William P. Young. The Shack.
When a friend said that he had been profoundly touched by The Shack, my natural curiosity kicked in. A quick online search told me that he was not alone: others were also singing the praises of the book. Eugene Peterson (The Message) compares it to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. But lurking between the glowing endorsements were the detractors, who denounce The Shack as fuzzy theology or even heresy.
Before I jumped on either bandwagon, I decided to read the book. Conclusion number one: controversy sells books, sometimes regardless of their literary content! (Hmm, that reminds me of a guy named Dan Brown…) Anyway, here’s my two cents.
First, a quick synopsis for those who haven’t read the book. The Shack is the fictional tale of Mack, an
At the shack, Mack meets a large effusive black woman, a small ephemeral Asian woman, and an unassuming Middle Eastern carpenter. He soon figures out that he is face to face with the Trinity. More than half the book is a type of therapeutic dialogue between Mack and the three. They break his paradigms right and left, in order to leave him with an eternal perspective on his tragic loss. At the end, Mack is not sure if his memorable encounter was real, or just a dream. But it has given him the closure that he needed to continue living.
Any evaluation of The Shack needs to meet the book on its own terms, as a work of fiction. When I read a fictional story—let’s say one of John Grisham’s novels—I expect to be entertained, surprised and emotionally moved. There is usually a problem to be resolved, a process toward the solution and some type of closure at the end. Besides the plot, we expect the characters to display the human triumphs and foibles that will cause us to identify with them and to live the story vicariously. We hope the good guys win and the bad guys lose. A good work of fiction will have all of these elements.
Incidentally, I may learn something new in a novel (Grisham’s The Testament has some good information about the great Brazilian wetland called the Pantanal), but this is usually not the main reason I choose to read a work of fiction.
Okay, so unless the book is in the fantasy genre, I expect the story to be realistic, believable. Here is where many readers of The Shack feel some tension. The book starts out like a John Grisham novel and then moves into some murky territory when Mack and “Papa” God listen to “Eurasian funk and blues” in the kitchen. Now that’s pushing our envelope! Could this really happen? What do we do with this? Do we require the book to line up with Systematic Theology 101 or do we meet it on its own terms, as a work of fiction literature?
Of course, Young is rattling our cage and he knows it. It’s a literary device to get our attention. He can do this because he’s not writing a seminary textbook. Is he treading on thin ice? Maybe, but we only get bent out of shape if we force the book to do more than it sets out to do.
Is God really a jolly black woman with a charming Southern accent? Young would be the first to say no, and he lets “Papa” explain with her own words:
…I am neither male nor female, even though both genders are derived from my nature. If I choose to appear to you as a man or a woman, it’s because I love you. For me to appear to you as a man or a woman and suggest that you call me Papa is simply to mix metaphors, to help you keep from falling so easily back into your religious conditioning.(1)
Besides looking at genre, we can also evaluate a book from the perspective of the author’s purpose in writing the story. The Shack doesn’t directly give us this information, so we have to read between the lines. We could assume that the author has experienced some traumatic losses in his life, and the book is his way of helping others work through the grief process. Young’s personal testimony on the book-related website seems to confirm this analysis:
While I have extensively written for business, creating web content, business plans, white papers etc., The Shack was a story written for my six children, with no thought or intention to publish. It is as much a surprise to me as to anyone else that I am now an ‘author’. […] The journey has been both incredible and unbearable, a desperate grasping after grace and wholeness. These facts don’t tell you about the pain of trying to adjust to different cultures, of life losses that were almost too staggering to bear, of walking down railroad tracks at night in the middle of winter screaming into the windstorm, of living with an underlying volume of shame so deep and loud that it constantly threatened any sense of sanity, of dreams not only destroyed but obliterated by personal failure, of hope so tenuous that only the trigger seemed to offer a solution. These few facts also do not speak to the potency of love and forgiveness, the arduous road of reconciliation, the surprises of grace and community, of transformational healing and the unexpected emergence of joy. Facts alone might help you understand where a person has been, but often hide who they actually are. The Shack will tell you much more about me than a few facts ever could. In some ways my life is partly revealed in both characters—Willie and Mack. But an author is always more. (2)
I get the feeling that The Shack is a parable, a metaphor of Young’s spiritual journey. He’s not giving us facts about God and the doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, he expresses a type of relational truth in a story. The Shack is not about theology; it’s about experience.
Will readers of The Shack start adopting strange ideas about the Trinity? I doubt it. But they might conclude that God is deeply aware of their painful losses. That God is saddened by human violence, but this does not diminish his sovereignty. That he can help us in our suffering because he has also suffered at the hands of violent men. That our ideas about him are probably still too small. That the life of faith is not about following a set of rules, but about walking daily with Jesus. That doctrine can sometimes get in the way of devotion.
