Book Review: The Shack by William Young

Pub­lished in 2007 The Shack con­tin­ues to be a highly rec­om­mended book, despite the (some­times intense) con­tro­versy that sur­rounds it. The ben­e­fit of writ­ing a review of The Shack almost two years after its ini­tial pub­lish­ing is that I’m able to draw upon a very large knowl­edge base when address­ing some of the con­cerns sur­round­ing this book. If you haven’t read the book what fol­lows would be con­sid­ered spoiler mate­r­ial. Also impor­tant to keep in mind, after read­ing the book I’ve come away from it with strong reser­va­tions. The review that fol­lows will be fair and bal­anced, how­ever, it will address the plethora of the­o­log­i­cal mis­steps in particular.

No one needs to be told that the book is a (cult?) phe­nom­e­non, hav­ing sold more than one mil­lion copies.¹ The Shack is still, after 56 weeks on The New York Times paper­back trade fic­tion best sell­ers list, hold­ing posi­tion #2.² A ver­i­ta­ble suc­cess with non-Christians and Chris­tians alike, it might strike some as odd that The Shack is caus­ing the con­tro­versy that cur­rently sur­rounds it.

So what exactly is The Shack all about? From the back cover, “Macken­zie Allen Philips’s youngest daugh­ter, Missy, has been abducted dur­ing a fam­ily vaca­tion and evi­dence that she may have been bru­tally mur­dered is found in an aban­doned shack deep in the Ore­gon wilder­ness. Four years later, in the midst of his Great Sad­ness, Mack receives a sus­pi­cious note, appar­ently from God, invit­ing him back to that shack for a weekend.

Against his bet­ter judg­ment he arrives at the shack on a win­try after­noon and walks back into his dark­est night­mare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.

In a world where reli­gion seems to grow increas­ingly irrel­e­vant The Shack wres­tles with the time­less ques­tion: Where is God in a world so filled with unspeak­able pain? The answers Mack gets will astound you and per­haps trans­form you as much as it did him. You’ll want every­one you know to read this book!“³

I can attest to the last sen­tence above, I’ve been approached by count­less peo­ple rec­om­mend­ing to me The Shack, not just as a good (or ‘bril­liant,’ as I’ve heard from some) piece of fic­tion, but as a book which will rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way I view and relate to God. I will say from the begin­ning that The Shack has nei­ther rev­o­lu­tion­ized my view of or rela­tion­ship with God. The Shack also hasn’t struck me as a par­tic­u­larly well writ­ten piece of fiction.

The Shack is a story which seeks to answer the ques­tion of how there could be pain and suf­fer­ing in the world if a max­i­mally good God exists. We’re told of a man named Macken­zie Philips (Mack) who, four years before the events of The Shack, took his fam­ily (except for his wife, Nan) on a camp­ing trip. It was dur­ing this camp­ing trip that his daugh­ter, Missy, was abducted and mur­dered, though her body was not found and the mur­derer was not caught. Through this event we are informed of The Great Sad­ness which inflicts Mack. The story really begins when Mack, one March morn­ing, receives a let­ter from God invit­ing him back to the same shack Missy was mur­dered in. After some hes­i­ta­tion Mack goes back to the shack where he meets the Trin­ity. God the Father is described as a ‘beam­ing African Amer­i­can woman’ named Elou­sia (com­bi­na­tion of ‘El,’ the Hebrew name for God the cre­ator and ‘ousia,’ Greek for ‘being’ or ‘essence’). Jesus as a typ­i­cal man of Mid­dle East­ern descent and the Holy Spirit as an Asian woman named Sarayu (San­skrit for air or wind). ⁴ Fur­ther on in the story Mack even­tu­ally meets with Sophia, the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of God’s wis­dom . Over the course of the book we learn that God has met with Mack to remove The Great Sad­ness. The major­ity of the text is dia­logue between God and Mack with top­ics rang­ing from the cru­ci­fix­ion to a proper under­stand­ing of the trin­ity to sin, redemp­tion and for­give­ness. As such sto­ries go, Mack leaves the shack a changed man.

As a piece of lit­er­a­ture I’m not overly enthu­si­as­tic about The Shack. Any book remotely approach­ing the genre of the­o­log­i­cal fic­tion is imme­di­ately com­pared to The Lord of the Rings, The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia or a num­ber of the works of C.S. Lewis, at least in my mind. Not a good place to start. In any case, Young is a com­pe­tent writer, though it takes read­ing a few chap­ters to real­ize this as the book starts out with more than a few awk­ward sen­tences: “He (Jesus) did so as a depen­dent, lim­ited human being trust­ing in my life and power to be at work within him and through him. Jesus, as a human being, had no power within him­self to heal any­one”.⁵ As the story pro­gressed I found myself strug­gling through some of the dia­logue as rather than let the story explain itself, Young seems to force both dia­log  and nar­ra­tive. Forced nar­ra­tive and poor dia­logue don’t make for enter­tain­ing read­ing (though I seem to be one of few peo­ple, con­sid­er­ing the books pop­u­lar­ity). The fact that the book is fic­tion has been used by a few peo­ple to explain the rather bad the­ol­ogy of the book, this is one of the dan­gers of writ­ing under the genre of fic­tion, the­o­log­i­cal fic­tion, even.

