The Internet exploded again a couple of weeks ago with the release of the movie version of The Shack, written by William Paul Young, the son of Canadian parents who were missionaries to New Guinea.  It is the story of Mack, a man hardened by tragedy:  in his youth, he was abused by a hypocritical father who was a deacon on Sundays and an angry drunk the rest of the week; as an adult, he endured the unimaginable heartbreak of his youngest daughter, Missy, being abducted and murdered by a serial killer.  One day, a few years after his daughter's death, Mack receives an unlikely message in the mail, presumably from God, to visit Him at the shack where his daughter was killed.  There he meets 'God', and his healing begins.

The phenomenon, if nothing else, has provided a perfect barometer measuring where every person lays within the Christian Church, which is in a state of civil war—whether we realize it or not.  On one side, there are those who value truth, structure, and holiness; on the other are those who pursue experiences, acceptance, and relationship.  For two weeks, verbal grenades have been lobbed across both sides, as has been increasingly typical over just about any subject these days:  the holiness crowd is claiming that William Paul Young is a universalist heretic while the 'love trumps all' group is declaring that this is the best book ever (some are saying it's better than the Bible), and that anyone who has a problem with it is oppressed by a demon of religion or a critical spirit.

Before I commented on it myself, I wanted to read it thoroughly.  Doing so would move my commentary beyond our normal attention span these days (it's no longer a news story), but it was worth it to get a clear, unfiltered perspective.  One thing is true: as a story, The Shack is an absolutely riveting read—I wish I were half that creative as an author (I'd certainly sell a lot more of my own material)!  I actually found that I liked parts of the book more than I originally thought I might; where the story bogs down is when the author tries to theologically explain everything Mack is experiencing—which is funny, given that so many people were saying he was not being theological—half the entire book is a theological treatise on the nature of God and His interaction with us!  (Could this be a lesson for me in my own writings?)

The true controversy—for me, at least—is that for all his theological musings and metaphysical machinery employed to try and make his views sensible, William delivered only one half of the Gospel.  Yes, what matters is our experiential love relationship with God—and He does love us beyond what we can ever imagine, and this love is brought out masterfully in the book.  But that relationship is predicated on the truth and the holiness of who God is and what He wants from us according to God's own definition found in His Word.  It is God's own story, not ours.  I didn't define Him; He defined Himself in the pages of the Bible and in the person of Jesus Christ—and when we get away from that, we misrepresent Him, taking His name in vain.  Now to be clear, I certainly don't believe that Mr. Young is a New Age globalist secretly attempting to deceive us all into taking the mark of the beast.  I genuinely believe his heart is sincerely bent toward reaching people for Jesus Christ; I just believe he is genuinely wrong about who God is compared to how He defines Himself in the Scriptures.  In our culture, people have come to regard art and opinion as the very definition of reality; and so I am concerned that people will take this book and place it above the Bible (some already have).  When someone is looking for God in The Shack, they come across a very different paradigm than what they would find meeting Him face to face.

So what are the specific things I found that led me to this conclusion?

Another hangup is the idea that there is no hierarchy in the Trinity.  We need to be clear about this:  from the standpoint of equality, authority, substance, etc., this is true. However, the author depicts the unity between the members of the Godhead as a 'circle of relationship' instead of a chain of command. (pp. 122-123) Throughout the Bible, though, it is clear that EVERYTHING God does originates with the Father and is accomplished through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Always.  So while this does not indicate 'rank', there is a hierarchy—a linear order to the roles that they have chosen.  An interesting observation that I made in my own book is that we as humans are created as one being with three basic parts—a soul, a body, and a spirit; and that we are in the image of God.  Everything we do originates in our soul and is accomplished by our body through the energy of life from our spirit.  In my view, this is a composite picture of what the Trinity looks like and how God acts in the world.

