MARY KASSIAN ON THE SHACK

I had not intended to post any more on The Shack. However, the following article approaches the book from a different perspective that should not be neglected. The emphases are mine. ~jb

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood — www.cbmw.org

Re-imagining God in the Shack

Mary Kassian
April 17, 2009

Summary: Mary Kassian is a member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.  Mary is also the founder of Girls Gone Wise, an award winning author, internationally renowned speaker, and distinguished professor of Women’s Studies at Southern Baptist Seminary.

The book “The Shack” has had a significant impact on the culture and the church. This good cautionary post originally appeared on Mary’s website marykassian.com April 6th, 2009. We reproduce it here with permission and gratitude.

If you would like to read other careful reviews of “The Shack” consider those by Dr. R. Albert Mohler and by Tim Challies.

This week, Christians around the world will commemorate Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It was at a Maundy Thursday service at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, in 1984, that a four-foot bronze statue of Jesus on the cross was unveiled. But to the shock of the congregation, the image of Christ on the cross was, in fact, an image of Christa. It portrayed Christ as a woman, complete with undraped breasts and rounded hips.

Betty Friedan, the main force behind modern day feminism, predicted that the question of the eighties would be: “Is God HE?” The Christa sculpture was the liberal church’s response to the question. And although Evangelical Christians have been much slower to consider female gendered God imagery, the recent phenomenon of the multi-million best-seller, “The Shack,” indicates that Evangelicals, too, are succumbing to the feminist pressure to image God in feminine ways. It’s a scenario that I predicted almost 25 years ago.

If you haven’t read it yet, and are amongst the un-Shacked evangelical minority, here’s the story in a nutshell.  Mack’s  youngest daughter Missy is kidnapped and murdered in a remote mountain shack by a serial slime, called the Daisy Bug Killer.  Mack goes through a denial-grief-anger-bitterness cycle until he receives a letter in his mailbox from God who tells him to go back to the shack to confront his point of pain and suffering.  When Mack gets to the shack he blacks out and awakens to find himself in a cabin complete with a manifestation of the Godhead.  But this is no ordinary Godhead.

God the Father, called “Papa,” is a She.  An Aunt Jemima pancake cooking Mother. Think Whoopee Goldberg in an apron. And Sarayu, the Holy Spirit with an Assyrian name, is a wispy, ethereal female. Think life-sized Tinkerbell emitting rainbows and sparkles.  Jesus is a human “male” – the one the three members of the Godhead collaboratively spoke into existence as the Son of God (umm…  go figure).  Then, in a bizarre twist that defies the orthodox image of the pre-incarnate Christ, another woman, “Sophia” appears as the divine personification of God’s wisdom.  And in the end, Papa contributes to the gender-bent confusing mess by setting aside his/her female cross dressing persona for a slightly more familiar masculine one- a grey haired man with a hip ponytail.

Forgiveness and healing from pain is a valid biblical motif – one to which I am profoundly committed.  But the way we heal is by running toward the God of the Bible, not by killing off or altering the parts of his character that we find politically incorrect. Not by coming up with an image of a God that is more palatable to our modern-day sensibilities. Not by altering God-revealed truth about the Trinity. Not by thinking we need to “help” God with his image. Over the years, I’ve witnessed thousands of women come to a place of healing and wholeness through the redeeming power of the unvarnished foolishness of the gospel.

The Shack contains terribly wrong concepts about God. Plain and simple. If you think it doesn’t, then you’re well on your way to accepting the image of the Christa on the cross.  In a few years, you’ll be hanging her up in your church. I don’t think I’m overstating the case. In my book I’ve carefully documented the way it happened in mainline churches. The arguments used to justify their feminist Christa are the same ones the Shack uses to justify its feminized version of God. In essence, there’s no difference between the artistic image of a feminized Jesus (a.k.a. “Sophia”) hanging on a cross and the artistic image of a feminized Aunt Jemima Papa god in a book.  If the latter doesn’t offend you, then the former really shouldn’t.

I’ve had good friends tell me that I’m missing the point of the Shack. Maybe I am. But maybe, just maybe, they are. Maybe they are getting caught up in the emotion of a heart-wrenching story and are failing to notice the horrendous theology that under girds it.  The authors claim that “at its core the book is one long Bible Study.” This isn’t an ordinary story book. It’s a book that seeks to transform people’s ideas about God. The fiction is merely a vehicle for the theology.

How we image God matters. So the image of God the book presents matters. It matters a great deal.  I seem to recall that God wasn’t terribly amused when his people imaged him in the wrong way, as a golden calf. If you’re not convinced that we should refrain from imaging God as female, and are interested in understanding more about the feminist theology rampant in the Shack, check into my book, The Feminist Mistake. If you take the time to understand the impact that feminism has had on society and church, then maybe you’ll understand my distaste for the Shack’s feminine god rendition.

When it comes down to it, my primary interest is not to engage in a debate about the merits of the Shack. It’s OK if you liked the book. There are some good messages in it, and parts that I liked very much.  And it’s apparently helped people in some significant ways. So that’s the good part. But I do want you to think about the false gender-blended image of God this book insidiously presents. And I do want you to base your thinking about God and masculinity and femininity on Scripture, and not on the spirit of this age. The thing that bothers me the most about the Shack is that it wraps destructive ideas up in an appealing package and feeds it to people who have neither the discernment nor the desire to carefully separate truth from error. Most Shackites don’t have a clue about the magnitude of the implications of messing with Trinitarian imagery.

Here’s the thing.  In the Old Testament, God instructed his people to reject female goddess images and images of God as a bi-sexual or a dual-sexual Baal/Ashtoreth-type collaboration. God hated this imagery so much that he had his people destroy it and all those who promoted it. The New Testament Church also fought hard against teachings that sought to incorporate female images of God alongside the male images – the Gnostic heresy, in particular. And now, it seems that the same ideas are knocking once again…. and many are throwing the Church doors wide open and welcoming them in.

What’s the big deal? Why can’t we image God as female? The main reason is that God defines who God is and how we are to image him and relate to him. God has chosen to reveal himself with male imagery.  Father is HE. Son is HE. Holy Spirit is HE. That’s not to say that God is male.  He encompasses everything that is good about masculinity and femininity. But that doesn’t mean that we have the liberty to think or refer to him as female. That’s crossing a line we have no right to cross.

The gender imagery that God has given us is highly important. It reflects critical truths about the nature of the Trinity. Calling him “she” violates his character and important imagery about the nature of our relationship to him. As C.S. Lewis observes,

Common sense, disregarding the discomfort, or even the horror, which the idea of turning all our theological language into the feminine gender arouses in most Christians, will ask “Why not? Since God is in fact not a biological being and has no sex, what can it matter whether we say He or She, Father or Mother, Son or Daughter?”

But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument …  against Christianity. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery. Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. And as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life… [But] one of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take the living and semitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures… [God images himself as masculine because]…we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him.

…The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.

(Quotes from C.S. Lewis Essays Notes on the Way and That Hideous Strength.)

There’s a whole lot more to be said about the importance of accurate gender imagery and the importance of honoring and preserving masculine imagery for God. But I’ll leave it at that for now. Hopefully this post has alerted you to some popular false ways of thinking that are both insidious and dangerous.  The nearly universal frothing of the Christian community over the Shack shows me how very much the philosophy of feminism has influenced even the Evangelical church.

 

INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM YOUNG

Tim Challies tipped us off to this interview:

Interview with William Young
Here is an interview with The Shack author William Young. In it he flatly denies the substitutionary atonement (which was one of the questions many people had as they read the book).

THE SHACK: GOOD NEWS OR BAD STORY?

The powerful emotional punch that The Shack carries disguises some highly questionable spiritual “poison.” In this review, Dan Hames systematically, thoroughly, and fairly dissects the book:

William P. Young’s novel The Shack has enjoyed enormous success all over the world, has garnered both high praise and heavy criticism.  A great deal has already been said and written about its assumptions, theology, and the possible agendas behind its authoring.  For this reason, there’s little point in rehearsing the premise, plot, and characters, and we can proceed simply to examine the contents of the book themselves.

Young is a seminary educated ex-minister of a Christian denomination in Canada, and the theology we find in The Shack is no accident: Young is clearly writing with an agenda.  The Shack is plainly designed to teach spiritual lessons, and especially to challenge the assumptions of Christian readers.  In nature, then, the book is comparable to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), or Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian (2001), which McLaren calls ‘narrative theology’: fiction with a didactic purpose.  This means that in assessing The Shack we should not arbitrarily make a black and white distinction between a systematic theology and a novel.  Of course we should read The Shack for what it is, but also be aware that is doing far more than simply telling a moving story.  

So The Shack is definitely a novel, but it is definitely designed to teach us spiritual lessons and challenge our theological understanding.  It aims to do this in two main areas: the being of God (the doctrine of the Trinity), and the problem of suffering (notably the justice and goodness of God).  

God the Trinity

Mack meets God in the shack, and it is interesting that he meets three physical, visible persons.  For some readers, the idea of three distinct persons might be difficult to swallow but it has to be admitted that this is preferable to Mack meeting a bearded old man!  Young vividly portrays the three as having deep relationships of love, and some passages depicting this are very welcome (his first meeting half-way through chapter 5, for example, is especially warm and creative).  As the story progresses however, the problems that emerge around The Shack’s doctrine of God are less tri-theistic, and tend more towards a kind of inferred pantheism (especially in sections about the Holy Spirit).  With regard to the unity of the three persons, Young seems to fall into modalism.   In the depictions of the three persons of the Trinity, there are a number of points worth exploring.

