"Is The Shack that good?"
Here's a portion of a review from Ordained Servant:
But is The Shack that good? And is the teaching of The Shack in line with Bunyan and the Bible? Lane Keister, author of the Green Baggins blog on the Web, doesn't think so. He has this to say:
Here is that important point from Lewis:The Shack is the story of a man ["Mack"] whose [youngest] daughter is brutally murdered. The man ... receive[s] a message from God [four years later] to meet him at the shack, the very place where his daughter was murdered. He then meets God....
The upshot of the plot is that God explains to the main character the why's and the wherefore's, and the man is healed. The theological upshot is that God is good, but not all-powerful....
Contrast Job. Job lost much more than the man in the story.... He had much more to complain about than the man in The Shack. He too wanted God to explain.... But when God finally has His say, He tells Job that He does not have to come to the bar of human reason. Humans have to come to the bar of God.
This is where C.S. Lewis comes in. In his brilliant essay entitled "God in the Dock," he makes [a] really important [point].
Ancient man approached God ... as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God is in the Dock.
The author of The Shack is a typical example of "modern man": From Young's perspective, God is in the dock and God (through the author of The Shack) must present "a reasonable case for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease." Young ignores Lewis's rebuke and—with tongue in cheek—titles chapter 7 of The Shack "God on the Dock," making an allusion to Lewis's essay and his own rejection of it (104-114).
Young's approach is far different from that which we see in John Bunyan and in Job in the Bible, as Keister explains:
Bunyan and Young go in fundamentally different directions. Christian's journey is to the bar of judgment as a defendant whom God will acquit based on the spotless righteousness of Christ imputed to him. The man's journey in The Shack is to the bench, where he magnanimously acquits God of wrong-doing, once it becomes evident that God is really powerless to stop it....In chapter 6 of The Shack, Mack meets God, and we as well are introduced to a very different view of the Triune God from that found in Scripture:
... [O]ne of my friends ... . noted the contrast between the way in which God is portrayed in the Bible as opposed to how God is portrayed in The Shack. The God of The Shack is hardly a God with the least little hint of awe and majesty. He is not the God of the whirlwind, which is how God treated Job. He is not the God before whom all bow their faces to the ground.
The door flew open, and he was looking directly into the face of a large beaming African American woman ... . Just as she turned to enter the cabin, a small distinctly Asian woman emerged from behind her ... . He [Mack] then glanced past her and noticed that a third person had emerged from the cabin, this one a man. He appeared Middle Eastern and was dressed like a laborer, complete with tool belt and gloves (82-84).
All three are "down to earth," humanized to such an extent that any sense of awe seems to be excluded:
Mack tried again to look at the Asian woman ... . From her attire, Mack assumed that she was a groundskeeper or gardener ... . [T]he large woman put her arm around Mack's shoulders, drew him to her, and said, "Okay, we should probably introduce ourselves to you. I am the housekeeper and cook"... . "And I," interrupted the man who looked to be in his thirties and stood a little shorter than Mack himself, "I try to keep things fixed up around here. I enjoy working with my hands, although, as these two will tell you, I take pleasure in cooking and gardening as much as they do" (85-86).
Read the entire review HERE.