The problem is not hierarchy itself; it is what man does with hierarchy.  If hierarchy is completely bad, which Mr. Young asserts, does that not also mean that God's higher position from us is evil as well?  Amazingly, as we'll see in a moment, William believes it means exactly that.  I don't think he thought that one through…

A further related point of contention is an all too common misrepresentation of the nature of Jesus brought on by the adoption of dyophysitism at Chalcedon.  Dyophysitism is a fancy way of saying that Jesus is both human and God, but as completely separate experiences; the outcome of which is that Jesus is painted as having done nothing as deity while in human form—and in The Shack, Jesus has limited Himself to only His experience of humanity in our current state forever.

I agree that in many ways, God has chosen to limit Himself for the sake of agape love (i.e. He chooses to work with us inside our experience of time because He created us to live within that context, and He allows us true choice within His predestination); but the nature of Jesus is such that his deity and his humanity are both fully expressed from the moment of His Incarnation through eternity (the ancient Oriental Orthodox concept of miaphysitism).  Jesus is fully God and fully man at the same time in the same way that God is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit at the same time.  So conversely, God does not choose to be the Father or the Son or the Spirit; neither does Jesus choose to be human or divine.  God is all these, and Jesus is both human and divine simultaneously.

Where was I?  Oh, yes—sin, holiness, obedience, and the Law of Moses.  William Young's loathing of hierarchy naturally predisposes him to a negative bent on these topics.  The author's perspective produces a logical trail taking us to a destination far away from God's intent, and this conclusion is exponentially more dangerous than his characterization of the Trinity.  From the moment Mack leaves 'Papa' to meet Sarayu in the garden, things take a downward spiral.

On pp.134-138, Sarayu has a discourse with Mack about good and evil.  She rightly acknowledges the perils of moral relativism and correctly identifies the self as the errant center of our moral sliding scale; furthermore, she agrees that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a real event and the place where mankind was separated from God.  But then, instead of declaring the reason of man's corruption as being his disobedience to God's instruction, she says the real tragedy was that the …spiritual was…torn…from the …physical…?  Yeah, I don't get how that relates, either.  This difficult explanation is very quickly abandoned with a discussion on what must be done about this; Sarayu simply says we have to "know God enough to trust 'God' (not sure if He's a he, a she, or an it at this point) and learn to rest in God's inherent goodness—which, rather than being defined by the Law of Moses and the person of Jesus Christ according to the Bible, was instead represented by the loosey-goosey values of love and light.  Even where these concepts are valid in the Scriptures, they have to be to be further defined—they CANNOT be understood outside of God's definition of righteousness in His Word.  Nowhere in this discussion was mentioned the necessity of sacrifice—and certainly not priesthood, because the author believes that hierarchy and therefore law are evil results of our 'seeking independence'; the logical trap of his error refuses to allow him to mention the word obedience in any positive fashion.  Sarayu says that we define good and evil, not God.  There is only relationship, no rules, no 'performance' we must make.

Now I understand what William is getting at here in terms of abandoning self-worship to allow God to live His life in us—but 'being like Christ' is exactly that—so I am not following the logic here.  Whatever happened to Philippians 2:3-13?

Sin and hell are concepts that are dealt with here; William surprisingly has good insight into the concept that sin is declaring independence from God (self-worship); and hell is simply be the consequence of one's own choice to remain in that independence as a self-worshiper.  But the author does us an injustice here; the Bible is clear that God decrees a time where grace and the rescue from self-worship will end.  At the Great White Throne Judgment—the fulfillment of the Jewish Levitical 'appointed time' called Yom Kippur—every person ever created from Adam and Eve to the last human being to be born will be bodily resurrected to stand in judgment for their deeds—whether they are Christian or not.  (Rev. 20:11-13) ALL will be found guilty, for we "all have sinned, and have fallen short of the glory of God."  (Rom. 3:23) THEN, another book is opened—the Lamb's Book of Life.  The sentences of those whose names are found within are commuted to Jesus' punishment that He endured on our behalf.  All those who are not found in the Book of Life are cast into the lake of fire, their self-worship continuously and eternally consuming them as flames that are never quenched and like worms that never die.  (Rev. 20:14-15, Mark 9:47-48)  In The Shack, Wisdom says that "judgment isn't about destruction, but about setting things right."  The Bible says it differently:  the Greek of John 3:16 ends with, "…that they may not be [violently] destroyed, but have life forever."  The destruction of evil is required—it is demanded—in order to set things right.  That's why Jesus had to die in the first place: if any of God's creation was to survive the destruction that God must pour out on all evil, a ransom had to take place!