The Father

The most immediate detail which consistently causes some surprise is that the Father is portrayed as an African-American woman of generous proportions.  This is not quite equal to the SCM poster, ‘Does God exist?  If so what is she like?’ (essentially a feminist polemic); though it is a deliberately shocking and subversive move.  Papa appears to bear close relation of The Oracle in The Matrix. The appearance of a homely African-American woman in her kitchen to surprise Neo is mirrored almost exactly by Mack’s first meeting with Papa.  Like The Oracle, Papa’s explanations of God, reality, and suffering appear to owe more to philosophical slights of hand and Eastern mysticism than the Biblical affirmations to which Christians normally turn.

‘Papa’ explains that neither maleness nor femaleness are essential to ‘her’ being, and that ‘her’ appearing as either is simply for the sake of Mack’s own understanding (p. 93), hence Papa later appears to Mack as a man for a time in which he needs a father (p. 218).  This is quite problematic, since the assertion that the Father is genderless is really a philosophical one rather than a biblical one.  As much as ‘maleness’ may fashionably be seen as a creaturely thing, or a social construct, the fact is that the Father has revealed himself fundamentally as ‘Father’ rather than as ‘Mother’ or ‘Ground of all Being’.  Young apparently anticipates the objection, and has Papa answering that objection thus,

‘… there are many reasons for that [revealing myself as Father], and some of them go very deep.  Let me say for now that we knew once the Creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering.’ (p. 94)

This is yet more disturbing, as it seems to suggest that the Father is only Father ‘for us’ and since the Fall, rather than in any final sense.  There is no hint throughout the book that Papa is in any way a Father to Jesus (nor even a Mother!).  The fatherhood of Papa is purely functional, and it speaks nothing of the real person which lies underneath the shifting shape, nor of the Father’s eternal relation to the Son, which the Bible presents as the source of the Creation itself.

On the surface, The Shack seems keen to wrestle with the doctrine of the Trinity but is consistently both confused and confusing.  While it is apparently keen to display the three in loving unity for which it is to be commended, it sadly falls into the most common philosophical traps of squashing the members of the Godhead into one.  On p. 99, Papa is shown ‘enjoying herself, all by herself’ and taking pleasure in ‘Me being ‘Me’ as if Papa in herself is the entirety of the Godhead, even though Jesus and Sarayu are not present.  We would want to affirm that biblically the Father’s pleasure is in his Son rather than in himself (Isaiah 42:1-9, Mark 1:11), and while we may talk about God being ‘happy in himself’ before the creation, this is a shorthand for speaking about the fellowship of the Trinity rather than an individual self-acceptance or self-absorption (John 17:24).  Young’s contentment with a ‘mathematical’ oneness is really a slip into modalism, despite the presence of three persons in the shack.

An historic form of modalism is expressed clearly when, on a number of occasions, there is the suggestion that the Father was Incarnate with the Son.  The most significant of which is on p. 99, and actually includes an Incarnation of the Holy Spirit.

‘When we three spoke ourselves into human existence as the Son of God, we became fully human.  We chose to embrace all the limitations this entailed.  Even though we have always been present in this created universe, we now became flesh and blood.’  (cf. p. 165, 201)

This passage should cause us to cringe at the very least, as it is such a bizarre take on the nature of God and the Incarnation.  The gospel itself is under threat if we maintain that the ‘Son of God’ is not an eternally distinct person from the Father, in a relationship inherent in the Godhead; moreover to suggest that it was not only the Son, but also the Father (and Spirit) who were Incarnate is to inexplicably ignore the plain reading of scripture.  This leads Young to tell us that Papa, the Father, was also crucified.  Mack touches the scars on her wrists (p. 95), and Papa says on p. 96 of the cross, ‘We were there together.’ (emphasis in the original). 

Young appears to forward the notion of a Trinitarian crucifixion to counter Mack’s understanding of Christ’s cry of dereliction, which has ‘haunted’ him – presumably pained by the prospect of the Father abandoning Jesus.  Papa tells Mack that ‘no matter what he [Jesus] felt at that moment, I never left him.’ (emphasis in the original).  As at many points throughout the book, Young gets us to deconstruct our understanding of scripture (in this case that the Son bore the Father’s wrath against sin on the cross), but fails to give us an alternative interpretation.  What is really happening in Matthew 27:46 on Young’s account?  We are left in the dark somewhat, and there is a sense that Young sees a secret meaning ‘behind’ the obvious reading of the text.  The Father is also spoken of as being on the cross, suffering with the Son on p. 103 and p. 164.  Some readers might object, saying that this is surely a creative attempt to show that atonement was a Trinitarian work; yet the stress on Papa’s scars is too difficult to brush aside in this way.  Young is telling us that Papa was nailed to the cross with Jesus.  

The teaching that the Father was Incarnate and crucified was noted in the third century and called Patripassionism, based on a single-person God who was expressed in three different ‘modes’.  We should be clear that simply by depicting Papa, Jesus and Sarayu conversing with Mack in the shack, he in no way vindicates himself from this charge.  It is a cause for some considerable sadness that Young would incorporate this teaching into his book, whether through ignorance or on purpose, perhaps assuming the defence that a work of fiction need not be held to account theologically.  There is a distinction to be made between the theological imagery of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and the straightforward account that Young offers here.  There is a gulf between Lewis’ purpose in making Aslan a ‘Christ figure’ and Young’s purpose in putting words into the mouths of the divine persons!  While all illustrations and allegories will fail eventually (and at this point will depart from the theological reality), Young’s explicitly didactic purpose in The Shack calls for great theological rigor and responsibility.  Indeed, to write the Father, Son and Holy Spirit into a novel is perhaps a questionable move at the outset.  At the very least, if he had wanted to express the Trinitarian nature of the atonement creatively, surely there were ways open to do this that would avoid leading undiscerning readers to warm to historic heresies.  

Finally on the presentation of the Father, there is another of Young’s deconstructions of doctrine surrounding sin and the wrath of God.  On p. 119-120, Mack questions Papa about ‘spilling out great bowls of wrath and throwing people into a burning lake of fire’ (in the Old Testament) and whether Papa enjoys this.  Young has Papa answer rather alarmingly, ‘I am not who you think I am, Mackenzie.  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.’  While Mack’s question reflects a common misunderstanding of the Bible’s teaching about God’s judgement (something Young is right to question), again there is no different reading offered for those narrative passages which speak of God’s anger.  Instead, the idea of sin’s offence to God and its resulting penalty is simply torn down.  If Young is hoping to liberate his readers from counterfeit conceptions of a capricious and unreasonable judge, why does he feel the need to cut-out the clear witness of the Bible on the issue?  The reason is that Young is not appealing to the Bible at all, because of his commitment to a universalism which teaches the final salvation of everybody through Christ, reflected in Papa’s comment to Mack on p. 127 that evil is not going to be ‘justified’ but ‘redeemed’, and on p. 225 ‘In Jesus, I have forgiven all humans for their sins against me, but only some choose relationship.’  As James B. De Young points out,

‘Mack acknowledges that he believes that God “will condemn most to an eternity of torment, away from his presence and apart from his love.” But the story proceeds to show that Mack is wrong in believing this!’

While this might sound like good news, it is really no good news at all since The Shack’s picture of God is of the one who has forgiven us, but done nothing to pursue us.  It is our job to seek relationship with him.  The biblical good news is that Jesus seeks out his lost sheep, puts it on his shoulders, and carries it home.  In the gospel, the Lord comes looking for us, since in our sinfulness we would never go searching for him.

Young’s universalism underpins the book, expressing his view that nobody will be judged for sin on the last day, and that amongst God’s attributes love will always conquer justice.  This means all discussions of sin, hell, and the cross are much skewed throughout the novel.  I believe that promoting this position is one of Young’s primary goals in publishing The Shack.

Jesus Christ

The person of Jesus is imaginatively and attractively presented as a keen woodworker, a lover of nature, and the one with whom Mack feels the greatest affinity.  There are some enjoyable passages as Jesus enjoys the creation, and shows delight in relating to Mack.  Yet here too, there are some grounds for grave concern.  These revolve mainly around the nature of Christ as both man and God.  Papa explains in conversation with Mack

‘Jesus is fully human. Although he is also fully God, he has never drawn upon his nature as God to do anything. He has only lived out of his relationship with me, living in the very same manner that I desire to be in relationship with every human being. He is just the first to do it to the uttermost—the first to absolutely trust my life within him, the first to believe in my love and my goodness without regard for appearance or consequence.’ ‘So, when he healed the blind?’
‘He did so as a dependent, limited human being trusting in my life and power to be at work within him and through him. Jesus, as a human being, had no power within himself to heal anyone.’ (p. 99-100)

Young might call on scriptures like John 5:19 to support his case (‘I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.’) but this is to overlook the fact that John is describing Jesus’ eternal divine life, not explaining the mechanics of the Incarnation.  What develops is picture of the Son being only human and never acting as God during the incarnation, but only relying on the Father for all he needs to do.  The rest of John 5 clearly contradicts this: the Son receives life ‘in himself’ from the Father (v. 26) to give to his people.  Life really belongs to Jesus, and it is his to give, and because of his complete divinity it is through Jesus that we can truly know the Father (Matthew 11:27).  Jesus of Nazareth is not merely a human vessel relying on the power of God, or else he can never be anything more than a revelation of a true human being.  The Bible shows that he is the perfect revelation of God, and those who do not honour him as such fail to honour the Father (John 5:23).  Cyril of Alexandria’s famous phrase was that ‘God walked the streets of Nazareth’.  This is conspicuously absent from The Shack’s Christology.

