read it. It is not the kind of book you can review chapter by chapter, and so this one review will have to suffice.
If you want to read the book like a novel, which it really isn’t, I suppose there will be some spoilers here. So, fair warning given. The protagonist of the book is named Mack, and a few years before the book opened, his youngest daughter named Missy had been kidnapped and presumably murdered. He himself had had a terrible childhood, and had finally run away from home as a teenager after poisoning his father. One day Mack receives a mysterious note from "Papa," his wife’s favorite name for God, inviting him to come meet at the shack where his daughter had likely been killed. He decides to go, and after he gets there, the shack is transformed, and he finds himself on a weekend retreat with all three persons of the Trinity. Over the course of that weekend, he learns all kinds of things about himself and about the world that he had never suspected. That, in sum, is the basic set up.
I am going to say some hard things about the book in a moment, so I want to begin with this. The book is filled with numerous insights into what makes people tick, and those insights are wise, shrewd, pastoral, tender, and they deal with sins at the root. But the strength here is largely diagnostic, and unfortunately gets confused when it comes to the remedy, as will become apparent in a moment. William Young, the author, knows with profound clarity that fatherlessness is the rot that is eating away at the modern soul. The clear appeal of the book is because of the ache created by fatherlessness which, when coupled with the metaphoric solutions offered, provides us with a full explanation for the popularity of the book.
But I must make a distinction here -- frequently (not always), the solutions as they are spoken are right on. They deal with honesty, confession, forgiveness, and they do so in a way that any orthodox Christian could embrace. But the problem lies with the setting. Disembodied truth doesn’t help anyone really, and so the embodiment really matters.
Before getting to that, I should note in passing what I might call the theological problem. Since the discussions revolve around the murder of a little girl, the book is clearly about the problem of evil. And the answers that are offered are a standard sort of evangelical non-Calvinism, with the result that the texts that plainly state the nature of God’s involvement in such things are simply ignored. In other words, the theoretical answers in this book that grapple with this problem are about as detached from the Scriptures as they could be. This is a big problem, but any of you who have been in more than two discussions between Calvinists and Arminians have probably seen it. That is not the thing that sets this book apart.
And this brings me to the way in which this book was simply terrible, blasphemous. But before going on, I have to hasten to add that it is a peculiar form of evangelical blasphemy, one that is well-intentioned and naive. I remember one time I was at a conference where the group I was with was sharing the venue with another group. So one time I sat in on the chapel services of that other group, and they began singing "Spring Up, O Well," which was fine with me. But since the song involved water, somebody had developed hand motions, and jumpy-up-and-down-motions. So there was this room full of adult Christians jumping up and down while they were singing, splish splashing along. But then they got to a verse where it was all about the blood of Christ instead of water, and they continued right on with the hand motions and the jumping, and the only thing missing was the rubber ducky, and nobody blasphemes like an evangelical can.
In a book clearly written to deal with the pain of fatherlessness, how does Young go about it? He makes God the Father, "Papa," a large beaming African American woman (p. 82). The Holy Spirit is a shimmery Asian woman named Sarayu, mysterious and "way out there." Jesus is simply Jesus, and is masculine after a kind, but in that unique way possessed by camp counselors and youth ministers with muscular forearms.
Here is a taste of the down home weekend retreat-like relationship that is going to fix Mack.
"Mack followed her soft humming down a short hallway and into an open kitchen-dining area, complete with a small four-seat table and wicker-backed chairs. The inside of the cabin was roomier than he had expected. Papa was working on something with her back to him, flour flying as she swayed to the music of whatever she was listening to. The song obviously came to an end, marked by a couple of last shoulder and hip shakes. Turning to face him, she took off the earphones" (p. 90).
Meet God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. Now Young is by no means a dunce -- he is very clear that this is just an appearance, an accommodation. But the image, the metaphor, the feel of this whole book is warm and maternal, cozy and nonthreatening. The center of the discussions is the kitchen. The need is a deep father hunger, but this is not met by a father, but by the enveloping warmth of a comfort mama who makes a lot of comfort food. This symbolism is not incidental to the message of the book. It is the central message of the book.
And this reveals the bedrock problem with the whole thing. There is no way we can hide from ourselves that we have a need for a father, but we cannot bring ourselves to repent, and have our hearts turned back to actual fathers. We cannot bring ourselves to honor our (admittedly sinful) fathers, so that our lives might go well for us in the land that God gave to us. This means that we are stuck. We know that the problem is fatherlessness, but we have no intention of honoring real fathers, the way they should be honored. This is because the sin of fatherlessness is one that is shared by both fathers and children. And repentance, when it is given, is bestowed on both sides of the generational divide.
"Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse" (Mal. 4:5-6).
This generation of evangelicals really is fatherless and adrift. They know that, they ache over it, they cannot pretend not to know it, but they have no intention of turning back to their fathers. And that means repentance has not yet been given.
The impotence of this approach comes out in this book in a couple of striking ways. Young cannot bring himself to give two characters in this book a face. One is Mack’s father. In the course of the story, they do have a heavenly reconciliation, but Mack’s father remains a faceless place-holder throughout. The other character is the murderer. The book ends with Mack resolved to meet him in order to forgive him, but the story/theology set forth in this book is not up to the task of actually showing it.
The good news for evangelicals is that they are coming to recognize their fatherlessness. The good news that they are not yet ready for is that this cannot be addressed without returning to fathers.
Written By: Pastor Dale Meador
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Copyright 2010 by Pastor Dale Meador. You are encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided you don’t charge for it or alter the wording and include this statement on any posted or distributed copy: "By Pastor Dale Meador (www.pastordale.com)." Thank you.