There is a whole basket of half-truths, false accusations, and mischaracterizations of motive in here; and the conflict over this paradigm marks the greatest divide of the Christian Church today.  Our author is half right in stating that the Law was originally given as a mirror; but the Law is also God's definition and the eternal standard of His own righteousness—again, none of us defined this for God—He defined these things for Himself in His Word.  Over and over again in the Scriptures—both 'Old' Testament and 'New'—we are told that we are expected to be holy as He is holy. 

I'm already on my way to writing a book with this post (which was not my intention), but let me unpack this basket by presenting some Biblical truths that may be news to many people:

The answer to our longing is not to create a god who is a genderless, multicultural buddy who eliminates every moral goalpost when we miss a kick. No god outside of YHVH, the God of the Bible, is suitable for us to have a relationship with, no matter how warm, loving, and accepting that god of our making might be.

I would change this slightly, based on my understanding of worship, which is that worship is our response (composed of faith and obedience) to the recognition of our position with relationship to God motivated by His love for us.  So when we see God's love for us, we respond in worship by accepting His great sacrifice on our behalf, which produces our redemption; our continued desire for relationship with Him motivates us to enter a partnership with Him that produces righteousness in us.  The point is, there is a sequence—redemption leads to righteousness, and true God-worship is the driving factor for both.

Redemption does not eliminate righteousness—it upholds it and produces it in us.  Rather than removing the moral goalpost, God works with us, strengthening our kick and increasing our aim—and loving us in the process.  I am fond of saying that God does love us no matter who we are, and no matter what we've done; but He also loves you too much to leave you there.

This matters because rightoeusness is who God is; it is the very fabric of His character.  If we are unconcerned with righteousness, we can have no fellowship with God who is righteousness. This is what the Apostle John was getting at in His first general epistle:

Jesus paid the penalty for our breaking of God's Law; He did not destroy the Law with His death.  Furthermore, even though the penalty is satisfied in Jesus' death, this does not mean God no longer cares about His Law.  Even Paul says in Romans 6, "should we go on sinning that grace may abound?  By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?" And the writer of Hebrews tells us, "If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God." (Hebrews 10:26-27) That's scary—but it describes the attitude of the theology contained in The Shack.  If we believe that somehow God erased His expectations of us defined in His law, this leads to relativism (the belief that morality is relative to circumstance), which then leads to universalism (that all moral paths are equally valid).  While I don't believe William Paul Young is a universalist, his beliefs are taking him—and his readers—down that path.  Far from being hateful toward those that subscribe to this paradigm; it breaks my heart to see someone deceived into believing that God is ok with an unrepentant heart—I don't want to see anyone stand before God thinking that He was unconcerned about their sin.  Our attitude needs to be one of reverence for God's holiness and worship of who He is.

I'm not going to sway anyone from reading this book, watching this movie, or accepting every teaching within its pages as a good representation of the Gospel. It is, after all, a fictional book. And again, my concern has nothing to do with how the author shows that God loves us, and how He meets us right at the source of our need; if I had been creative enough to come up with the plot for this story, but used good theology about God and His holiness instead, the story would have come out not much differently (Jesus would have been the one to meet Mack face-to-face, and there would have been discussion about how holiness, sacrifice, obedience and forgiveness interact). But I have written this commentary to provide you with some answers when someone says, "Oh, hey—have you read The Shack?  It revolutionized my life and the way I think about God!"  I pray that far from lobbing grenades, we'll have the opportunity to discuss the subject matter honestly according to God's Word.