For the most part I didn’t find the book to be any­thing spe­cial, how­ever, to now address a few con­cerns I have with this book.

Con­cern #1 — Goddess worship

Exo­dus 20:4–6

4“You shall not make for your­self an idol, or any like­ness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.
5You shall not wor­ship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jeal­ous God, vis­it­ing the iniq­uity of the fathers on the chil­dren, on the third and the fourth gen­er­a­tions of those who hate Me,
6but show­ing lov­ingkind­ness to thou­sands, to those who love Me and keep My com­mand­ments.”

There is a dan­ger in describ­ing God the Father as a black African-American woman. Fur­ther­more, there’s even greater dan­ger in describ­ing the Holy Spirit as an Asian woman. It is dan­ger­ous to do so as it’s a vio­la­tion of the sec­ond of the ten com­mand­ments. God the Father is Spirit and God the Holy Spirit is Spirit (seems self evi­dent to me). This con­cern (objec­tion?) is specif­i­cally addressed by Mark Driscoll, pas­tor of Mars Hill Church (Seat­tle). ⁶

Con­cern #2 — Sabellianism

The sec­ond of my con­cerns is a severe mis­un­der­stand­ing (and sub­se­quently, mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion) of the Trin­ity. As Dr. Nor­man Geisler has said in his cri­tique of The Shack:

God appears as three sep­a­rate per­sons (in three sep­a­rate bod­ies) which seems to sup­port Trithe­ism in spite of the fact that the author denies Trithe­ism (“We are not three gods”) and Modal­ism (“We are not talk­ing about One God with three attitudes”—p. 100).  Nonethe­less, Young departs from the essen­tial nature of God for a social rela­tion­ship among the mem­bers of the Trin­ity.  He wrongly stresses the plu­ral­ity of God as three sep­a­rate per­sons: God the Father appears as an “African Amer­i­can woman” (80);  Jesus appears as a Mid­dle East­ern worker (82).  The Holy Spirit is rep­re­sented as “a small, dis­tinc­tively Asian woman” (82).  And accord­ing to Young, the unity of God is not in one essence (nature), as the ortho­dox view holds. Rather, it is a social union of three sep­a­rate per­sons. Besides the false teach­ing that God the Father and the Holy Spirit have phys­i­cal bod­ies (since “God is spirit”—Jn. 4:24), the mem­bers of the Trin­ity are not sep­a­rate per­sons (as The Shack por­trays them); they are only dis­tinct per­sons in one divine nature.  Just as a tri­an­gle has three dis­tinct cor­ners, yet is one tri­an­gle. It is not three sep­a­rate cor­ners (for then it would not be a tri­an­gle if the cor­ners were sep­a­rated from it), Even so, God is one in essence but has three dis­tinct (but insep­a­ra­ble) Per­sons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.⁷

Elou­sia (God the Father) states on page 99: “When we three spoke our­self into human exis­tence as the Son of God, we became fully human. We also chose to embrace all the lim­i­ta­tions that this entailed. Even though we have always been present in this cre­ated uni­verse, we know became flesh and blood. It would be like this bird, who nature it is to fly, choos­ing only to walk and remain grounded. He doesn’t stop being the bird, but it does alter his expe­ri­ence of life sig­nif­i­cantly”. Geisler has also said in response to this, “this is a seri­ous mis­un­der­stand­ing of the Incar­na­tion of Christ. The whole Trin­ity was not incar­nated.  Only the Son was (Jn. 1:14), and in His case deity did not become human­ity but the Sec­ond Per­son of the God­head assumed a human nature in addi­tion to His divine nature. Nei­ther the Father nor Holy Spirit (who are pure spirit–John 4:24) became human, only the Son did.“⁸

Con­cern #3 –Implied Inclu­sivism / Universalism

“I am the best way any human can relate to Papa or Sarayu.“⁹

“Those who love me come from every sys­tem that exists. They were Bud­dhists or Mor­mons, Bap­tists or Mus­lims, Democ­rats, Repub­li­cans and many who don’t vote or are not part of any Sun­day morn­ing or reli­gious insti­tu­tions. I have fol­low­ers who were mur­der­ers and many who were self-righteous. Some are bankers and book­ies, Amer­i­cans and Iraqis, Jews and Pales­tini­ans. I have no desire to make them Chris­t­ian, but I do want to join them in their trans­for­ma­tion into sons and daugh­ters of my Papa, into my broth­ers and sis­ters, into my Beloved.¹⁰

Being the best way to relate to God is a far cry from being the only way to relate to God (John 3:16; 14:6). Nowhere in The Shack does Jesus clar­ify that he is the only way to God, he remains the best way. “I have no desire to make them Chris­t­ian, but I do want to join them in their trans­for­ma­tion into sons and daugh­ters of my Papa;” what else could this mean?

Well, I have many more con­cerns than this, how­ever, this is get­ting quite long so I think here is where I’ll stop. If you haven’t read The Shack, don’t. And with that, this review is finished.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: On Guard by William Lane Craig
2. Book Review: The Unaborted Socrates by Peter Kreeft
3. Book Review: The Last Chris­t­ian on Earth by Os Guinness
4. Book Review: Doubt­ing by Alis­ter McGrath
5. Book Review: The Invis­i­ble World by Anthony Destefano