Later, p. 145 exposes another unusual approach to Christ.  Young has Jesus saying,

‘Have you noticed that even though you call me Lord and King, I have never really acted in that capacity with you?  I’ve never taken control of your choices or forced you to do anything…’

The obvious concern is that many people struggle with Christ’s Lordship and Kingship, and Young wants to rescue Jesus from being portrayed as a cruel master.  But if we did call Jesus Lord and King does this necessarily mean he would be forcing the hands of his subjects?  Again, Young seems to want to challenge orthodox biblical interpretation but is agonizingly vague about what he is really trying to prove.  It is of course a straw man: Christ is Lord and King- and exalted to the highest place with the Name above every name!- but that is never biblically linked to tyranny or suppression for his people.   If Young wants simply to encourage his readers to think carefully about how Christ exercises his Lordship, why does he leave open the possibility of scrapping the concept altogether?  Later we will return to his obvious difficulty with authority.

The Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit is given the name ‘Sarayu’ (wind) and depicted as a small Asian lady with a shimmering appearance that makes it easier to see her when you are not looking directly at her.  This is an effective and creative way of expressing the Spirit’s self-effacing work of glorifying Christ (John 16:13-14).  She is the most mysterious of the three in the shack and into her mouth is put some of Young’s most telling rhetoric.  She is defined by Papa on p. 110 as follows, ‘She is Creativity; she is Action; she is the Breathing of Life; she is much more. She is my Spirit.’ (emphasis in the original).  This is an interesting on account of its lack of a solid personhood for the Spirit.

The identity of the Holy Spirit as a distinct person in the Godhead is an important thing to preserve.  Jesus carries-out his ministry anointed by the Spirit (Isaiah 42:1, 48:16, 61:1; Psalm 2:2; Luke 3:22; Acts 10:38), the Holy Spirit refers to himself as ‘I’ in Acts 13:2, Romans 8:16 tells us that the Spirit testifies with our spirits, Hebrews 9:14 calls Him ‘the eternal Spirit’.  Significantly, Jesus tells the disciples to baptise in the Spirit’s name along with his own and His Father’s in Matthew 28.  Defining the Spirit as an impersonal force flies in the face of scripture, and even though Sarayu is given a physical form, name, and personality, the problem stands.

This trend continues, and is expanded somewhat on p. 204 when Sarayu speaks about herself, Papa, and Jesus,

‘I am…  I am a verb.  I am that I am.  I will be who I will be.  I am a verb!  I am alive, dynamic, ever active, and moving.  I am a being verb… my very essence is a verb.’

To say that ‘God is a verb’ is not a new idea, and find its roots in Kabbalah and other mysticism.  It is strange that Young wants to borrow from those who maintain that ‘the divine’ is a force, or a presence in everything, yet he clearly steers toward this again on p. 198 when Sarayu tells Mack,

‘You might see me in a piece of art, or music, or silence, or through people, or in Creation, or in your joy and sorrow.’

This is most clearly seen on p. 112 :

‘God, who is the ground of all being, dwells in, around, and through all things- ultimately emerging as the read- and any appearances that mask that reality will fall away.’

The speaker is Jesus, and he is talking about the Father (in this instance referred to as ‘Elousia’- a composite of the Hebrew El (God) and the Greek ousia (being)).  

Young’s depiction of the Holy Spirit initially, and the whole of the Godhead subsequently, reveals that far from an imaginative fictional work on the personal triune God of the Bible, The Shack seems to meditate instead on a Unitarian/pantheistic deity which presents itself as ‘Father’, ‘Son’, and ‘Spirit’ for the benefit of human beings’ understanding.  While the Trinity is often regarded as a difficult doctrine to comprehend, the three persons of the Godhead are the centre of Christianity’s good news as they act together for our salvation.  It is reason for genuine grief that this doctrine is so distorted in a story that has proved so popular around the world.

Sophia

It is fascinating that Mack meets a fourth person; one whom the other three are excited for him to meet.  She is Sophia the embodied wisdom of God, and it is with her in the absolutely crucial chapter 11 that Mack’s most serious business is done.  It is this chapter that deals with the issue of judgment (which I believe to be Young’s primary bone of contention in the book), and this chapter in which Mack makes the biggest leap in terms of his ‘recovery’ by seeing Missy.  This is bizarre, since it means that more power is given to Sophia to change Mack than the three members of the Trinity.  In fact the three seem simply to facilitate his visit to Sophia by making him pancakes and coffee, walking him to her cave, and preparing him for his visit to her!

Sophia’s presence as a ‘fourth person’ is both disturbing and perplexing, and is perhaps a further hint at the Unitarian conception of God that apparently characterises The Shack.  That a fourth person, ‘Wisdom’, does the bulk of God’s work is perhaps a demonstration of a philosophical commitment to God being primarily a divine force of knowledge rather than a communion of three distinct persons.  Surely no creative prerogative is licence enough to add persons to the Godhead!

What’s going on underneath?

The driving concerns behind Young’s underlying theology manifest themselves briefly at certain points.  Sarayu’s discourse on ‘paradigms, perceptions, and emotions’ on p. 197, Jesus’ reflections on power and sin on p. 147-8, and Sarayu’s denial of hierarchy within the Trinity on p. 122, exude the feel of having  been lifted from Michel Foucault rather than the Bible.  There is a constant suspicion of authority and power for this reason that underpins the book; especially a latent cynicism about Christianity as historically expressed.  Among the objects of scarcely concealed scorn are, church, ‘… Sunday hymns and prayers weren’t cutting it anymore, if they ever really had’,  (p. 66), theological education ‘None of his old seminary training was helping in the least.’ (p. 91), doctrine, ‘That came as a shock to Mack’s religious system’ (p. 100), and biblical interpretation ‘Mackenzie, religion is about having all the right answers… there are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of smart things from their brain because they have been told what the right answers are, but they don’t know me at all.  So really, how can their answers be right even if they are right?’ (p. 198)   Young’s evident problem with authority is of course partly warranted.  Fallen human beings make imperfect fathers and ‘lords’, we abuse our power and debase the duty we are given to mirror God’s authority over the universe.  Yet The Shack’s outright rejection of authority (whether biblical or ecclesial), especially that of Christ as Lord and King is too far.  It is particularly disturbing since the gospel relies on the grace of God being bestowed by him as ruler of the universe, and on Christ being ascended to the Father’s right hand for the security of the believer.  To deny the essentially supernal nature of the gospel is to rob it of all grace.  The love of Jesus in The Shack is the love of a peer not of a King, and far from being unmerited; it is almost as if Mack’s pain has earned it.

One does not have to read for very long online about William P. Young to find that these issues are ones that he has struggled with personally, leaving the church in which he was a minister.  So it is clear that The Shack is in some sense autobiographical, certainly reactionary, and to a degree polemical.  It is important, then, that we do not see The Shack as a creative work in a vacuum.  Instead, I think it is demonstrable that Young’s project is to deconstruct readers’ conceptions of God and salvation, leaving them to rebuild the picture however they like.   There is a clear reliance on theology from experience rather than the revelation of an external Word, a clear example is on p. 126,

‘Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved.  Because you do not know that I love you, you cannot trust me.’ (emphasis in the original).

Humanly speaking, trust may be generated by relationship- but we are to know God is trustworthy simply because he says he is (Romans 3:4).  Our experience confirms this, but is not fundamental in us knowing it.  In The Shack there is a clear preference for experience over revelation which is potentially perilous for Christian assurance.  Our perception of suffering and pain in our lives will sometimes lead us to believe that God is untrustworthy: it can only be his external promise that will sustain our faith at these times. 

Why portray the Father as a lady called ‘Papa’, or call the Spirit ‘Sarayu?  Why arouse doubt and dislike over parts of scripture without appropriate apologetic?  The answer is simple: because external revelation is not the focus, internal experience is.  Why ignore scripture’s teaching about the fate of unbelievers and root for a universal salvation?  It is because external revelation isn’t the authority, but rather personal preference.
 

The problem of suffering

While the doctrines of God and salvation permeate the book and their expression has required a thorough critique, the book is really about the problem of suffering.  It is a story of Mack coming to terms with childhood abuse from his father, his rash retaliation in poisoning him, his loss of Missy, and the misappropriated guilt of Kate.  While The Shack name-checks forgiveness, the cross of Christ, and the plan of God, I feel that it is ultimately unconvincing in the answer it offers to suffering and evil.  The fundamental reason for this is that The Shack is a statement of Young’s universalism.  Throughout the book, love is seen as the attribute of God’s character that will consistently conquer the others, especially his justice- nobody it seems will finally face the justice and wrath of the Father.  As we have seen, Young is certainly clear that Christ did not do so on the cross.  

Missy’s abduction, rape, and murder are horrific, yet the book seems to give only very shallow attention and answers – many readers have commented that its treatment of the loss of a child is in fact remarkably glib.  While the idea of a universal reconciliation to God and loved ones is offered as ‘hope’ for Mack and for readers, I cannot help but feel the book actually makes light of the suffering of Missy.  It does the same for Mack’s abuse from his father, and their outlandish cosmic reunion in chapter 15 is dealt with in such a fleeting manner that I thought I had missed a few pages!  There is little account given of the Fall as the root cause of murder and rape, and greater weight is placed on our free will as humans to choose what God would not.  Young does not show God as the one who will one day deal with sin and evil, so much as the one who can weave it into a tapestry that will in the end be beautiful.

