Re-Post From Facebook: Thoughts On THE SHACK

There is a lot to like about this book, and much in it I find myself agreeing with. For instance, the image of God as suffering love and the working out of the implications of this for creation and our own lives is concomitant with many of my own views. Love is essentially persuasive, not coercive, and when you accept that God is that, you should look for evidence of persuasive and not coercive influence. Further, I liked the big U Universalist overtones. There is little doubt that the God represented in the book is TRULY a God love, and one that reconciles mercy and justice through that love. I enjoyed the vision of the Trinity, the view of God as living relatedness, and one in which God truly shares in the suffering of creation. The embracing of a patripassionist tone is concomitant with my own views. God was not 'away' when Jesus was on the cross, it is on the cross that we get our purest vision of the divine. That kind of Christocentrism, in which we truly take Jesus as the primary revelation of who and what God is, is so often lacking in the Christian community. 2000 years later we still haven't fully come to grips with what that might mean, and the book goes a long way to addressing that issue.

But does the book FULLY embrace its own project? I'm not so sure. It certainly supports a vision of God that, in love, allows the universe to become fully itself. God 'lets things be' out of a commitment to non-interruption, a commitment born out of love and respect for autonomy of the other. But retained is the possibility that God COULD coercively intervene, but chooses not to out of love. Is this logically consistent? I'm not so sure. If God is ESSENTIALLY suffering love, if that is His very nature, then it seems to me that coercive power is simply not an option for God. Because any God that acted coercively would not BE God, but an idol. Doesn't it make much more sense, and is more internally consistent to just say that God IS suffering love, and as such there are just certain things God cannot DO? Isn't the really radical conclusion that the book should lead us to that God just cannot do everything, that God is not the guarantor of proximate security so many people sycophantically crave? A corollary of this is the view that God knows what we do before we do it. The book sees God as taking a risk on creation, on the main character, on Jesus. God is essentially risky venture, in the book. But that simply isn't possible if God knows what happens in advance. For US, there is risk, for God, no risk. This brings up another point, in the end the book suggests that the only purposes that matter are God's purposes. Now we may speed up or slow down those purposes, but we do not in the final analysis add anything to them? Is this right? Can God's purposes (though never His character and the nature of those purposes) not CHANGE with human decisions? The view of God as finally self-sufficient, in no need of humans, whose plans are set and cannot be ultimately frustrated, seems more in line with the vision of God as essentially coercive, than as essentially persuasive. In that view, humans cannot finally add value to the universe, they can only slow or speed up the addition of God's value. But why can't God MAKE what humans do VALUABLE, be the element of lasting significance to human purposes, and that which makes human purposes part of a cosmic venture? It seems to me a vision of mature interdependence between all creatures and God is more in line with the vision of God's CHARACTER with which I so heartily agree.

Finally, the book lacks a vision of cosmic evil. It sees all evil as the result of human behavior. Not only do I think its interpretation of Genesis is wrong biblically, it is wrong scientifically and so leads to a misunderstanding of human evil. Evil, in some form, was running wild long before we got here. Evolution is a story of waste and suffering which is second to none. The Bible always envisions human evil as a part of a cosmic struggle, that predates them. The absence of such a vision in the book is problematic. Humans did not cause cancer, or mosquitoes, or malaria, nor the suffering and loss of value that emanates from them.

In the end, I highly recommend the book. It is well written and makes good points. However, I would say that in general I think the book contains internal contradictions the writer is unaware of.