The Way, The Truth, and The Etc. Etc.

Last Wednesday, I visited the local Church of Christ in Sidney, Nebraska. I was out on business, and well, what else is there to do besides play shuffleboard in the local bar? Don’t get me wrong, I love shuffleboard, but had already frequented the “Silver Dollar” the previous night. It was a medium size building, which gave me hope that I could probably make some connections through the ACU network. When I walked into the auditorium, I was greeted by no less than fifteen to seventeen people filling up one aisle of the church. I knew I was taking a risk by attending, and viewing the sparse faces in the crowd confirmed that I had lost my bet with fate, and could not simply pop in and maintain a relative sense of anonymity. After much explaining and easing of fears as to why a young person would grace their assembly, I was soon welcomed into the small life of the church. They wanted me to lead singing, and while, I love to sing the old songs, I have never been graced with a confidence of pitch to actually lead worship. Where’s Daniel Wheeler when you need him?
The irony of the situation is that I have great confidence in my speaking/preaching ability, but judging from the lesson of that night, I could in no good faith offer up words of exhortation, exegesis, or worship that would gel with the firm convictions in Biblical authority and inerrancy, not to mention a wonderful assurance that interpretation of the Bible is straightforward and is not mediated by any whims of culture, intelligence, or history that the Church holds. This realization made me feel like a voyeur, or a PhD candidate in rhetoric studying the “heuristics” of a small time denomination in a small town. I felt more a sense of the sovereignty of the community than a sense of an impoverished theology bent solely on getting to Heaven. Which in turn, made me feel like the typical liberal, forever tolerant and a respecter of persons. To their delight, I told them that I would return next Wednesday night, which I am still planning to do, barring a hankering for shuffleboard. I didn’t want to change them, or explore ways in which, as a community they could broaden their definition of fellowship to include more people than showed up that night. For starters, it is not my community. I don’t feel like it is appropriate to engage in theological discourse where there is a lack of accountability between individuals and communities. To do so would be to come across as foolish as the swindlers (the Prince and Dauphine?) in Huckleberry Finn when they put on mock spiritual revivals. The members of the Church eke out an existence from the ground or at the Cabella’s outdoor headquarters. They solidify their community, not by what they believe, but by simply making the time to show up and be with each other. And although I tell their story in a light that makes Grace abound to all of our foolish human searching, (which reifies my own positions), I do not tell their story in a manner that trivializes what they do when they show up. I do not know where the boundaries of the Church end and begin. I withhold my judgment, at least to their faces, on their quite virulent theology. It just doesn’t seem to be my place to discourse with them.

I tell this story to confess how much our community means to me. Perhaps we are like minded, perhaps we are monolithic in our theology, but I don’t think so. We have diversity, and more importantly, accountability that allows us to engage in discourse. We should never take this for granted, because community is a hard thing to form. I hope we grow together in faith and good works, whatever that means. I hope we build communities with those we see face to face on a regular basis. I hope we are transformed, and I hope we figure this whole thing out, at least for the time being. I’ve started a sermon I want to present the preacher of the Church of Christ in Sidney. When I finish, I’ll post it up here.
Bryce

The Theology of William Young's The Shack

I can’t remember the last time a work of Christian fiction was buzzing on everyone’s lips the way The Shack has been these days (or at least since the Left Behind series). As a testimony to its popularity, I met my grandfather for coffee at a McDonald’s yesterday, and I was reading the book while I waited for him. When he showed up he had the book in hand, and it was only moments before a stranger came to us and asked us where he might get a copy for himself, since he had heard so much about it. So I figured it would be a timely undertaking for this weblog to offer its own humble analysis of the theology that the book espouses.

Possible Spoiler Alert: The editors of the book asked that readers not divulge some key elements of the plot to those who have not read it yet. However, it's nearly impossible to talk about the plot without discussing these.