‘…there are millions of reasons to allow pain and hurt and suffering rather than to eradicate them, but most of those reasons can only be understood within each person’s story…  Your choices are also not stronger than my purposes, and I will use every choice you make for the ultimate good and the most loving outcome.’ (p. 125)

I believe that such thin and cursory treatments of suffering, justice, and forgiveness are inevitable for a theology so broken and impoverished as Young’s universalism.

For orthodox Christianity, the cross is the key to understanding both the love and justice of God, since it is here that God shows most clearly his determination to punish and destroy sin, and simultaneously his love in providing reconciliation through faith in Christ’s sacrifice.  Young, in contrast, portrays the cross as a demonstration of God’s love and sympathy as a co-sufferer.  While it is true that Christ’s sufferings enabled him to be a ‘faithful and merciful High Priest’ sympathising with our weaknesses (Hebrews 2), in The Shack the cross cannot be, and is not advanced as the final answer to suffering and injustice.  Instead, we are met with swathes of pantheistic hand waving, which simply raise more questions, and obscure the reality of future judgment, the nature of sin and salvation, and the need for faith.

Conclusion

Despite my initial open-mindedness to The Shack, and my determination to read and review it charitably, I conclude my thinking over its contents feeling very disturbed.  I began by thinking it may have been a good-hearted book which made some innocent (if serious) missteps, but having carefully considered it I have changed my mind.  Sadly I can see only a partially-disguised tract for a Unitarian brand of universalism, decorated with some post-structural philosophy and nods to Eastern mysticism.  In the end, The Shack is hardly a Christian book at all.

God the Trinity is squashed into a monolithic omnipresent ‘verb’, the nature of Christ is divided, and his cross is emptied of all meaning.  Salvation, therefore, is nothing to do with personal trust in Jesus but is made automatic for all.  The answer to the evil and pain in the world is not the kind justice of God demonstrated on the cross, but rather the hope that God may continually work our free choices into a better future.  

The true good news that the Bible gives us for comfort in our suffering is more than the assurance that God is good, or that things will work out in the end.  It is even more than the consolation that Jesus suffered with us.  It is that Jesus suffered for us on the cross, bearing the sin of humanity and conquering the evil that has polluted us and the universe.  It is the great promise of the gospel that those who trust that their sin has been paid for by Christ can be united to him, knowing the fellowship of the Trinity eternally in a renewed and cleansed cosmos.  In this story, God truly does come to dwell with his people in his creation – not to brew coffee, but to wipe away their tears, to banish death, and put an end to pain.  The one who ‘makes all things new’ is the very same Lamb who was slain for the sin of the world, and who is the beginning and end of all things, the one to whom the faithful are united forever (Revelation 21:1-8).  It is a far better story, and far better news than the impotent god of The Shack.

Some Possible Questions

Surely you’re not saying it’s all bad?

It is true to say that a number of the passages in the book are warm and attractive, expressing creatively at least some of the truth about God’s love for the world and the reality of following Christ.  However, on balance, I’d say that the book is extremely unhelpful and even dangerous.  This is discerned not only in what it says, but what it misses out, and its general tone.  I don’t think I could in good conscience recommend it to somebody experiencing real suffering.

Calm down!  It’s only a novel!

One objection is that The Shack is first and foremost a novel and should be treated as such.  On one level, this is true.  The vast majority of the book is dialogue, and it does not set-out to define its terms carefully, walk through doctrine, and interpret scripture as a non-fiction book might, since that is not usually the shape of a conversation.  

The Shack is consistently being read and marketed as one that changes readers’ perception of God, and the Christian life.  William P. Young’s own website (www.windrumours.com) bears an advert for the book with the title, ‘God as you’ve never seen him before’ which is clearly a supposed benefit of reading The Shack.  Many readers have said that the book has reduced them to tears as they’ve reached a new place in their relationship with God.  One writes on Young’s website,

I couldn’t put it down.  My heart soared at every turn of the page.  I wept with agreement, excitement, hope, joy, sorrow, and beauty in your description of Papa.  I know Him as you described and I love him so.  Your book is a [sic] overwhelming and very accurate (in my opinion and knowledge of what I know of our Daddy).

Not only are readers crediting The Shack with transforming their spiritual life, but it is fascinating to see that they are also using its language and names for God, and incorporating these into their own discipleship.  Some readers even appear to confuse the story with reality,

Dear sir, I read your book, The Shack, and I absolutely LOVED it! It was increadible [sic]. It changed me. Thank you, thank you for allowing God to work through you and Mack to write this book. It touched me in a way I have never allowed anyone to touch me before. Tell Mack thank you for being willing to tell you his story, I appreciate it. And thank YOU for writing it. God bless you.

As much as this is determinedly a book of fiction, an overwhelming majority of readers – and advertisers- are claiming that this book alters one’s spiritual life upon reading.

An author cannot escape the requirements of biblical faithfulness and theological responsibility by pleading ‘It’s fiction!’  Just as a child who is told off for swearing at home will not get away with it by claiming they were quoting a film.  There’s a naïveté about thinking in this way that elevates the purity of artistic expression to the level of speaking the truth, which is perhaps a sign of the relativism that’s so much abroad in the late-modern West.  The fact is that in our artistic and creative expressions of Christian devotion, we are not free to conceive of God and his truth in our own terms- least of all terms that contradict his own self-revelation- no matter what our personal experience may leads us to believe.  The fact is that all things are to be judged by the scriptures, whether a chat in the pub, a painting, a sermon or a novel.

But I enjoyed it- it helped me, and I know others it’s helped

I think it would be important to think carefully about what you mean when you say the book has ‘helped’ you.  Has it shown you that God is three persons who relate to one another in love?  If so, I wonder why this was new to you.  There are many books about the Trinity that do a far better job than The Shack.   Has it encouraged you that God loves you unconditionally and is with you in life’s troubles?  If so, I wonder why you needed The Shack to point this out to you as again, there are plenty books that remain faithful to the Bible in teaching this.  

Fundamentally, I think The Shack has a certain poignancy and punch that makes its readers feel emotionally affected; but its comforts are not real, its promises are vague, and it finally gives no satisfying answer to the problem of suffering.  I would not recommend it to anybody to help them through difficult times.

Are there alternatives to The Shack?

Yes!  Here are some recommendations.

The issue at the heart of the book is really suffering, and our assurance that God is with us and for us in it. Sadly, since Young’s universalism means he has no theology of judgment, the cross has no real part to play in his answer to suffering and evil in the world.  So a good place to start would be with an understanding of the cross.  Try Mark Meynell’s Cross Examined, or this article from Theology Network: Theology of the Cross: Subversive Theology for a Postmodern World? by Graham Tomlin.

The sovereignty of God and his loving care over the creation is a central issue.  Try this article from Theology Network: An Introduction to Sovereignty.

If you’d like to think about the Trinity, try Tim Chester’s Delighting in the Trinity, or listen to Mike Reeves’ series of talks on Theology Network:.

If you’re looking for a book of comfort, for a dose of warm and big-hearted gospel medicine: Richard Sibbes’ The Bruised Reed is matchless.  You may find reading aloud will help you with the language.

And as a good balance to The Shack, the book of Job deals with a man who– like Mack– suffers greatly, is faced with dead religion and pat answers, but encounters God and emerges healed and changed.  Its answers are vastly different to Young’s.

Explore posts in the same categories: Books, Reviews

HT: Allsufficient Grace

Paul Washer on the Invitation and Decisional Regeneration

Biblical Thoughts on the Election Aftermath

James White presents an apologist’s viewpoint on the present state of our culture and our approach to it, as well as what the primary content of our prayers for Obama should be:

By Schism Rent Asunder, By Heresy Oppressed….

By David & Tim Bayly on Preaching

(Tim: This by Mark Chambers, although not the title. Incidentally, yesterday I received an e-mail from a longtime member of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan who estimated the number of Redeemer’s members who voted for Barack Obama was fifty percent.) There is nothing particularly unusual about the picture above; nothing fantastic or different. It is just the result and remains of the  typical abortion;  a bit of messy refuse to be discarded after the useful cells have been harvested. At least it is not an entire waste, we can be thankful for that after all. The decapitation is interesting. The heads of fetuses, being too large for the vacuum tube must be pulverized to facilitate removal. Similar to certain seed pods that find their way into my garage that are too large for the shop vac I must take steps to reduce the size of them in order to suck them up. I find that stepping on them works quite well, and it is only a minor annoyance. Not nearly so complicated as finding the obstacle via ultrasound in order to crush it with forceps. But doctors are adept at accomplishing the difficult and we must salute them… What admirable skills they have. How kind they are to minimize the trauma to the poor woman. This growth has caused enough pain already and there is no reason to make such inconveniences worse than they need be. Quick, easy and painless is the key here. One should not be punished for forgetting condoms or being carried away in the heat of the moment. Who can control such things? Careers must not be affected. Plans shouldn’t have to be changed. Lives must not be put on hold. We must help the poor victims if even they are victims of their own improprieties. And so we praise men like Barak Obama who understand such things and help make these acts of kindness possible.  Let us extend to him the right hand of fellowship and call him brother. And let us cease our unreasonable and reprehensible criticisms of those Christians who are able to see beyond such trivial things to look toward the important issues of coal and ice caps and banks and homophobia. Anything else would be uncivilized. O beautiful for spacious skies…

A Lament for America

I could not agree more with the following post by Dan Phillip. You can find it at Biblical Christianity.

