The Shack by William P. Youngrating: 2 of 5 stars
The father as Papa, the heavy-set African-American woman, Jesus, the mid-eastern man, and Sarau, the out-of-focus Asian woman as the Holy Spirit gripped me at a visceral level. The names and characters got me in a primal way. Mother God's kindness and gentleness caught me off guard. I was, again, deeply convicted of the heartless, male, distant God that fills so much of my expectations about God. All of my intellectual notions about God's immediacy, tenderness, and enjoyment of me translate so thinly into my actual experience of my world on a day-to-day basis.
But, beyond the personification of God, what actually fills this book left me cold and bored. Endless god-talk by God. An endless series of pithy pop-theology platitudes, eaten up by a jaw-dropped, golly-gee-whiz protagonist. The author is able to assume the voice of God, dropping an incongruous, quilted-together theology composed of listening to a lifetime of clever Evangelical sermons. The reader is relegated to the dumbfounded, uncritical protagonist's passive-viewer seat. 250 pages of the author's theological observations put into God's voice, offered to a dumbfounded, elated protagonist-reader.
At the core of my being, I hope that a weekend with the Trinity wouldn't be theological Q+A. At the core of my being, I don't believe that propositional, theological statements (from "God", or anyone), are an important venue for healing and redemption.
William P. Young obviously had nothing but the best intentions in writing his runaway best-seller. He is a kind and hopeful author. But I have to hope for so much more in a contemporary re-imagining of the Trinity.
