I stood in the hallway of my church listening to two women discuss the book, The Shack by William Paul Young for their book club.  Representing both sides of the debate, I was once again admonished that I had yet to tackle this controversial work of fiction.  Can it be approached as “purely fiction” or does it need to be judged as a representation of Christian apologetics-however fancifully told?

It is Mackenzie Allen Philips’s story.  Beginning as a young man belonging to an alcoholic family where his church elder father physically abused he, and his mother.  After an especially awful two day beating, he left home spending some time in the military and in seminary.  Chapter one picks up his story as a happily married man with five children.  The burden of his childhood is never far away and events in the story will test his faith further.

His youngest child, Missy, was abducted on a camping trip and murdered.  The body and killer never discovered.   When a blizzard keeps his family away for a weekend, he receives a note in the mail from what appears to be God.  The note requests a meeting at the very shack where his daughter was believed to be murdered.

Secretly, he travels to the shack and encounters the Lord in the three persons of the trinity. The African-American woman is God (reminding me of the seer from The Matrix). Throughout the story she is known as Papa. Near the end, because Mack requires a father figure, she turns into a pony-tailed, grey-haired man, but otherwise God is this woman. Jesus is a young to middle-aged man of Middle-Eastern descent with a big nose and rather plain looks while the Holy Spirit is played by Sarayu, a woman of Asian descent.

Many philosophical and theological subjects are tackled in this story. What the author does well is affirms the absolute nature of what is good and teaches that evil exists only in relation to what is good. Young challenges the reader to understand that God is inherently good and that we can only truly trust God if we believe Him to be good. He highlights the human tendency to create our image of God by looking at human qualities and assuming that God is simply the same.

“I don’t need to punish people for sin.  Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It’s not my purpose to punish it; it’s my joy to cure it.”

However, I became very uncomfortable with his explanation of the trinity. Specifically that there is no hierarchy between the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost or in heaven for that matter.  The author’s arguments that without the triune nature of God, and Jesus becoming a man, God would be incapable of love is not supported anywhere in scripture. When the book delves into submission and free will it also makes many arguments not supported by any scripture.  In fact, he points away from Scripture and towards subjective promptings and leadings of what feels good.

“Jesus paused and grew sober. ’Seriously, my life was not meant to be an example to copy.  Being my follower is not trying to ‘be like Jesus,’ it means your independence is killed. I came to give you life, real life, my life. “

Because of the emotional impact of reading good fiction, it can be easy to allow it to become manipulative and to allow the emotion of a moment to bypass our ability to discern what is true and what is not. The book began with far too many awkward sentences, but as it went on and as the story took over the book became easier to read. The story itself is interesting reminding me of the dialogue in the book of Job from the Bible. I felt the ending was abrupt and better left unsaid, proving to be a weak attempt at closure to an emotionally driven story.

“Those who have loved me have come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims; Some are Democrats, some republicans and many don’t vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions…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.”

It is fun to get caught up in a large movement of people inspired by Christian fiction, but readers tread dangerous theological ground in The Shack. Both because of that and because of its mediocre writing I recommend finding better more compelling reads for searching souls.

GENRE: Christian Fiction