The Shack, Revisited, and Still Shaking My Head.

Several years ago when the book The Shack was all the rage, I wrote a couple of pretty, well, scathing and maybe nasty critiques of it. I don’t critique anything I haven’t seen or read (except porn or really grotesque horror), so I had read it. I understood its attraction and I can’t say I wasn’t touched by it. It had some good parts. The author had suffered abuse in missionary kids school, something that has come to light for many others over the last twenty years. This was his way of working through that pain.

But it also was highly problematic, theologically. One, the embodiment of God. Only Jesus embodied God in the incarnation.  Second, the racism of the mammy “God the Father.” That one still makes me shake my head. Third, “Sophia” as a fourth member of the Trinity. Wisdom in the Old Testament is a metaphor or stand-in for Jesus, the Word. Fourth, the subjectivity that drove the theology, and the cherry-picking of Scripture.

Yet many people said “I really understood God’s love after reading it. I really felt like God loved me.” Those statements puzzled me more than anything. Did you really need more than the gospel to show He loved you? Do you need more than the crucifixion and resurrection accounts in the Bible to convince you? Do you need more than God’s everyday sustenance?

And I have a deeper question—why do you not “feel” God’s love in the first place? Where is that lack of feeling coming from? What has God done to make you not feel loved?

I don’t want to come off as a curmudgeon. We all have experiences that can cause us to question God’s love. In my case, experiences cause me puzzlement and confusion over God’s purpose and plan more than His love.  But I would encourage you not to depend on pop culture to “feel” God’s love. I would also encourage you not to confuse God’s gifts (or perceived gifts and physical objects in general) with God’s love. They are not the same, and that could perhaps be the cause of much of our feeling unloved.

I tease my husband that Walmart’s theme song should be “You can’t always get what you want” a song from the Rolling Stones. The last line, “But if you try sometimes, you get what you need.” Walmart is notorious for not carrying brands it used to, all of a sudden. My dog gets the same song: “Nala, you can’t always get what you want” (in her case, treats).

If we mistake getting what we want for God’s love, we are in a dangerous place. With God, you get what you need, and you don’t even have to try. Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

God’s love is the great theme of the Bible. Don’t look for it in a flash-in-the-pan piece of fiction.