The story takes place in Portland, Oregon (is this the secret recipe for a book guaranteed to fly off the shelves of Christian bookstores?), where family man Mackenzie Phillips is wrestling with a cloud of depression that descended upon him four years prior, when his six-year-old daughter was brutally murdered by a serial killer during a family camping trip. One day he mysteriously receives an unstamped letter in his mailbox, from God, inviting him to spend the weekend with him in a dilapidated shack in the Oregon wilderness—which happens to be where Mackenzie’s daughter was murdered. When he arrives, he is surprised to find the murder site transformed into an idyllic log cabin with a perfectly manicured lawn, and is greeted by an ethnically colorful personification of the Trinity: God the Father is revealed as a large, jovial black woman—who will surely be played by Queen Latifah when the movie adaptation comes out; Jesus is a 21st century version of himself—an Israeli manual laborer in a token blue jumpsuit; and the Holy Spirit is apparently played by a character from the creepy British children’s show Boobah. What ensues is a weekend of theological conversation and moments of revelation between Mackenzie and each of the three members of the Trinity, wherein God gets a chance to explain him/herself to the troubled, doubting protagonist.

The book’s primary concern is the timeless theological dilemma of the problem of evil: how can an all-loving and all-powerful God allow senseless suffering to run so rampant in the world? In today’s scene of hard Calvinism making such a startling comeback in all kinds of church circles, I found Young’s depiction of God refreshing and hopeful. Young portrays God, not as a puppet master who orchestrates tragedy to show us a lesson about his sovereignty or to create situations that will force us to grow, but as a God who suffers alongside his creation and values relationship with his children above micromanagement.

The difference between Calvinism and Young’s argument is the difference between de facto and de jure understandings of God’s sovereignty. In de facto sovereignty, God is directly behind all activity in the universe—no matter how seemingly insignificant or evil—and every event works in accordance with his will. Whereas de facto refers to what actually is the case, de jure refers to what is “by right” or “by law”; God might not be controlling every detail, but all of creation rightfully belongs to its Creator and awaits the day it will be redeemed back to him/her. To affirm God’s sovereignty, then, is to have faith in God’s ability to redeem the most senseless situations. This is the revelation that ultimately brings healing to Mackenzie.

The Shack also features interesting discussion on the nature of the Trinity. Free-church Protestants in the past have made topics like soteriology (doctrine of salvation) and eschatology (doctrine of the end-times) their main points of focus, while being content to leave more esoteric Trinitarian speculation to Catholics and Orthodox. It's nice to see the topic take a central place in a book so popular the free-church crowd. (Interestingly, the book supports the peculiar doctrine of patripassianism: the historically heretical belief that the Father suffered with the Son on the cross and bears the same wounds.)

For those of you who noticed Eugene Peterson’s blurb on the front cover lauding the book as today’s equivalent of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, I wouldn’t go in with such high hopes. While The Shack’s theology can be winning at times, the writing, lamentably, is not. (Will there ever be a return to great Christian fiction, a return to the days when we could claim great writers like Dante and Dostoyevsky? Or is there plenty out there and I just haven’t come across it yet?) The dialogue is quite stilted at times, with characters set up to deliver theological quips seemingly on queue. It’s a bit like watching a 2nd grade Thanksgiving pageant, with students lined up in a row behind the microphone, each taking his turn to uncomfortably say his line and hurry back to his place in the chorus. And the book is more than a little touchy-feely. Everyone refers to God as “Papa”, and Jesus and “Papa” greet each other with a kiss on the lips—and this is after he/she has morphed back from God the Mother into the familiar Father (an old white guy).

As far as the theology goes, the book makes some very important arguments about the nature of God that, I think, are very needed today. Young’s God is pluralistic, relational, non-manipulative, able to experience pain, and at times something of a hippy. We need an injection of this kind of theology in a time when influential people like John Piper are preaching that the 2004 tsunami that claimed a quarter of a million lives was God's way of calling the world to repentance. If what you’re mainly looking for is an inspired work of fiction, however, you might stick with the New York Times Book Review. But then again, my schooling is in theology, not literature, so my expertise is not in this area. Please, let us know what you thought of the book, even if you think I’m totally off.