Online House Church Community

We love stories! And The Shack uses story powerfully to communicate truths about God in a way that lets us “get them” at an emotional level as well as an intellectual level. The downside of this storying, it seems to us, is that makes it harder to weigh the truthfulness of the teaching. It seems to us that The Shack also presents some non-biblical views on important Christian teachings, and because they’re inserted in dialogue in a work of fiction, it’s harder to examine them. For reasons of space, we’ll give just a couple of examples, but we encourage you to be aware of other instances and compare them with Scripture.

We’re concerned that The Shack tends to de-emphasize the role of the Bible in the life of a follower of Jesus.  In the world of The Shack, subjective impressions seem to trump Scripture as a way for God to communicate with us, and the Bible is almost an afterthought:

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. My ability to communicate is limitless, living and transforming, and it will always be tuned to Papa’s goodness and love. And you will hear and see me in the Bible in fresh ways. Just don’t look for rules and principles; look for relationship—a way of coming to be with us. (198)

In another passage, Mr. Young almost seems to ridicule the Bible:

In seminary [Mack] had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. . . . Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges? (65)

He could simply be ridiculing the misuse of the Bible, but because this is the primary reference to the Bible in the book, the overall effect seems to us to point away from Scripture and toward subjective impressions and leadings.

The Bible claims for itself a pre-eminent role in the life of the believer. It is not just another among the many ways that we hear our Lord’s voice, it is the way by which we measure all other ways. It seems to us that the primary way we have of telling whether the still small voice within is the Holy Spirit’s voice, or our own ideas, or the voice of the enemy, is to check what we’re hearing against the teaching of the Bible.

It seems to us that this casual attitude toward the Bible is found throughout the book. To give just one example, The Shack seems to us to implicitly teach universalism, the belief that everyone will eventually end up in heaven, which doesn’t square with Scripture as far as we can tell. Papa tells Mack that she is now fully reconciled to the whole world, not just to those who believe in her (192). Later, Papa tells Mack that he has forgiven all humans, and that “when you forgive someone you certainly release them from judgment” (225). Mack asks Papa about her wrath: “But if you are God, aren’t you the one spilling out great bowls of wrath and throwing people into a great lake of fire?” (119) She answers, ambiguously, that, “it’s not my purpose to punish [sin]; it’s my joy to cure it” (120). Sophia tries to get Mack to choose three of his children to spend eternity in hell, saying;

 I am only asking you to do something that you believe God does. He knows every person ever conceived. . . . He loves each one. . . . You believe he will condemn most to an eternity of torment, away from His presence and apart from His love. Is that not true? (162)

The implication is that she doesn’t believe this. Mack can’t choose, of course, and ultimately volunteers to take the place of his children in hell. Her response? “Now you know Papa’s heart, who loves all his children perfectly” (163).

God’s heart was indeed to take our place, through Jesus’s death, but The Shack sidesteps the question of what happens to those who don’t avail themselves of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Sophia’s implied teaching in this conversation doesn’t seem to square with the consistent teaching of the New Testament  that the Lord Jesus will come, "dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. And these will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.” (2 Thess. 1.6-10)

It seems to us that The Shack fails to follow the implications of its own teachings about God’s inscrutable goodness to their natural conclusion. Papa tells Mack, “The real underlying flaw in your life . . . is that you don’t think that I am good. If you knew I was good and that everything—the means, the ends, and all the processes of individual lives—is all covered by my goodness, then while you might not always understand what I am doing, you would trust me” (126).  This seems to us to apply, not only to our human understanding of pain and death, but equally to our human understanding of any of the Bible’s difficult teachings, including that of hell. If we really believe that God is good, then we can take his word for it that the way he says he’s working things out—including suffering, pain, death, and, yes, even hell—is good, even if we can’t understand how. 

Scripture tells us to test what other people say. Paul tells the Thessalonian church: “Do not stifle inspiration, and do not despise prophetic utterances, but bring them all to the test and then keep what is good in them and avoid the bad of whatever kind” (1Thess. 5.19-22). We’d like to encourage you to carefully consider the teachings of Scripture on the wrath of God, and test the teachings of The Shack alongside them (we’re including some references to New Testament passages dealing with coming judgment and the wrath of God in a postscript) as well as examining the rest of the book’s teachings in the light of the Bible.

We think the issue of The Shack’s stance toward God’s wrath and coming judgment is important in itself, and even more important as an indication of the book’s general attitude toward Scripture.  When we stop clinging to the Bible as a God-breathed document, profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, we lose the only objective standard we have against which to measure ourselves and our world, and we end up like Israel in the time of the judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (2 Tim. 3.16, Judges 21.25).