Book review - The Shack

Review by David Rietveld

Several people told me The Shack was a once in a generation type of book, and I ought to read it. This ‘once in a generation’ claim is plastered on the front cover, along with a comparison to Pilgrim’s Progress. These are high claims.

I must say it’s a page turner, but I cannot recall another Christian book that has left me with such mixed feelings. At times I was moved to tears. At other times I was very frustrated, annoyed, and agitated.

Briefly, the plot

Mack is flawed man, who as an abused child, poisons his father’s alcohol. He has a caring wife, and five healthy children. Then Mack takes three of his children on a camping trip and two of his children go canoeing. One falls in the water, and needs to be rescued by Mack (an ex lifesaver). In going to save his son, Mack leaves his youngest daughter at the camp. She is abducted by a serial child-killer, never to be seen alive again.

This is all too much for Mack. His fragile and clunky personality is all at sea, his family is unravelling, and his simple faith is failing. Anger, judgmentalism, depression, and disengagement take over.

God then invites Mack to a weekend at the shack – the scene of the crime, where Mack freely engages with real personifications of the trinity. Mack works through his anger, his self- and God-blame, and emerges a transformed man, closer to God and able to lead his family as never before.

Three things I like about this book
…and three things I hate

I like the way this book is written. As a narrative, it avoids the trap of being an abstract theological reflection on the trinity. Many people (like Mack) have a simplistic view of God as someone who will bless the good and punish the bad. This book has the capacity to help move people beyond crisis, and into a deeper relationship with God. This is a book I want to give to those people who are stuck at the level of a Father Christmas ‘god’.

I like much of what the book says about suffering. There are no simple answers, and Mack struggles. God is portrayed as someone who is also hurt and angered by evil and its consequences. The way forward is not revenge. God can use suffering to bring good out of evil and at the crux of all this is Jesus – God in the flesh. The Shack doesn’t say all that could be said about suffering. Yet for the person who is stuck at the angry stage, it says enough, and it says it movingly.

I genuinely love the way this book explores the triune God as relational and loving.

The narrative rightly portrays God as a being who exists in perfect complete relationships. The author’s exploration of the three human personas of the trinity interacting with mutual respect, love, and other person centredness captures something of the nature of God.

But I do not like not knowing exactly what this book is! Is it fiction? Biography? Or theology?

Young unhelpfully blurs the genres. I have concluded The Shack is extended parable, like Pilgrim’s Progress, but alarmingly, the nature and perspectives of God are explored without any reference to Scripture, or historical theology.

Pilgrim’s Progress works because it is written from the perspective of a pilgrim, from our perspective. The Shack puts ideas as coming from the very mouth of God. This is a level of authority that is unwarranted and undeserved.

This book is unhelpfully dualistic.

Mack experiences God in ways that his previous theology (Mack is a theology graduate) mitigated against. Theology is pitted against experience, thoughts against feelings, religion against relationship, being against doing, love against justice, freewill against determinism, Christianity against — well I’m not sure, but Young’s Jesus denies not only being religious, even being Christian. Too often this book is about ‘either-ors’ and not enough about ‘both-ands’ and the mystery of paradox.

Finally, I do not like The Shack because it presents many fundamental issues as if they are fresh revelations about God. (Space does not permit I do justice to this claim. ^1.)

Young’s Jesus is also lacking, presented as a young carpenter with a heightened ever-present God consciousness. More alarmingly – where is the cross? Beyond some vague reference to scars on his wrists, the Jesus we meet in The Shack is not a crucified and risen saviour. Mack’s salvation from depression (as opposed to sin and death) comes from his own personal growth and enlightenment (as opposed to Jesus death).

At the end of the book Mack’s (dead) father comes back from somewhere, but not hell, reconciled to his son Mack. The Shack sounds more and more like Neibuhr’s 1938 assessment of mainline liberal theology, where ‘A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.’

Ouch! But if the shoe fits...

So, will I give The Shack to someone? Yes – I think I might. Guy meets God is a great love story, and to my dismay sometimes the liberals appreciate and tell a better love story better than evangelicals.

But it’s also a dangerous book, bursting with half truths and heresy. It’s liberalism dressed up in parable. I would be doing coffee with anybody I gave the book so as to sort out the wisdom from the folly.

^1. The full review of this book may be found here.

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