USA Today Article on "The Shack"

After my review of "The Shack" I received a few comments along the lines that the reporter in the article mentions. I thought that the article really helped the reader understand just what the crucible was that produced the book. Take a look and maybe you can at least begin to understand more about the author and where the book comes from.

Again, it is fictional. It is NOT Scripture. But I certainly can understand why it appeals to people, especially hurting ones. The challenge then, to all of us who teach, preach, and write, is to find ways to make THE Story as compelling as the fictional accounts.

Someone once said that Las Vegas has absolutely nothing of value to offer but makes people think it does in an amazingly effective way. The Church has the greatest story ever told and has obscured it more effectively than ever thought possible.

'Shack' opens doors, but critics call book 'scripturally incorrect' - USATODAY.com

Young was born in Canada to missionaries who brought him as an infant to New Guinea to live with the primitive Dani tribe. He says he was subject to the harsh verbal attacks of his unhappy father, and sexual assaults by tribesmen. He went to a missionary boarding school at age 6, he says, and was molested by older students.

He never lost a sense of God, but to Young, God was distant and judgmental. "I learned to survive by becoming a performer/perfectionist," he says.

Even as he roamed the world and eventually wound up in a Bible seminary for the Christian Missionary Alliance, he knew he wasn't meant to be a pastor or missionary. He finally graduated from Western Pacific College in Portland and landed at a Four Square Gospel church, working with collegians.

There he met Kim, who poked holes "in my version of being a perfect performer to earn God's love. You can't perform for God. You can't run. You can't hide. You can adapt, but that won't heal the stuff you've buried deep inside, in your 'shack.' "

Soon after they married, waves of tragedy gouged their life. When he was 25, his 18-year-old brother died in a work accident, Kim's mother died unexpectedly, and his niece, 5 years and one day old, was run over by a cement truck while riding her new birthday bicycle.

Grace seemed nowhere in sight.

Young was 38 and the father of six when his life took a hairpin turn after his adultery. He spent a year in counseling, years more soul-searching, marveling at Kim's steadfast commitment, before he reached wholeness in faith, he says.

He wrote The Shack in 2005, prompted by Kim. She wanted him to open up his heart and his thinking to their children, now ages 14 to 27. The book was meant to be like the box top on a jigsaw puzzle, the picture that shows where all the pieces fit, Young says.

Book Review - The Shack

A friend on a pastor's forum asked us if we had read "The Shack", a novel by William Paul Young. No one had, but several of us had heard a lot about it. Since I was curious, we went out this afternoon and bought it, and I spent a couple hours reading it tonight.

The fear for this book is that people will treat it as theology, instead of the story a father wrote for his kids. For some reason, people in America will take fictional material and try to use it in ways it wasn't intended. I do not understand how that can happen, but I am sure that it does.

Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill in Seattle, and an outspoken Calvinist, addressed the book specifically in a clip that's on You Tube. Just search for the shack and driscoll and you'll find it. He blasts it on several fronts - for "making a graven image of God", for "encouraging goddess worship", for "the heresy of modalism", and for dissing the Puritans. Okay, not the latter, I just get tired of hearing about them. I think he was way over the top on the graven images and goddess worship but on track on being careful about what could happen to people who aren't discerning of this fictional work.

As for the book, it's the story of a man who suffers some great pain - first from an abusive father who he poisons, then from the loss of a daughter to a serial killer. He struggles with "the Great Sadness" which robs his life of joy and color. He gets an invitation from "God" to the shack in which his daughter was killed.

And he goes.

The book spends a good deal of time after the first 60 pages, exploring the relationship between the Trinity as they deal with Mack, the focus of the novel. The author seemed to deliberately push some buttons by casting "Papa", the father as an old black woman, Jesus as a typecast middle eastern male, and the spirit as an asian woman. Sophia, the wisdom of god personified, shows up later.

Mack is helped to fully trust god and come out of the Great Sadness by the members of the trinity, and he deals with both of the worst events in his life. He comes away changed, and then there's a twist.

So...

If you are capable of separating fiction from theology, it's a good quick read. There's something inspiring about even fictional characters dealing with their demons, and it's nice to see god referred to as always loving and enthralled with his children. But again, it's a novel so we need to be careful not to port anything in it over to life that doesn't square with Scripture.

If you get your theology from Oprah, you'll be right at home. Not sure how you'll work that into the rest of the speculation from the Secret or Tolle's work, but maybe Oprah can help you figure it all out.