Should 'The Shack' Be Attacked?
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CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH
In this regular feature, Dave and Tom address questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call, here is this week’s question: Dear Dave and TA, Frankly I am confused by a book that is very popular among my circle of Christian friends, it’s titled, The Shack, and although it is endorsed by some leading evangelicals, I was freaked out by it, and couldn’t actually finish it. I don’t understand how anyone thinks he can put God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit in a fictional situation, and then have them speak the words out of his own imagination. Isn’t this dead wrong?
Tom:
Now Dave, I know you haven’t read The Shack, you’ve been working night and day on your book, Cosmos, Creator and Human Destiny.
Dave:
I’ve heard about it, Tom, probably know quite a bit about it.
Tom:
I’ve read it, I struggled through it, but in case you haven’t read it, I just want to run some things by you, and just kind of get your comments. Well, first of all, it’s a book that claims to be fiction, although you can’t really tell. It’s like mixing theology and some concepts, some beliefs that we might agree with, with some fiction. But basically what you have is a man in the story, he gets a note from God. He’s gone through great trauma in his life, he’s lost his daughter to a heinous kind of murder, so he’s carried this guilt and concern because maybe he could have saved his daughter, and so on. So he’s go this real burden that he’s been carrying, and he’s sort of been blaming God for this. But then, supposedly he gets a note from God, to come back to the place where the murder took place, and God is meeting him there, but not just God the Father, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, but all three. So you have in this story this man interacting with the Trinity and you have the Trinity. I’ll just give you my synopsis of those that he meets with. He conjures up God the Father as a hip talking now and then crude black woman referred to as Pappa. And Jesus as a sometimes inept stone skipping good ole boy enamoured with his humanity and creation, and the Holy Spirit as a wisp of a woman from Asia who gardens and collects tears. Now, anybody reading the book would say, Well, that’s your evaluation, but that in reality we have the Holy Trinity, okay, God the Father and the Holy Spirit as women, dressed in women’s clothes, interacting with this guy. What do you say to that?
Dave:
Well, Tom, I refused to read it. I know you had to, to answer the question, but this is abomination from beginning to end, and it’s a sign of the times in which we live. Can you imagine a black woman, black or white, or whatever?
Tom:
And Dave, it’s not even consistent with having God use a dialogue of a black woman. It’s just ludicrous, even from writing’s standpoint, but go ahead.
Dave:
Well, you’re not supposed to make an idol, you’re not supposed to make any representation of God. Now this is the worst kind of misrepresentation you could have. A living idol of someone who is, supposedly, they say God came in this form now? The Father came in this form? And the Holy Spirit in the form of an Asian woman? And Jesus is kind of inept? He is enamoured with his humanity, and so forth? Tom, this is—I don’t have words to express it! This is blasphemy of the worst sort. And yet that evangelical supposedly, Christian bookstores and churches!
Tom:
Well, Christians have pushed the sales, at this recording, over a million, and it’s really a hot item. I’ve talked to some people that said their friends keep passing it around, and they just love it. One of the attractions, Dave, I mean, you are repulsed by it and so was I, but one of the attractions of this book is that God explains himself. So there is a lot of theological dialogue of God saying, well the reason I did this, and the reason I did that, none of which you find in the Bible.
Dave:
I’m sure it would not ring true to who God is.
Tom:
Oh without a doubt.
Dave:
So, they are demeaning God, they are presenting a false picture of God. An author who writes that, he ought to tremble. He is going to stand before this God that he misrepresented, stand before Him in judgment, and the people who loves it, they will stand before God in judgment as well. They’ve got a false idea of God in their minds, they allowed—
Tom:
Dave, I mean, it runs the whole gamut. Now this is a God who has been reduced to somebody that we can get along with. In our earlier segment, you talked about going down on your face before God. There is no sense of that reverence or awe, humility at all in this book. I mean, here’s a god you get comfortable with. You know, you get comfortable with Jesus, and then you know, they are very human. We have reduced them to our stature really in this book. Not we have, but the author has.
Dave:
Well, Tom, I tremble for this man, and I tremble for those who read it, for those who recommend it, those who—what could be going through a person’s head as they read this? This is a representation of God? It couldn’t be worse, and to even entertain that thought… You see, the problem is, Tom, it corrupts the mind, it corrupts the heart, it corrupts one’s idea, comprehension of God. We’re not to even make an image in our mind. We’re not to make any image of God, no representation of God. So this is blatant disobedience of the very first commandment, You shall have no other gods before me.
Tom:
Now Dave, one last point about this book which is, I think, talk about no fear of God. Who would dare speak for God? Now we have a dialogue, we have God in dialogue with this other character in the book, whether it be God the Father or Jesus or the Holy Spirit, who would put words in their mouth? Who would date to do that? But we see this trend. You have books out there now, Jesus in conversation with Confucius, or with Buddha, and so on. I mean, this is Robi Zacharius, you know, who did that. We have Eugene Peterson, which we’ve dealt with over and over again, but that’s what his bible, The Message is all about. He puts his own words in God’s mouth, and then have the nerve to say, Thus sayeth the Lord. No, this is Eugene Peterson sayeth, not God.
Dave:
Tom, you couldn’t denounce it more strongly. I mean, there is no way you could denounce it strongly enough. This is blasphemy, this is apostasy and the fact that the church goes for it, or many in the church, that is just absolutely incredible!
Tom:
Dave, evangelical leaders . . we do a Q & A on this, which I name them, let’s just look to Eugene Peterson. His quote, his endorsement of the book is the featured endorsement right on the cover. And, he says, “This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It is that good.” Wow!
