So runs the strapline for William Paul Young’s ‘The Shack’.
I wouldn’t have dreamt of reading it – had it not been the subject of our local clergy book club. But I’m glad I did.
Eugene Peterson writes that “This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It’s that good!” I’m not sure about that – but it was good.
It’s a book about God, and the Trinity, and suffering, and judgement, and forgiveness, and sacrifice, and above all about relationships: God’s with him/her/themselves (you have to read it!), our’s with God, and our’s with one another. I don’t think it says anything new about any of that – but it does use some novel and interesting metaphors and images to convey it all. And you can ready it all in a day!
The author uses the quote from the book: “If anything matters…everything matters” as the strapline on his website.
My own ‘keynote’ quote would be: [Papa (God), to Mack (the central character)] “…just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies. Don’t ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes. That will only lead you to false notions about me. Grace doesn’t depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.”
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6 April 2009 at 5:59 pm
Phil Groom
I read it because I was sent a review copy – have yet to write a review though.
Much of what Young says is good: a fascinating if somewhat contrived exploration of what an encounter with God might actually be like, with God largely refusing to conform to conservative stereotypes of what s/he ought to be like.
But by the end, the Shack’s God fails and I finished the book disappointed. I was angry at the outset with the author’s use of a child abduction and murder as a platform for exploring his theology. Eventually Mack asked the billion-dollar question: could the Shack’s God have prevented the tragedy? And the answer? Bog-standard conservative evangelical apologetics: s/he could have prevented it but didn’t “for purposes that you cannot possibly understand” (p.222).
That, putting it bluntly, is a cop out. What would we think of a human being who excused his or her failure to act like that? We’d call them a monster, and rightly so. So why do we balk when it’s God making lame excuses? Or, more precisely, human apologists, making lame excuses for God?
The reality is that even an omnipotent God, even if there was one, couldn’t make a square circle. Evil happens; and if we’re in a position to do something about it, do we not have a duty to act? I think we do ourselves no favours when we try to defend an indefensible failure to act by coming up with variations on the “God knows best” apologia front.
It’s a nice idea to believe that God somehow weaves together the dark strands and the light strands of life to make a tapestry — but that analogy falls apart because a weaver uses wool dyed different colours: it’s still perfectly good wool. Try to weave a tapestry made out of wool with a few strands of barbed wire thrown in for good measure and you end up with a nightmare: not so much “grace in many facets and colors” as blood, running red: God crucified, wearing a crown of thorns twisted together and shoved down onto his head by human hands.
No: I think the best thing we can do with evil is not to pretend that God weaves it into his/her purposes but to acknowledge that evil exists outside of God’s purposes, that as a friend of mine once remarked, the most evil thing about evil is that it has no purpose. Oh, how we want it to have a purpose: how we want to bring meaning out of meaninglessness!
But the truth, the reality we have to learn to live with, I think, is that God is crippled by evil: think Superman and kryptonite and we’ll begin to get the picture. Crippled but not crushed: and that’s where hope begins to emerge. We want an almighty God who could make everything right but doesn’t and his/her mysteries are too deep for us to fathom; but what we’ve got is a God in whom we live and move and have our being and for whom evil is a cancerous growth which s/he calls on us to work with her/him to destroy.
So, at least, it seems to me. Of course, I could be wrong.