The Shack dives into the deep end of the theology pool, swimming around in the Biggest Questions: the divine nature, the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, providence, the problem of evil, eschatology, revelation, and more. That’s rather a lot to discuss in a novel of less than 250 pages. It’s a lot to discuss in Barth’s Church Dogmatics! Drawing on Christian Orthodoxy across its traditions, there are six main concerns.
So perhaps it is in order to suggest that a few subjects could have been left out of consideration, rather than briefly discussed in such a way that might distract or even put off a reader otherwise inclined to enjoy and profit from The Shack. And that’s the nature of my criticisms: These ideas I see to be not crucial to the good work done by
The Shack, and I hope that in a subsequent edition Brother Young will either rework or omit these problematic spots.
Here are my six theological concerns with The Shack:
1.) The Shack takes the occasional gratituous poke at religious institutions.
Seminary training is mentioned a few times and never positively. The church doesn’t look good when it comes up. And ritual is something God apparently doesn’t “do”—and God avers as much.
I freely acknowledge that seminary training is never as good as we’d like it to be, and many seminaries are pretty bad. But unless Brother Young wants to make a case that seminary training is intrinsically a bad idea or that all seminaries everywhere are bad, which would take a lot more than a few passing references to make, then it would be well to leave this subject aside.
As one who has spent a career studying and, yes, criticizing the church, I don’t believe the church should be immune from critique. Still, as my colleague Maxine Hancock has said, “You should be very careful about what you say about Jesus’ fiancée.” I’d like to see the church that nurtured Nan, as well as Mack, portrayed in a more balanced way in The Shack. For what is Mack supposed to do after he has had his experiences in the shack? Live off those memories, or enjoy private communion with the Holy Spirit? That’s a pretty dangerous way to live. Instead, where is the good role for the church?
As for God’s distaste for ritual, well, he seems to like it quite a bit in the Pentateuch, and he likes it enough in the New Testament to institute two new rituals: baptism and communion. I think The Shack‘s dismissal of ritual is one of those instances of Brother Young mixing in his personal issues and preferences with the generically Christian ideas he otherwise helpfully presents. And authors who put words in the mouth of God must be utterly circumspect about such idiosyncrasies.
2.) The book depicts God as having a very dim view of religion, politics, and economics, which God refers to as “terrors.”
Again, this anti-institutionalism strikes me as untrue to the Bible. But I don’t have time to argue for that here. Instead, I argue for the legitimacy of institutions at some length in my own new book, Making the Best of It—which is not nearly as interesting, I freely confess, as The Shack, and has the sales numbers to prove it!
(Political scientist Steve Monsma’s new book, Healing for a Broken World, makes the sensible point that “some sort of government would have been necessary even if sin had never entered God’s good creation” [p. 43]—and the same could be said, I think, for religion and economics.)
3.) Anti-institutionalism shows up again in that both coercive power—which is unhelpfully oversimplified sometimes as just “power” in The Shack—and hierarchy also are shown as unworthy of God.
I deeply disagree.
The Bible shows God willing to be coercive from Genesis 3 to almost the end of the Book of Revelation. We may not like this aspect of God, but I don’t see how one can purport to offer a Christian view of God and ignore it, much less deny it.
As for hierarchy, the idea of hierarchy within the Trinity is basic to Christian doctrine.
Jesus does the will of his Father, and Jesus says he will ask the Father to send the Holy Spirit. And so on, and so on. Indeed, I don’t think The Shack quite avoids portraying Papa/God the Father as first among equals, and I’m glad it doesn’t!
My own father died a couple of years ago. I look forward to seeing him in the resurrection. When I do, I will gladly defer to him as my father, without feeling at all diminished as a grown man. I want to treat him that way and to have him look after me as my dad. So I simply don’t think that hierarchy is something repellent to the nature of God, and The Shack would be better off without trying to deny it.
4) The Shack skims briefly over the surface of theology of religions, raising the question particularly of whether God reveals himself to and saves people of other religions.
I am glad for Brother Young’s concern to expand our horizons. I am strongly inclined myself to a theological conviction that God’s salvation is extended beyond the range of those who have heard the Gospel, understood it, and accepted it as true. I have written about that here.
