It’s spiritual, who cares about God?

It’s not meant to be a Chris­t­ian book any­way, its a spir­i­tu­al­ity book so who cares if its wrong about God, that’s not the point about it! Chris­tians can learn a lot from read­ing stuff about other aspects of spirituality…Open your minds people!

This was the sen­ti­ment I encoun­tered while dis­cussing the book The Shack with a few acquain­tances, well, more ‘friends of a friend of mine’. As far as I’m aware they are all pro­fess­ing Chris­tians which leaves me won­der­ing: what are they think­ing? Keep­ing in mind a Chris­t­ian world view and all that this entails, is it even pos­si­ble to cre­ate a dis­tinc­tion between ‘spir­i­tu­al­ity’ and ‘God’ and dis­cuss one with­out it impact­ing the other? I would haz­ard a guess and say no, not that I agree with the view that The Shack is a ‘spir­i­tu­al­ity book’ and not con­cerned with God.

Not that this is intended as any sort of review of The Shack, it doesn’t take more than ten sec­onds of blurb read­ing to real­ize that this book is intended (as I under­stand it) as a re-evaluation or per­haps rede­f­i­n­i­tion of the Chris­t­ian faith. Eugene Peter­son, Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of Spir­i­tual The­ol­ogy, Regent Col­lege has said, ‘…This book has the poten­tial to do for our gen­er­a­tion what Paul Bunyan’s Pil­grims Progress did for his. It’s that good!’ Michael W. Smith, who made the back cover, is quoted as say­ing, ‘…My wife and I laughed, cried, and repented of our own lack of faith along the way. THE SHACK will leave you crav­ing for the pres­ence of God.’ Pas­tor Steve Berger, ‘Wrapped in cre­ative bril­liance, The Shack is spir­i­tu­ally pro­found, the­o­log­i­cally enlight­en­ing and life impact­ing.’ What blurb sec­tion would be com­pletely with­out Kathie Lee Gif­ford, ‘The Shack will change the way you think about God for­ever.’ Even if I grant that The Shack is a ‘spir­i­tu­al­ity book,’ the real­ity remains that many peo­ple are view­ing this book as some sort of rev­o­lu­tion­ary eval­u­a­tion of God. If The Shack is wrong about God (and it is…) then I don’t think ask­ing ‘who cares?’ is the most appro­pri­ate ques­tion. A book wrong in it’s view and teach­ing of God which alters the way peo­ple view God is a dan­ger­ous thing. Well, maybe an even­tual book review is in order, even though it’s a cou­ple years down the road since the ini­tial release of The Shack (see­ing as peo­ple are still rec­om­mend­ing it left and right).

I would like to believe my mind is an open mind, more­over a dis­cern­ing mind. Being open minded I read the book, gave it a chance and unlike oth­ers I’m not con­tent hid­ing behind it’s lit­er­ary genre to make up for its the­o­log­i­cal defi­cien­cies. That reminds of me some­thing else that was said dur­ing our conversation:

Everyone’s per­cep­tion of who or what God is are dif­fer­ent so it doesn’t mat­ter if its wrong about God because the book isn’t meant to be teach­ing bib­li­cal truths, its about spir­i­tu­al­ity and a jour­ney plus its fic­tion so if  its wrong about God…what does that matter?

Seem­ingly illus­tra­tive of an ear­lier post of mine, here we have a fail­ure to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between our per­cep­tion of God and who God actu­ally is. Fur­ther­more, just because we all have dif­fer­ent per­cep­tions of who God is doesn’t mean we all hold cor­rect or jus­ti­fied or war­ranted per­cep­tions of God. Addi­tion­ally, it’s non-sequitur to con­clude that The Shack’s being wrong about God doesn’t mat­ter because peo­ple have dif­fer­ent per­cep­tions of God, this is sim­ply very poor logic. Fic­tion or not (for those con­fused, con­trary to the intro­duc­tion, the book is a com­plete work of fic­tion) this is a book which seems to attempt to explain God in a ‘new’ way, in the process chang­ing our under­stand­ing of and rela­tion­ship with God. As such if it’s wrong about God, as I said above, it’s a very dan­ger­ous thing. That’s why it mat­ters and that’s why I’m wor­ried that young Chris­tians are tak­ing such an atti­tude to impor­tant mat­ters of faith.