By popular demand, public and private, here it is. I wrote it early this morning. Today, a lament. Tomorrow or Monday, I hope to provide further theological reflection, and the start of stategerizing. Delicate (or guilty) souls may want to stay out of the blast zone. Perhaps you shouldn’t. And so…..If the title gives you the impression that this won’t be a happy-face, good-loser post, you are correct. Be warned. I’m in earnest. If you keep reading — which I seriously do not necessarily advise — you’ll have that same experience that, to my bafflement, keeps surprising people. That is, you’ll find that (oh, no!) I really meant everything I said.I’ve mulled and tossed what to write. Some of you are here to gloat and lecture, some just to observe, and some wanting comfort and encouragement. What do I have for you here? You’ll find some gallows humor, a wry comment or two. But the theme of this post could not be summarized as, “Ain’t life grand right now?”Wish I had that to give, at the moment. In due time, perhaps. I remember after the horrid election in which Bill Clinton first lied his way to the White House, Rush Limbaugh was very heartening. He observed that conservatism had actually won, because Clinton deceptively positioned himself to the right of Bush, Sr.

You could say that here, to a degree. Obama actually campaigned for cutting taxes and spending. It was a lie, of course, but McCain did not counter it effectively enough. Obama defeated McCain, and the perceived Bush legacy, and the recent GOP. Not conservatism, well and clearly and passionately articulated.

But anyone with two live neurons to rub together could have seen through The One’s charade. Obama’s mentors and allies are hardcore Marxists, socialists, racists. He marinated in anti-American, racist hatemongering for twenty years. His backers included the worst within America, and enemies outside America. It was all a paint-thin facade.

But, as David Wells has argued convincingly, people like paint. It’s all about image.

So what do I write for you today? I think of Jeremiah, looking at the ruin of his beloved nation. Did the prophet write a happy-face booklet about how glorious God’s sovereign providence always is? I don’t think so. There’s a reason that the 25th book in the Canon isn’t titled “Happy Giggles,” or “Jeremiah’s Jolly Jokes.”

There is, as Ecclesiastes 3:4 says, “a time to mourn.” If you love what America was, what it should be, and what men with a Biblical worldview crafted it to be, this begins such a time.

I’ll say one happy horizontal thing: I think it is a good thing that a black man won the presidency. It shows that America has long-since ceased being the country that Obama’s bitter, angry, self-absorbed wife imagined.

But most of us already knew that. It is a bad thing that that black man won. I actually think it may well cause long-term harm to other blacks’ presidential aspirations, which is a pity. Obama does not have the unsought blessing Bill Clinton had: he will not have robust opposition in Congress. So he may actually do many of the harmful, disastrous things he proposed. And future voters may, if unfairly, look even at totally-different black candidates and think, “Didn’t we try that already?”

So who’s in the Hall of Shame for this debacle? Too many to name. But here are a few.

Bush. I blame President Bush. Not for what the wingnuts blame him for; he was right about those things. History will view Bush as a visionary, amply-accomplished president.

But where W did miserably fail was as a politician. He did not learn from Bill Clinton, who got right the fact that he needed never to stop campaigning. Bush was like the anti-Clinton in that regard. W focused completely on governing, and did nothing about keeping the American people with him. Bush evidently thought results would speak for themselves, and people would figure things out. He was wrong.

Clinton always had instant-response squads, who overwhelmed all the media with unified, sharp, aggressive responses geared to make sure Clinton’s view always prevailed. Bush couldn’t be bothered. You can call it arrogance; I actually think it was misplaced modesty. But the net sum was that W left a disastrous political situation for his would-be successor.

Dick Cheney was an excellent VP (— you can tell that simply by the deranged sorts who hate him). But Cheney was never going to succeed Bush. So Bush should have replaced Cheney in his second term, and groomed a presidential replacement.

Bush was right in not being a slave to opinion polls; he was wrong in not trying to bring people along with him. As a consequence, McCain had two bad options. He could try to make up for eight years of Bush’s failure to defend himself in his campaign, which he wasn’t equipped to do. Or he could distance himself utterly from Bush, which McCain tried but found impossible to do.

And that’s largely Bush’s fault. It took down McCain, as well as GOP candidates for both houses. W’s refusal to defend himself cost others badly.

MSM. Light a candle of mourning for the mainstream media. Obama lied and deceived and hid, true; but he never could have gotten away with it if we’d had a vigilant, ethical, non-partisan press. However, the MSM acted not as the press, but as Obama’s press secretary.

The MSM kept the ugly and inconvenient truth out of the spotlight, diverted the public’s attention, ran interference, carried water for his lies, and served as Obama’s opposition research. Only a fool will trust them ever again. For that matter, only fools trusted them this time ’round.

An aside: I wonder how many Obama revelations will start seeing the light now? Or will they wait until after his first or second inauguration?

Voters. But of course that doesn’t give the electorate a pass. Thirty years ago? When there were only CBSABCNBC and The Timeses? Maybe. But now, alternative news and analysis sources are readily available. For now. Look for the new triumvirate to target a free press and all soapboxes, cyber and otherwise. Perhaps even pulpits. Think Canada.

Government reeducation camps. The government school system didn’t help, creating uneducated, uninformed, fact-starved glandlings, who mistake emoting for rational thought. These folks have been raised from toddlerhood on the state’s teat. The State is a kindly face embodied in Miss Parkins in pre-school; when you’re eighteen, you’ve long-since learned to see The State as your friend and guardian. As designed. And so you vote.

Quislings. But the most disgraceful of all are professedly Christian enablers.

[Last warning: this is going to be brutal.]

These are the hand-wringing, conflicted souls who just can’t figure out whether or not it’s a good thing to sweep aside thirty-five years of hard-fought, hard-won advances in the pro-life cause. Who just can’t agonize themselves into seeing that they have a clear-cut moral obligation to stand athwart the most remorselessly, unrepentantly vicious pro-death advocate ever seriously to seek the White House.

How wretched are such souls?

It’s like this. A man comes to attack your wife, or your child. You professed Christians who voted for Obama, you had every reason to know what that man was going to do. And your response was to toss him a knife, and tell him “Have at it, sport; I prayed about this, and I feel good about it. I’ll just stand over here being deep and conflicted and nuanced, mocking anyone who tries to stop you, and congratulating myself on my new friends who cheer you on.”

Your candidate was charismatic and confident. The people you wanted to accept you and think well of you swarmed after him. He was different, and novel, and exciting.

And when he said that his very first act in office would be to remove all legal restrictions against gassing Jews, and would compel taxpayers to pay for the gassing of Jews in foreign countries? Oh, well. It wasn’t as if you would be pulling the lever yourself, right? Besides (you tried to convince yourself), removing all restrictions on Jew-gassing would actually result in fewer Jews being gassed!

This is what you’ve done. Obama was evasive and inconsistent about a great many things. Not about this. About this, he was emphatic, and crystal-clear: “first act as President.”

And you knew it.

You Christians who did not vote or went third-party, you can tell yourselves you did otherwise. You didn’t allow the attacker to assault that helpless victim. No, not you. You drew a picture of a devastating raygun, and waved it at him vigorously, yelling “Zap! Zap!”, hoping he’d fall over.

Alas, he did not.

To both of you, I offer this: “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper,
but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy” (Proverbs 28:13).

You want to keep insisting that you did the right thing? Can’t help you. Won’t try. After January 20, you go to the dumpsters behind abortion clinics and explain to the sad, tragic, forsaken contents just how deep and nuanced you are.

But repentant believers in Christ always find mercy and forgiveness. And that’s all the happy I have for you.

And you pastors who could not find it in yourselves even to say, from the pulpit, that life is an important consideration when voting… I don’t know what to say to you. I know some very fine men are absolutely convinced that all politics should be kept out of the pulpit. But is life politics? Is the stewardship of one’s vote politics? Are we really called to give no guidance whatever for the pressing moral issues of citizenship? Look at Roman Catholics, who deny and pervert the Gospel, who don’t cherish the truths you cherish, and yet who managed to speak up for the unborn. Are you sure you did the right thing?

I’m really not.

We have grim days ahead, very grim days. We’ll need to look to God more than ever, and that’s a good thing. We’ll need to cling to the Cross more than ever, and that’s a good thing. We’ll need to study and practice the Word more than ever, and that’s a good thing.

But what President-elect Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid mean to do to our children’s America?

That isn’t a good thing.

What to do now? We’ll talk about that in the future, Lord willing. “Pray for Obama,” we’re told. Indeed. Pray that Barack Obama be soundly converted to faith in Christ as his Lord and the only Savior. Pray that, evidently for the first time in his life, he’ll take on Christ’s yoke and learn from him. Pray that he will repent of his false beliefs and values, and embrace God’s point of view, learning to think His thoughts after Him. Pray that President-elect Obama will repent of the evil he means to do, before he does it.

Pray for the church, where judgment will begin. Pray for pastors. Pray for America.

Then we’ll have to figure out what the Nehemiah pattern of praying plus doing will mean for us.

I had a bad feeling when my Bible reading the morning of the 5th turned out to include 2 Kings 17. I gulped.

We Need More Shack Time

from Between Two Worlds

Paul Grimmond reviews The Shack in The Briefing.

