The Shack
Author:
Genres: Literature & Fiction, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Religion & Spirituality
Book Type: Paperback
Author:
Genres: Literature & Fiction, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Religion & Spirituality
Book Type: Paperback
Helpful Score: 4
When I heard about "The Shack" in early 2008, it was draped in controversy over its depiction of God.
The heart of this controversy wasn't just that God was portrayed as a black woman rather than as a grandfatherly figure with a flowing beard, nor that Jesus looks Middle Eastern, nor even that the Holy Spirit is portrayed as a hard-to-see Asian woman. The issue was that God was portrayed wrong, and in an irreverent, blasphemous or sacrilegious manner.
Now having read the book -- and apparently I was at least the third owner of this particular copy, via Paperback Swap -- I can't see what the fuss was about. True, its protagonist gets what many of us have wanted desperately -- a chance to get some clear answers from God about why life stinks so much, so often -- but while there is little doubt that the author feels that God deserves to have all the right answers and that his hero should be satisfied with them, all these answers fall well within orthodoxy, and even within evangelical orthodoxy in particular. So it's hard to see why a primarily (presumably) evangelical readership would be distressed by them.
The book's not offensive, at least not to me; but I did find it fairly uninteresting.
As fiction goes, it's pretty poor stuff, using the death of a man's young daughter as the vehicle to convey a story about a man's weekend getaway with God. It's a clever idea, but one more suited for a sermon illustration than for a book. And, as a result, that is what this book reads like -- a series of sermons on the nature of faith and suffering, God's love, the humanity of Jesus, and other issues that believers have struggled with for ages, all thinly disguised as a conversation with God. They don't go particularly deep, although people who have never asked these questions at all may find that "The Shack" offers a good place to start exploring.
The heart of this controversy wasn't just that God was portrayed as a black woman rather than as a grandfatherly figure with a flowing beard, nor that Jesus looks Middle Eastern, nor even that the Holy Spirit is portrayed as a hard-to-see Asian woman. The issue was that God was portrayed wrong, and in an irreverent, blasphemous or sacrilegious manner.
Now having read the book -- and apparently I was at least the third owner of this particular copy, via Paperback Swap -- I can't see what the fuss was about. True, its protagonist gets what many of us have wanted desperately -- a chance to get some clear answers from God about why life stinks so much, so often -- but while there is little doubt that the author feels that God deserves to have all the right answers and that his hero should be satisfied with them, all these answers fall well within orthodoxy, and even within evangelical orthodoxy in particular. So it's hard to see why a primarily (presumably) evangelical readership would be distressed by them.
The book's not offensive, at least not to me; but I did find it fairly uninteresting.
As fiction goes, it's pretty poor stuff, using the death of a man's young daughter as the vehicle to convey a story about a man's weekend getaway with God. It's a clever idea, but one more suited for a sermon illustration than for a book. And, as a result, that is what this book reads like -- a series of sermons on the nature of faith and suffering, God's love, the humanity of Jesus, and other issues that believers have struggled with for ages, all thinly disguised as a conversation with God. They don't go particularly deep, although people who have never asked these questions at all may find that "The Shack" offers a good place to start exploring.
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