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.
4 comments:
Thanks for the review, Nic. Given the intractability of the problem of evil and the inevitable nature of any theodicy as a sort of pissing into the wind, it seems as though the value of a book like this lies more in its capacity for reminding us of themes of divine relationality and empathy. I still struggle with this idea of the suffering sovereign. It certainly makes God more "relatable," but I wonder if we've arrived here somewhat by default (divine empathy being a distant second to actual justice).
Also, I'm not sure I understand the De facto/ De jure distinction. Is it merely a difference in the nature of God's action (De facto as the cause and De jure as the response)? If we go the De jure route, it seems as though we are hanging the responsibility of evil/chaos on some sort of cosmic natural law to which either, 1) God chooses to be submissive, implying that God could have done otherwise and subsequently is still "accountable" or, 2) to which God actually IS subordinate, in which case we begin our rhetorical two-step of showing how God is all-powerful without having all power. In any case, we're back at square one: choosing between the casualty of God's omnipotence or omnibenevolence.
I'm sure I have botched up all of your definitions/intent, etc. My point is that (without having read the book,) maybe theodicy is less a central agenda and more of a by-product of whatever else the author was trying to do with the relationality/suffering?
The de facto / de jure distinction is a distinction between two ways of describing God. Someone who attributes de facto sovereignty to God is saying that God is literally behind and directly responsible for every action in the universe. I would attribute de jure sovereignty to God because God could conceivably run the universe that way, but chooses not to. This is operating under the assumption that God prefers Texas Hold'em to solitaire. So, in a sense, God is still at least indirectly responsible for evil in the universe because that's the way the game was set up from the beginning (by God).
So this doesn't get God off the hook completely. Creation still groans for redemption, and this is why we still say "marana tha", "Come, Lord", in prayerful hope that God will bring justice to the world on the Last Day.
As difficult as it is, I'm not sure that any theodicy is a "pissing into the wind", as you say, but maybe it is if we ignore the eschatological dimension of justice (presumably the truer dimension, right?) and formulate a theory that attempts to seal the deal definitively in this day and time. We all know that things are not right now, but we still have hope that some day they will be.
I began to write about the problem with pain, but as I am no English major (just a minor, and one escaping through the flames no less) I decided to demote it to my own mostly ridiculous blog. If you have a few minutes that beg to be killed, you could go to www.captainblah.blogspot.com and read the post entitled "The Prob with Pain", which I will summarize-
Pain is in the world because we are all dying. God cares for us, but he knows that we are all very temporal in this physical form. So what seems like cruelty from God, in allowing the brutal destruction of life on earth, is perhaps just the consequence of the frailty of a human in the midst of common activity. Every time I talk about this I sound like a complete jerk, but I think this life is secondary and when you cannot get past that fact, the painfulness of this life wont go away or make sense. I don't see God killing little kids as a sign to get things together, but I can't get away from the fact that if God saves some little kid's immediate life, then the fact remains that they are eventually going to die. (how dare you) I apologize for myself, but I cannot escape the brevity of this existence in comparison to the eternity of God. So what do you do in the now? I suppose you do your best to ease the pain of those around you, by watering the dry and feeding the starving and befriending the annoyingly obtuse. But perhaps there is some connection with the eternally spiritual realm (which seems to be more real than our physical arena, which gets more and more silly the closer you look at it- like Joe said earlier) that we can establish whilst we tick away our brief stint in this fleshy shell.
I appreciate all of the dialogue that grows on this site. I felt compelled to offer a bit of my own inane yark, as inadequate compensation.
Thanks for the comment, Aaron. It is true, we are all dying. There was a Radio Lab (podcast) episode a few weeks ago about dying, and how it seems we're genetically programmed to decay over time. Dying is an integral part of living, regardless of external conditions that cause us to age.
Your theodicy takes this seriously (or, at least what I've read of your theodicy so far; I'll soon read your blog and comment again there). It's true--Josef Stalin's autonomy and power of persuasion that got him to the top of the USSR are rooted in his finitude and mortality as a created being. And, in a sense, the millions that he sent to be slain in his Gulags dramatically testify to the implications of his mortality and autonomy. So, in the end, Stalin and his Gulag victims are really all part of the same decaying machine that is the human process anyway, it just so happens that Stalin brings that to the forefront of our awareness in a very grizzly way. Is this the argument I hear you mapping out? (Don't worry, you're allowed to freely make conjectures into this area without risking being judged on your character.)
The problem is that this just doesn't work for us on an existential level. I mean you could work out a neat syllogism about why the above line of thinking is quite balanced and rational, trimming up all the loose ends and presenting a formal argument that would satisfy the most highly trained logician. The trouble is that the human spirit is often detached from such rationality and encounters what is said to be rational as something rather absurd. The universe may be rational, be we humans are certainly not. (Or maybe it's the other way around, as Albert Camus said: it's we who impose our rationality onto an irrational universe.) It would be grossly obtuse to bring up any kind of problem of evil formulations with someone who had just suffered senseless tragedy, because what they need at that moment is probably more a beer and a friend and less an introduction to the philosophy of Leibniz.
So maybe this is just another way to confirm your conclusion: we should probably concern ourselves with watering the dry and feeding the starving, because we might never get to the bottom of this. Thanks again for joining the discussion, and sorry for replying so late (I hadn't noticed you posted on this until today).
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