Here is the closing section:

How should we respond to The Shack? My first response was to run away as quickly as I possibly could. But then I realized that The Shack gets one thing right when it encourages us to meet God in the difficult issues. ‘The shack’ functions as a metaphor for two things: it is the place where we stuff the things that are too hard to think about, and the place where we meet with God face-to-face. Young is dead right to suggest that we need to get to know God in the midst of the hard questions. The problem is that he brings us face-to-face with a God who is not God at all. In his zeal to ‘free’ God from the chains of misunderstanding, Young has shackled God beyond recognition.The solution, though, isn’t to run away from ‘the shack’; the solution is to spend more time there—not in William P Young’s ‘shack’, of course, but in the place where the living God speaks for himself about the big issues of life. We need to spend more time gazing into the face of the God who reveals himself in the Bible. We need to think about the big questions of suffering and obedience and truth while we sit at the feet of our Lord. In fact, if we have been reading our Bibles, we will have found that these are issues that he is only too willing to discuss. Indeed, it is the triune God of Scripture alone who is both sovereign enough and good enough to deal with evil.

I am not pretending that there won’t be difficult questions. Nor am I suggesting that the answers will be totally satisfying for everyone. We may even need to accept that God is not willing to answer some of our questions right now. But we will certainly be better off hearing from the God who sent his Son to die for us, than listening to the god of our imaginations.

If western Christianity had spent more time in ‘the shack’ with the true and living creator, and less time wallowing around in our felt needs, then, just maybe, less people would have been fooled. We might have recognized The Shack for the empty shell that it is. Our churches might even have become places where people could meet face-to-face with the holy God of Scripture. Only when we come into the presence of the loving, holy, majestic, glorious, gracious, judging, rescuing, creating, sustaining and redeeming God, who holds the future in his awesome hands, will we have a real message to offer a world obsessed with pain.

The Shack & Universal Reconciliation Pt 3

 

from Herescope

The Theological Implications

Part 3: THE SHACK and Universal Reconciliation

By Pastor Larry DeBruyn

Writing from the standpoint of being a one time “theological buddy” of Paul Young, author of The Shack, James De Young notes that the “the most serious error is Paul’s embrace of Universal Reconciliation which lies imbedded in the book.”[15] When applied to Christianity, Universal Reconciliation (UR) behaves like a computer virus that first invades, and then infects the whole body of biblical Truth. Contradicting distinctive Christian teachings, UR proposes a dialectic that changes biblical beliefs about God’s love and justice, Jesus’ atonement, heaven and hell, and the balance between divine sovereignty and human responsibility.

Divine Love and Justice

In the composite of His being, the loving God is interested in personal relationships (John 1:12). But at the same time, He remains holy and just (Isaiah 6:1-7; Genesis 18:25). At one and the same time, He is both separate from and near to His creation and His creatures. At times, He even becomes angry with people (Ezekiel 16:26; 38:17-23).[16] After all, how should God feel about and respond to the crimes and injustices He sees perpetrated by one group or individual against others? Is He to idly stand by and let the villains get away with it? If UR is true, then, yes. Love trumps anger and justice. But if UR is not true, the answer is, no. Sooner or later, in this life or the next, God will bring the bad guys to justice and punish them. This is the wrath of God. But in sync with a UR worldview, The Shack manifests aversion to the idea of divine wrath.

Alluding to a biblical statement in the book of James—by the way, biblical allusion can peddle spiritual delusion—the sensual Sophia tells Mack that Jesus and Papa chose the way of the cross, “For love.” The “all-wise-Sophia” then explains to Mack, “He chose the way of the cross where mercy triumphs over justice because of love.”[17] Rebuking Mack, who is role-playing Judge, she asks, “Would you instead prefer he’d chosen justice for everyone? Do you want justice, ‘Dear Judge’?” (The Shack, 164-165) For salvation to be universal, the God’s love (mercy) must overrule God’s justice (righteousness) or sense of fair play.

When isolated from the rest of Scripture, and on the face of it, James’ statement (“mercy triumphs over judgment,” James 2:13b), might seem to support the contention that God’s mercy will trump His justice in the end. But as the context shows (James 2:1-13), James is addressing the issue of equity between people, admonishing them to work out their relationships according to God’s rules (“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself . . . Do not commit adultery. . . Do not kill.”). If they discriminate against the less fortunate around them, if they fail to love their fellows, then they can be certain of one thing: “judgment will be merciless to one who has shown no mercy” (James 2:13a, NASB). In other words, the first half of the verse affirms our accountability to God for how we treat others. Give no mercy in this life, receive no mercy in the next life (Compare Matthew 5:7.). On the other hand, the merciful will be exonerated, for in the last judgment “mercy triumphs over judgment” for them. Ironically, the first half of the verse affirms the opposite from what UR supposes the last half does; namely, that love overrides justice. But because God’s being is balanced, His love does not diminish His justice (Galatians 5:21; Revelation 20:10, 15; 21:8; 22:15). Yet one scene in the The Shack suggests otherwise.

In a comfortable, schmoozing, and relational conversation about the Canadian rock musician Bruce Cockburn, Papa says to Mack, “Mackenzie, I have no favorites; I am just especially fond of him.” Mack then responds, “You seem to be especially fond of a lot of people . . . Are there any who you are not especially fond of?” After pensively contemplating the question, Papa responds, “Nope, I haven’t been able to find any. Guess that’s jes’ the way I is.” (The Shack, 118-119) Bingo! God is as “fond” of Nero, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Saddam Hussein as He is of Jesus, or Mother Theresa. It’s all one big “circle of relationship” (“Kum Ba Ya”). As Morris comments,

The other religions of the world, in either ancient or modern times, lack a deep sense of the purity and holiness of God and of the ill desert of sin. It is thought unpalatable to man that God’s holiness must be taken seriously in any attempt to solve the problem of reconciliation.[18]

Any universalism necessitates imagining a God at variance from His transparent self-disclosure in the Bible. So this exchange of divine wrath in favor of divine love causes The Shack to jettison the doctrine of Jesus’ penal and substitutionary atonement for sin.

Jesus’ Cross and Sin

Theologian Wayne Grudem explains that the penal-substitutionary atonement of Christ “has been the orthodox understanding of the atonement . . . in contrast to other views that attempt to explain the atonement apart from the idea of the wrath of God or payment of the penalty for sin.”[19] Because in The Shack’s view divine love supersedes divine wrath, we would expect to find indication in the book that Jesus did not die as our representative to provide a penal-substitutionary atonement for sin. And this we find.

No Punishment—Oh Really?

In a poignant moment with “deep sadness in her eyes,” Papa tells Mack,

I am not who you think I am, Mackenzie. I don’t need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It is not my purpose to punish it; it’s my joy to cure it. (The Shack, 119-120)

Thus, a Christian reader is left groping to explain why Jesus died. We need to understand the relationship of human sin to divine punishment.

Though Paul Young vaguely infers that the atonement might be substitutionary (The Shack, 162), he does not, for reason of love eclipsing wrath, and for Papa’s co-crucifixion with Jesus, present it as the payment of a penalty for sin (Remember Papa said: “I don’t need to punish people for sin.”). The issue is not whether God needs to punish people for sin. After all, who are we to tell God what His needs are, or are not? The issue is whether God does punish sin, and according to the Bible, He has punished and still punishes sin.

The Bible tells us that physical death is God’s continuing punishment for sin. We may deny we’re sinners, we cannot claim exemption from death. The Apostle Paul wrote, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12; Compare Genesis 2:16-17.). So if God possesses no “need” to punish people for sin, then why not abolish death now? But excepting the generation of the translation (1 Corinthians 15:50-56), we are all destined to die. As a pundit put it, “The statistics on death are overwhelming. One out of one person dies!” Death happens. I know, for as a pastor, I’ve officiated at hundreds of funerals. So about the inference that God doesn’t punish sin, let’s get real. If He still punishes sin in time, how can we be sure He won’t punish sin in eternity? We can’t, and this fact brings us to consider the death of Jesus.

Jesus’ Penal-Substitutionary Atonement

Though men dispute the reason for Jesus’ death, and whether or not He was raised from the dead, they do not dispute that He died. That’s history. He lived. He died. In light of death’s cause, that it remains a continuing punishment for sin, the begging question becomes—why did Jesus die? Did He die to be punished for His own sins? If so, then He was just another sinner like the rest of us because “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). But the Scriptures declare Him to be sinless (Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 1:19). Thus, did He, as opposed to the forbidding idea that He died for His own sins, vicariously die as the penal substitute for the sins of others? The Scriptures declare this to be the reason Christ suffered and died (Isaiah 53:4-6; 2 Corinthians 5:21). In fact, that’s why Jesus said He would die (Mark 10:45) Now either Jesus deserved to die for His own sin(s), or He died for the sins of others. As Donald Macleod summarizes:

People speak with horror of ‘the penal theory of the atonement’. But what happened to Christ on the cross? He died. And what is death? It is the penalty for sin! . . . On that cross He was dealt with as sin deserved. The glory of it is, it wasn’t His own sin. It was our sin. He bore the sin of the world (John 1:29). [20]

As with other world religions, and believing that people want a relationship with God,[21] universal salvation rejects the idea that sin is a personal offense against God that deserves punishment (Contra Psalm 51:1-4; Romans 3:21-26; 1 John 2:2; 4:10.). Therefore, the demand for penal propitiation of sin becomes unbecoming of “touchy-touchy-feely-feely” god who has been manufactured by our emoting culture and church.