The Shack, however, deals with this complex issue much too briefly, and unclearly, and thus again distracts more than it edifies. It’s particularly not clear as to just how we are supposed to understand the basis of salvation, the nature of God’s revelation in or through other religions, what it means for people to respond properly to God, what role the religions actually play in all this, and the like.
Furthermore, we encounter again another variety of anti-institutionalism. In The Shack, Jesus says he has no interest in making people Christians. But this claim seems odd, given what Jesus said in The Great Commission about making disciples of his, which is about as basic a definition of “Christian” as there is. This question needs either more treatment or less. Good advice for any writer: either set out adequately what you think, or just don’t raise the question at all.
(In the public session at Regent, Brother Young explained in response to this point that he is indeed no fan of religion and doesn’t believe that God calls people to the religion of Christianity, but to the person of Christ. I think that is a valid distinction at the very heart of salvation: following a religion, even Christianity, won’t save you; only Jesus will, as we trust in him. But once that’s said, is Christianity of no use? Isn’t it, in fact, generally—generally, I say—the best context in which to grow up in the faith and become a mature disciple? Isn’t that a fundamental assumption of the New Testament? Brother Young’s indifference to that question is of a piece with the book’s view of the church, and it’s an overstatement that I find regrettable. We can, and should, champion faith in Jesus over against “mere” religion, but without dismissing the value of the Christian religion or the church.)
5.) The Shack depicts the first person of the Trinity with scars on his/her wrists to demonstrate the oneness of God and thus God’s participation in the crucifixion.
Of course it is very difficult to render the Trinity in a way that properly balances the three and one, and The Shack doesn’t really come close, but instead opts for a generally tritheistic depiction. I think that’s okay for its purposes, however, while I will wish that Brother Young’s striking imagination had found somehow an equally vivid and accurate way to depict God’s unity.
As I say, The Shack tries to connect these three vividly rendered persons of the Trinity through this device of the scars, but I don’t think that’s the way to go. It’s wrong to say, in fact, that anyone other than the second person of the Trinity was crucified. It is, indeed, on the Cross that the three persons of the Trinity are as distinguishable from each other as they ever are—except perhaps at Jesus’ baptism. Most of the rest of The Shack in fact is quite orthodox about who did what on the Cross, so if the particular image of the scars on Papa’s wrists was dropped and one or two other phrases are tidied up, I think all will be well.
(In response to this point, Brother Young claimed justification from II Cor. 5:19, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” And he explained that he is reacting against theological depictions of the crucifixion that assert that God the Father abandoned his Son. I agree with Brother Young’s resistance to this latter picture, and sometime I hope to blog on that point. But I would say that it is to steer into the other ditch to then suggest that God the Father is in Christ: No, God the Son is in Christ, which entails that God—the one, true God—is in Christ. That’s the reading of II Cor. 5:19 that is most consistent with the rest of the Bible’s revelation of the Incarnation.)
(Also in the Regent discussion, Jonathan Wilson raised a similar concern and made the helpful suggestion to relocate the scars from Papa’s wrists to his heart.)
6.)The Shack insists that God does not bring evil, but instead only works with a given situation to bring good out of it, whatever evil happens to be there.
The idea that God “allows” evil but doesn’t “bring” it deserves a longer response than I can give here—and I give that response in another book of mine, on the problem of evil.
For now, I will simply say that if God has the power to prevent an evil and does not do so, then he is responsible for that evil occurring, even as the perpetrator of that evil is also responsible. Furthermore, the Bible shows God as the one who, as Isaiah says, brings both well-being and calamity (45:7), and our depiction of God must take that dimension of God thoroughly into account, especially when providence is at the heart of our picture, as it is in this book.
These are my main theological concerns with The Shack.
As I say, these are important theological matters in themselves, but not crucial to The Shack. I maintain that they could all be fixed to my full satisfaction and nothing crucial to the architecture, argument, or artistry of The Shack would be lost.
In my last post, I want to celebrate the considerable good I found in this book—and to defend it against one or two further charges raised by perhaps over-scrupulous critics.
