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The Shack

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Author: William P. Young
Creator: Wayne Jacobsen & Brad Cummings
Publisher: Windblown Media
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$14.99~~
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

1508 reviews
Sales Rank: 2

Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.8

ISBN: 0964729237
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780964729230
ASIN: 0964729237

Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Customer Reviews:

Showing reviews 866-870 of 1508

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The Shack A Great Place for All June 22, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

Can God present Himself as a hefty black woman with a sense of humor? Can Jesus stand by looking like the Brawny Man, covered with sawdust? Can the spirit look like an Asian woman?

Well, Christ Himself said "all things are possible with God?" right after that comment about rich men and camels and eyes of needles. So, why not?

For a sense of what the faraway God can look like, I recommend The Shack. It will no doubt make theologians nuts, but it's a good read and and a feel-good read. If you've suffered a tragedy in life, read The Shack. You'll feel better when done, plus, camels hopping through eyes of needles must be as likely as The Shake being realistic.

The world of Christians, often seen as a gated community, is really a wide open city. All are welcome. The Shack underlines that message dramatically.

Read The Shack. Think about it. If it makes you feel good, consider the possibility that the words of Jesus promising absolute salvation--for eternity--for all us sinners are true.

The so called Good News is hard to receive because, well, it's too good to be true. But it is true. Try it out, believe it, then go where it takes you.

That's all. The rest is up to God and you.

Tom

5 out of 5 stars

Thought Provoking June 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

The Shack provokes thoughts about who God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit really are in contrast to who we think they are. I haven't been so affected by a book since Ninety Minutes in Heaven. Some readers may be skeptical, but all will be moved. No one can argue with another person's experience or what that person perceives it to be. First-hand face-to-face encounters with God intrigue me. I thank God for giving us a modern day view of His being. "God is a verb."
Barbara Eubanks
-author of
Humorous Happenings in Holy Places
and
And the Angels Laughed

5 out of 5 stars

Seeing God as He is June 22, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

Wow! The Shack has truly opened my eyes to The Papa,Son, and Holy Spirit.
Through the experiences that Mack had to go through of losing his child in such a terrible way. God (Papa) gives him understanding and wisdom to all of lifes questions. It is one of the best books I have ever read, next to The Holy Bible.
A life changing experience!

3 out of 5 stars

A Very Different Approach of the Trinity June 22, 2008
2 out of 7 found this review helpful

This is the most down to earth explanation for the Trinity, even though it threw me for a loop. God is Papa, a large Black woman who is the cook. Jesus is a "normal" human-God person who wears the clothing of today. The Holy Spirit was portrayed as an Asian female who was more invisible at times. Mack was suffering great pain over the murder of his little girl, and had basically turned from God. However, one is never quite sure if he had a vision, a dream, an hallucination, or a revelation when he returned to the shack at the invitation of "Papa". I am giving three stars for the forgiveness found and the methodology of the writer. However, I still have more questions than answers after reading this book. It was more difficult to understand than my Bible, by far.

1 out of 5 stars

Is The Shack Emergent? June 21, 2008
5 out of 9 found this review helpful

I didn't enjoy reading this book. The early chapters were slow and strange. The long encounter with God was preachy. The theology was not good.

I didn't feel attracted to Mack (the main character) at all. He seemed like an airhead with selfish expectations. I know people turn against God in the face of disasters (his daughter is kidnapped and killed) but it
has never made much sense to me. I would be glad to go through such a disaster with God, and I feel sorry for those who have to go through them without him. Expectations on God to protect us from the fallen world seem infantile and ungrateful to me. The amazing thing is not that tragedy occurs, but that God is willing to have anything to do with us. Mack's reaction to revelations from God in dialog are usually bland, uncurious, and dense. He's mostly a foil, or straight man, for the lines from God.

At the heart of this book is a portrayal of God's immanence. Young pictures God the Father, as a friendly "very large black woman" named "Papa," Jesus as a jean-wearing guy who clumsily drops the bowl of sauce and says, "true that," and the spirit as a partially transparent Asian girl. All three talk in a friendly, familiar way with Mack. The endearing, sometimes almost mushy love these three exhibit is appealing from the standpoint of our relationship with God, and I think this aspect of God is biblical, even if exaggerated in this story.

Unfortunately, God's transcendence, justice, authority, and truthfulness are lost in this portrayal.

Lack of transcendence
I was uncomfortable with the notion of this large woman representing the Father who, according to scripture, "dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see." This is the same God to warned Moses that nobody can see God and live. Immanence is stressed in the Bible through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but the Father always stands for pure transcendence.
In the Bible, people usually fall on their face when confronted by God. Paul was blind for three days--and these encounters only involved the Son. In The Shack, the relatively irreverent Mac repeatedly throws caustic charges at God the Father:
"How can you say that with all the pain in this world, all the wars and disasters that destroy thousands?"
"But the cost!... It all sounds like the end justifies the means, that to get what you want you will go to any length, even if it costs the lives of billions of people." 125
One's credulity is stretched constantly by the plot anyway, but I found my credulity reaching the breaking point with this picture of a man challenging God the Father's legitimacy and fairness to his face. No sufficient answer is given--just smiling assurances that it all works out for love.

Lack of justice
The justice of God completely disappears in Young's portrayal. And for this reason alone, I'm not surprised the book is popular with emergent thinkers. I think this is a major theme in emergent theology--they have virtually eliminated justice as an attribute of God. One emergent book after another heaps scorn on any portrayal of God as one who promises death to sinners. This is why so many emergent thinkers have been questioning the penal substitution understanding of the cross of Christ.
McLaren and Chalke are completely baffled as to why God would find it necessary to inflict pain on his son. They have both referred to this idea as "cosmic child abuse." If God wants to forgive sin, they wonder, why doesn't he just do it? That question makes sense for a God without the attribute of justice. The emergent god is way too nice to do anything like judging people in hell. An all-loving God unconcerned with righteousness and justice would never do something mean like that.

In The Shack, Mack asks papa whether she is especially fond of all or are there those who she is not especially fond of. She answers,
Nope, I haven't been able to find any. Guess that's jes' the way I is."
Mack, was interested. "Do you ever get mad at any of them?"
"Sho `nuf! What parent doesn't? There is a lot to be mad about in the mess my kids have made and in the mess they're in. I don't like a lot of choices they make, but that anger--especially for me--is an expression of love all the same. I love the ones I am angry with just as much as those I'm not." 119
Mack is incredulous. Responding to his amazement, papa says,
"I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It's not my purpose to punish it; it's my joy to cure it." 120

In fairness, God doesn't say sin is okay in this book, but the absence of justice is a glaring flaw. Apparently, we don't need to be adopted through conversion to become a child of God. All humans are his children, and all entitled to his love as sons and daughters.

Other emergent themes emerge as well, including deprecating the sufficiency and clarity of the Bible, deprecating authority, and the exclusivity of Christ. I detail these on my blog (authenticmeansreal)
-Dennis McCallum, author, Organic Disciplemaking: Mentoring Others Into Spiritual Maturity And Leadership

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