Jesus’ Death—an Inspiring Example

So if all persons are saved (i.e., universally reconciled), then the question arises, “Why the cross in the first place?” Robertson McQuilken summarizes the dilemma. He writes that universalism,

. . . undermines belief in the atoning death of Christ. For if all sin will ultimately be overlooked by a gracious deity, Christ never should have died. It was not only unnecessary, it was surely the greatest error in history . . . Universalism . . . demands a view of the death of Christ as having some purpose other than as an atonement for sin. [22]

Thus in the salvific scheme of universalism, Jesus died for some reason other than that we might be forgiven for our sins.

Beginning with Abelard (1079-1142), liberal Christianity proposes that Jesus died to provide mankind with an inspiring and sacrificial example. Though His death does give us that (John 15:13), the implications of His atonement are far more profound.

As I see it, the atonement theory of The Shack seems to be that Jesus died to provide a sacrificial example of love for individuals to induce and inspire them to become more selfless as they seek “relationship and reconciliation” with God and with others.[23] (The Shack, 225) One theologian frames the liberal theory of the atonement: “If there is anything liberal theology is agreed upon it is that the frequent biblical references to God’s wrath (anger, displeasure, indignation, rage, vengeance) must be interpreted down to mean something like frustrated love.”[24] And that is exactly how The Shack interprets God’s wrath. Persons not choosing relationship with God merely frustrate His love for them, a love which in the end, will universally win out.

In a Universal Reconciliation scheme of redemption, divine wrath needs to be toned down. This may explain why The Shack pictures Papa as having been co-crucified with Jesus. (The Shack, 95, 102, 107, 222) As evidenced by the Jesus-like scars on her wrists, Papa had magnanimously borne her own wrath. Perhaps Papa even atoned for her sins. Who knows? But in that Papa was crucified with Jesus, it cannot be held that Christ suffered and died alone as man’s penal-substitute.[25] (The Shack, 96) In a supreme exhibition of love, Papa took the hit herself. This is the ancient heresy of modalism in which the three members of the Trinity are so fused in their relationship that any personal distinction between them is lost.

Heaven and Hell

According to the worldview of The Shack, Hell cannot exist because evil, however it may be perceived, is not real. It’s a mirage. Sarayu (the Holy Spirit) tells Mack, “Both evil and darkness can only be understood in relation to Light and Good; they (i.e., ‘evil and darkness’) do not have any actual existence.” (The Shack, 136) The logic of universalism might be constructed like this:

• The omni-present God of light is omni-benevolent toward all people.
• Hell would be a restricted, dark, and malevolent place.
• Therefore, assuming God’s omni-presence and benevolence, hell can’t exist.

Thus, as a place of “eternal punishment” and “outer darkness” (Matthew 8:12; 22:13; 25:30, 46), universalism denies the existence of hell. God is “fond” of everyone. Universal Reconciliation cannot allow for a place where men are eternally separated from God, where any hope for “relationship” with God would be devastated.[26] However metaphorical it might be, I think of the sign over the inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy, “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” Hope can’t happen in hell.

Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility

It can also be charged that UR is fatalistic. Freedom of choice is violated to such a degree that even atheists are forced to spend eternity with a person they do not like in a place where they did not want to go—with God in heaven. There are fools who mutter in their hearts, “No God” (Psalm 14:1; 53:1). Sadly, the Bible describes some people as “haters of God” (Romans 1:30). Are we to project that such individuals, who in this life possess deep animus toward God and who have spent the majority of their lives despising and/or denying Him, will derive one moment’s enjoyment from being in the presence of the One whom they loathe? Will God grab these despisers and deniers by the nape of their necks and drag them “kicking and screaming” into heaven? Thus, C.S. Lewis wrote:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. [27]

Similarly, Alister McGrath also remarks: “Universalism perverts the gospel of the love of God into an obscene scene of theological rape quite unworthy of the God whom we encounter in the face of Jesus Christ.”[28]

Conclusion

Absent faith in and acceptance of the truth, the differences between God and sinners are irreconcilable. Exhibiting that people can and do reject “relationship” with God, even after extensive pleading to be reconciled, Jesus lamented over the ancient Jewish nation, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (Emphasis Mine, Matthew 23:37, KJV). If any person refuses relationship based upon the terms of the Gospel, they will remain un-reconciled to God—forever. But Christian believers have been reconciled and possess an eternal relationship with God through the penal and substitutionary blood atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. As a hymn writer states:

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood—
Sealed my pardon with His blood:
Hallelujah! what a Savior!

Guilty, vile and helpless we,
Spotless Lamb of God was He;
Full atonement! Can it be?
Hallelujah! what a Savior! [29]

The Truth:

“For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Endnotes:
15. De Young, Back of the Shack, 3. De Young notes that, “The greatest doctrinal distortion in the book is Paul’s assumption of universal reconciliation” (p.3), and that the book’s storyline has “universal reconciliation at its base.” (p.4)
16. “A study of the concordance will show that there are more references in Scripture to the anger, fury, and wrath of God, than there are to His love and tenderness.” See Arthur W. Pink, The Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1975) 82. After describing the fear of a little boy who, because of intimidating scenes recorded in the Old Testament, thought of Jehovah as a “dirty bully,” a liberal preacher explained: “We have long since rejected a conception of reconciliation associated historically with the idea of a Deity that is loathsome. God, for us, cannot be thought of as angry . . . who because of Adam’s sin must have his Shylockian (i.e., ruthless money-lending) pound of flesh.” See G. Bromley Oxnam, Preaching in a Revolutionary Age (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Series, 1971) 79. The book comprises the Lyman Beecher lectures on preaching at Yale Divinity School, 1943-44.
17. The allusion is to James 2:13, where the second half of the verse states, “mercy triumphs over judgment” (NASB).
18. Morris, The Cross, 250-251.
19. Emphasis Mine, Wayne Grudem, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994) 579.
20. Donald Macleod, A Faith to Live By, Understanding Christian Doctrine (Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 2002) 151.
21. Contra Romans 3:11 which says, “there is none that seeketh after God.”
22. Robertson McQuilken, The Great Omission, A Biblical Basis for World Evangelism (Waynesboro, Georgia: Authentic Media, 2002) 41.
23. Vernon Grounds summarized that Abelard’s “view of our Lord’s passion, exhibiting the great love of God, so frees us from the fear of wrath that we may serve him in love.” Grounds notes that by subordinating “everything to the controlling idea that the cross” is the demonstration of God’s love, man’s love for God is “almost automatically” drawn out in return. Ground’s summary of Abelard’s theory describes the meaning of the atonement presented in The Shack. See Vernon C. Grounds, “Atonement,” Baker’s Dictionary of Theology, Everett F. Harrison, Editor-in-Chief (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1960) 73.
24. Robert Duncan Culver, Systematic Theology (Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, Ltd., 2005) 553.
25. Papa tells Mack, “Don’t ever think that what my son chose to do didn’t cost us dearly. Love always leaves a significant mark . . . We were there together.” (The Shack, 96) This statement is made in spite of the fact of Jesus’ cry, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).
26. Brian D. McLaren disdains “violence and war” writing that it “is one of the reasons many of us have become critical in recent years of popular American eschatology in general, and conventional views of hell in particular.” See Everything Must Change (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007) 144. Nobody I know likes violence and war. I don’t. Yet the testaments, both Old and New, from beginning to end, contain it. Is the eschatology, McLaren and others are critical of, American, or biblical? Remember: America did not hatch the Bible.
27. C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, The Best of C.S. Lewis (New York: Christianity Today, Inc., 1969) 156. I thank Dr. De Young for drawing my attention to Lewis’ quote.
28. Alister McGrath, Justification by Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1988) 106. Again, I note that Dr. De Young drew my attention to Lewis’ quote. Though he is an Arminian within the camp of open theism, Clark Pinnock states: “Universalism is not a viable position because of the gift of human freedom.” See William Crockett, General Editor, Four Views on Hell (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1996) 128.
29. Philip P. Bliss, “Hallelujah, What a Savior!” The Celebration Hymnal (Dallas: Word/Integrity, 1997) 311.

The Shack & Universal Reconciliation Pt 2

from Herescope

By Pastor Larry DeBruyn

The Christian underpinnings of The Shack make it necessary for the allegory to deal with fallen humanity’s relationship with God, for as the prophet told Judah, “[Y]our iniquities have made a separation between you and your God” (Isaiah 59:2). For reason of sinning, the Bible depicts man to be living in a broken world and estranged from God. Thus Papa explains to Mack why things are the way they are when she says to him, “The world is broken because in Eden you abandoned relationship with us to assert your own independence.” (The Shack, 146) Consistent with the allegory’s antiauthoritarian and antinomian bent, The Shack defines sin as abandoning relationship.

But the Bible defines sin as breaking God’s rules, for as John wrote, “sin is the transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4). The dynamic of sin is more than deserting relationship with God. In the allegory’s explanation of the world’s brokenness and the importance of relationship over rules, a theological inconsistency arises. It is this: To explain his “sin-is-abandoning-relationship” theory, the author refers to the very Eden narrative in Genesis where God ordered Adam, “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat” (Emphasis mine, Genesis 2:17). Ironically, by breaking the rule of God, Adam broke relationship with God. For doing so, God expelled Adam from Eden. So rules do have something to do with relationship. In fact, rules are tests of relationship! “Thou shalt not murder,” it seems to me, would have been a good rule for Missy’s killer to have obeyed. If he had, there would have been no Great Sadness.

