Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Next up, The Shack by Wm. Paul Young

This book gives an unconventional picture of the Trinity. What did you think of the way he describes it?

2 comments:

  1. Again--not Pastor Dan, but Sue


    The Shack’s presentation of God the Father as God the Mother made me a little uncomfortable. While the Bible tells us that we are made male and female in God’s image, I don’t believe this makes gender a non-issue. Jesus is a man. The universal Church is a bride. Wisdom (and Folly) are female. It seems safe to assume that God presents Himself in the Bible as masculine for a reason. I would venture to say that God’s definitions of masculine and feminine go way beyond anything we can perceive. The cosmic Masculine by which God identifies himself and the cosmic Feminine from which he distinguishes himself are too deep and complex to be understood. To make them interchangeable is to make them less and deny their respective glory and purpose. I’m afraid we start down a slippery slope when we attempt to “improve on” what’s in the Bible by spinning it to make it more palatable to our twenty-first century American minds.

    I do agree with and am touched by many of the thoughts in this book. The idea that genuine relationships are marked by submission is radical, even offensive in our culture. Yet if you are truly strong, you don’t have to constantly prove your strength. How much pain is caused by people insisting on winning? (Genuine relationships by definition do not include relationships where one party is consistently victimized by the other. Genuine relationship is the ideal.)

    I also loved the scene where the importance and power of forgiveness were discussed, and the line, “People are tenacious when it comes to the treasure of their imaginary independence.”

    My main complaint with The Shack was that the voices of the individual characters were sometimes plastic and two-dimensional. Black female Papa was reduced to a caricature. Did he really have her saying “Sho-nuff”? It also rather annoyed me how he rather overused “rather.”

    Still, I think this a worthwhile book--thought-provoking, poignant and refreshing, simple and profound.

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  2. The author of The Shack, Wm. Paul Young, sets out to introduce his audience to God in a way they have not encountered Him before. He uses Mack as the stand-in for an audience who believes that God is like a distant, dysfunctional father, and who questions God’s goodness in light of the great evil and tragedy that we all see in the world and many of us personally experience.

    The way the author describes the trinity is most controversial in that God the Father is represented as a jolly black woman. The Holy Spirit is portrayed as an Asian woman, which is also a bit controversial. But Jesus is simply a friendly Middle Eastern man, as we have always known him. It seems like the author is expecting for people to be taken aback by Papa’s gender, since he explains his reasoning explicitly in several places, and finally changes his representation of God to a father figure at the end of the book, after Mack has (and we have) learned what he intended to show us about how God is different from the way many of us have learned about him. Papa says, “To reveal myself to you as a very large, white, grandfather figure with a flowing beard, like Gandalf, would simply reinforce your religious stereotypes, and this weekend is not about reinforcing your religious stereotypes.” When Papa is challenged by Mack on why she appears to be a woman when God is normally represented as a male, she begins her answer with, “there are many reasons for that, and some of them go very deep.” Within this discussion it seems that Young is acknowledging that it isn’t no big deal to change the representation of God’s gender, but he feels that it’s important to help people part with all of the package of stereotypes they have about Him.

    As the book continues, Young does an excellent job explaining many attributes of the Trinity with his imagery and storytelling. I appreciated his descriptions of the personality of God’s three persons. It was a little confusing to have all three of them represented as humans, since in reality, Jesus is the only human manifestation of God. And in reality Jesus did actually do what Young is imagining the three persons of the trinity all doing in The Shack, when he came to earth to show his love for humanity and his sorrow at, sharing of and bearing of our suffering. But through their conversations, Young was able to show how it is possible for God to be good and still to allow evil in the world. He was also able to create a beautiful picture of the hope for redemption of creation that God promises us. This book is definitely not a theological textbook. But it is a fantastic jumping off point for the intended skeptical audience to come to terms with what it means that God “is especially fond of them.”

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