Though for reason of God’s grace, obedience to rules does not determine a person’s relationship with Him (Ephesians 2:8-9), but His rules do define what a relationship with Him looks like. Those who love God will not place other gods before Him. Those who love other persons will not abuse them. Anyone can say to someone else, “I love you!” Some men use the statement to manipulate and use women. They say it but do not mean it. So the greater question becomes, “Do you love me?” The Apostle Paul wrote that “love does not” (Emphasis mine, 1 Corinthians 13:4). Love is more than saying. Love is doing, and to that end, and as the Ten Commandments indicate, rules define “doing” love.

So the question becomes, after ruining our Eden by our sin, after having broke “relationship” with God, how can we reconciled to Him? Note: Though we need to be reconciled to God, God does not need to be reconciled to us. He has done nothing untoward to offend us. But before dealing with our necessity to be reconciled to God, William Paul Young’s position should to be noted; that is, he believes in a Universal Reconciliation* (UR) which finds basis in God being reconciled to the world.

Wayne Jacobsen, one of Young’s collaborators and editors in writing The Shack, admits that Universal Reconciliation was part of the book’s “earlier versions because of the author’s partiality at that time to some aspects of what people call UR.”[7] And according to a professor and acquaintance of the author, “Paul’s embrace of universal reconciliation . . . lies embedded in the book.”[8] But just what is Universal Reconciliation?

In the words of one theologian, Universal Reconciliation,

. . . maintains that Christ’s death accomplished its purpose in reconciling all humankind to God. The death of Christ made it possible for God to accept all humans, and he has done so. Consequently, whatever separation exists between a human and the benefits of God’s grace is subjective in nature; it exists only in the human’s mind. [9]

In short, Universal Reconciliation holds that without exception, and for reason of Christ’s atonement, all persons are saved. The world needs to do nothing to be reconciled to God, for according to Papa, she is fully reconciled to the world.

While talking with Mack, Papa leans forward, crossing her arms on the table, and says to him, “Honey, you asked me what Jesus did on the cross; so now listen to me carefully: through his death and resurrection, I am now fully reconciled to the world.” (Emphasis mine, The Shack, 192) In a later conversation, Papa tells Mack, “In Jesus, I have forgiven all humans for their sins against me, but only some choose relationship.” (Emphasis mine, The Shack, 225) Rightly, the allegory points to Jesus’ cross as the centerpiece of reconciliation. But wrongly, on a number of counts, Papa’s statements can be misleading.

First, God’s state is not one of being reconciled to the world. In fact, God does not need to be reconciled to the world for He has never done anything to estrange Himself from the world. About the New Testament passages dealing with reconciliation between man and God, James Denney commented in his classic work, The Death of Christ,

Where reconciliation is spoken of in St. Paul, the subject is always God, and the object is always man. The work of reconciling is one in which the initiative is taken by God, and the cost borne by Him; men are reconciled in the passive, or allow themselves to be reconciled, or receive reconciliation. We never read that God has been reconciled. [10]

Denney’s statement contradicts Papa’s.

To see whether Denney’s observation is correct, we should notice three central New Testament passages that mention man’s reconciliation to God (Romans 5:10; 2 Corinthians 5:18-21; Colossians 1:21, KJV). In each of these passages, God is the subject of reconciliation, and man is the object. In these passages, man is reconciled to God, and not the other way around. We quote.

For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. (Emphasis mine, Romans 5:10) God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God. (Emphasis mine, 2 Corinthians 5:18-20) , that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight . . . (Colossians 1:21-22)

And all things are of

And you

These Scriptures do not reveal God is reconciled to man. God possesses no “need” to be reconciled to sinners. While through the cross God reconciles sinners to Himself, it is not the other way around. In this regard, the two adverbs which modify “reconciled” in Papa’s statement are troubling.

The first adverb “I am now” suggests there was a time when God was not reconciled to sinners.[11] The adverb describes the state of something in the present that was not the case in the past. But as has already been noted, the cross did not reconcile God to sinners, but rather sinners to God. From God’s perspective, the atonement made the world savable.

The following adverb, “I am now fully,” implies that nothing else is needed for reconciliation to occur.[12] Papa’s declaration makes it seem that, as far as God is concerned, reconciliation is a done deal—that peace between God and man has been secured when in fact it has not. Yes, on the basis of Jesus’ atonement, God offers the “olive branch” of reconciliation to people, but it does not stand that they are automatically reconciled to God or are moved to accept His peace plan (i.e., the Gospel). As has been pointed out, people do refuse to believe the Gospel thereby short circuiting relationship with Him. It cannot therefore be rightfully stated that God is “now fully reconciled to the world.”

Second, the world’s standing is in fact, not one of being fully reconciled to God. The “atonement” of Jesus forces nobody into “at-one-ment” with God. Though the cross makes reconciliation with God accessible to man, it is not thereby consequent that all persons will receive the reconciliation He offers, for God does not coerce people into relationship with Him. He invites, but does not impose. Thus, after declaring others and himself to be “ambassadors for Christ,” the Apostle asks, “as though God were entreating through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (Emphasis mine, 2 Corinthians 5:20). If everybody stands “now fully” reconciled to God, then Paul’s plea is unnecessary. But in the cross, God is simply saying to man, “These are the terms by which you may be reconciled to Me. Now, it’s your move.” Theologian Thomas Oden states that the completed work of the cross is an offer . . .

to receive God’s reconciling act. Until that occurs through repentance and faith, the sinner remains behaviorally unreconciled to God, even though God offers it already as a gift . . . [13]

But obviously, there is a sense in which, despite the cross, all persons do not receive God’s pleading invitation to be at peace with Him. For whatever the reason, many persons ignore or refuse God’s invitation. They are not moved. They follow their own spiritual agenda. For example, the agenda of some is atheistic. They mock the thought of God’s existence. The agenda of others might be hedonistic. They love “feel-good” experiences more than God. Others are narcissistic. They love themselves more than God. Others in life are materialistic. They love things more than God. If any of these attitudes dictate our lifestyle, then Scripture declares that, “the love of the Father is not in” us (1 John 2:15). Of spiritual infidelity, James states: “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4:4). There are those who mock the Gospel, who think of it as either foolishness or a scandal (1 Corinthians 1:23). Do such attitudes and responses evidence a state of being at peace with God? Without exception, all persons are not “fully” reconciled to God, for if they were, they would all be saved. So the question arises, how can someone be reconciled to God?

Adolf Schlatter stated that because reconciliation is an aspect of justification, “reconciliation occurs by faith” (Romans 5:8).[14] Absent repentance for sin and faith in the Gospel, persons will remain un-reconciled to God (Romans 1:5; Hebrews 11:6). Though God extends the olive branch of peace to people, many refuse to accept the divinely initiated overture thereby imploding the whole reconciliation process. They refuse to accept God’s peace plan. The sinful rebels remain at war with God. We turn now to address the theological implications of universalism—how UR affects other vital Christian teachings.

Stay tuned for the riveting conclusion . . . .

The Truth:

“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him” neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Corinthians 2:14)

Endnotes:
7. Wayne Jacobsen, “Is The Shack Heresy? LifeStream Blog, http://lifestream.org/blog/2008/03/04/is-the-shack-heresy/ Windblownmedia.com).
8. An acquaintance of Paul Young, a “theological buddy,” has written an extended essay that tracks The Shack’s universalism. See James B. De Young, At the Back of the Shack a Torrent of Universalism (Damascus, Oregon: Revised May 2008, 39 pages). Professor De Young’s essay can be downloaded online in a PDF format at (http://theshackreview.com/content/ReviewofTheShack.pdf). Like Jacobsen in the preceding quote, De Young states, “About four years ago Paul embraced universal reconciliation, and strongly defended his decision” (p. 5).
9. Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, Second Edition (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998) 1027.
10. Emphasis mine, James Denney, The Death of Christ (Minneapolis: Klock & Klock Christian Publishers, Inc., 1982 Reprint) 103. Morris also states: “It is interesting to notice that no New Testament passage speaks of Christ reconciling God to man. Always the stress is on man being reconciled. . . . It is man’s sin which has caused the enmity.” See Leon L. Morris, “Reconciliation,” The New Bible Dictionary, J.D. Douglas, Organizing Editor (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962) 1077. Further, of the eleven New Testament mentions of reconciliation, “in every instance man is said to be reconciled to God.” See John F. Walvoord, Jesus Christ Our Lord (Chicago: Moody Press, 1969) 179.
11. As dictionaries define the word, “now” means “at this time or moment . . . nowadays.” See The Random House College Dictionary, Revised, Laurence Urdang, Editor in Chief (New York: Random House, 1988) 911.
12. The word means “containing all that can be held; filled to the utmost capacity; . . . complete; entire.” See Ibid. 534.
13. Thomas C. Oden, The Word of Life, Systematic Theology: Volume Two (Peabody, Massachusetts: Prince Press, 1989) 356.
14. Adolf Schlatter, The Theology of the Apostles, Translated by Andreas J. Köstenberger (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999) 246.

*UR is the belief that every person who has ever lived is, or will ultimately be, either before or after death, reconciled to God. Historically, universal reconciliation leads to Unitarianism which denies the biblical Trinity. After all, if God saves all persons, who needs Christ and His atonement on the cross, or the application of salvation to the human soul by the Holy Spirit? Universalism makes the Trinity unnecessary!