I have read the Shack of Mack.
I have read this paperback.
I would not give it to my friends.
I might just spoil how it ends.

[. . .]

That Mack in Shack!
That Mack in Shack!
I do not like that Mack in Shack!

Instead of writing like his favorite authors, though, he simply asserts in his own sentences the effects that their writing has on him. The result is oppressive, as in the description of a tree that the character Mack crashes into: As he lies prone and looks up into the tree, it is said “to stand over him with a smug look mixed with disgust and not a little disappointment.” Take a moment right now, reader, to see if you can arrange your face into an expression that communicates smugness mixed with disgust and disappointment. You will find it “not a little” impossible, and you have greater expressive range than trees. This is typical of the way Young projects attitudes rather than actually describing anything.

[. . .]

Whatever religious readers may make of the theological Trinity in this book, the most heretical trinity is surely this trinity of the Foreword and the first chapter, wherein three personas speak to us in a single confused voice, crying out with a shrill faux-folksiness, “Please like me! Please like me! I’m ever so authentic!”

[. . .]

And the clichés became flesh, and they dwelt in the shack. Throughout this section, the worst narrative passages sound something like “By the time Mack woke up, Jesus already had the waffles a-cookin’, and the Holy Ghost had cracked a couple eggs.” That is not an actual quotation, but here is one: Papa, the woman who portrays God the Father, reflects on her tendency to love everybody by saying, “”Guess that’s jes’ the way I is.” And before the reader can finish rubbing his eyes in disbelief, three lines later Papa says “Sho’ nuff!” Though he comes perilously close, Young at least manages to keep his God character from saying “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout rulin’ no universe!”

Eugene Peterson
Said it was good as Bunyan.
He must have meant Paul.

[. . .]

My copy was free
But I almost lost my mind
Inside of the Shack.

While fiction is by definition a story that doesn't pretend to be true, it still must adhere to certain basic rules. You can create any universe you like, but once you've created it, you must stick to its internal logic. If zurts are green and fly and jurts are blue and don't fly, you cannot willy-nilly switch these “facts” around, even if they are totally products of your imagination. And if for some reason in your story we see a blue jurt that is flying, you'd better have a good narrative explanation for why or else you've confused the reader.

[. . .]

If you're going to ground your fiction in the real world, then it must conform to the rules of the real world we live in. No unicorns or magic squirrels allowed. Even one of my favorite literary genres, Magical Realism, adheres to certain basic rules.

So if you're going to have God as a character in your real-world fiction, then you must deal with God as he has revealed himself in Scripture. By using the Trinity as characters in this story set in the real world, The Shack author William P. Young is clearly indicating that he's supposedly talking about the God of Christianity. But God has said certain things about himself in Scripture, and much of what Young does in this novel contradicts that. I don't care if he's trying to make God more “accessible.” He's violated the rules of fiction.

[. . .]

To those people who have snapped up copies of The Shack to give to non-Christian friends, you are doing them no favors. You are introducing them to a false god. You are inoculating them against the claims of the True God of Scripture. And more to the point, you're just giving them bad fiction.

Recommended Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications by D. A. Carson

[ECM writers' frequent use of “absolutist” language], perhaps, is the wry irony that lies at the heart of this movement, or “conversation.” In its tone and approach, it tends to see the world in very black-and-white categories. Of all the Christian writers who explore postmodernism, none is quite so modernist--so absolutist--as the emerging church movement leaders in their defense of postmodern approaches.

It is easy to understand why. Most theological aberrations appeal to particular segments of Christendom in general, or of evangelicalism in particular.

[. . .]

One of the striking commonalities among [ECM] leaders is the high number of them who come from intensely conservative or even fundamentalist backgrounds. When they describe the kinds of churches from which they spring, a very high percentage of them have emerged from a tradition that is substantially separated from the culture. These churches often lay considerable emphasis on getting certain doctrine, often cast in fundamentalist mode, nicely constructed and confessed. The passage of time has moved these churches farther and farther from the very different directions being pursued by the broader culture, and sensitive and concerned individuals within such traditions finally make a break, not least for the gospel's sake. It becomes a mark of freedom to have a glass of wine and watch some movies that our former ecclesiastical friends wouldn't approve. Understandably, the pendulum may continue to swing a long way.

None of this background is meant to determine whether the emerging church movement is right or wrong, biblically faithful or otherwise. Rather, it shows that a fair amount of its heat and overgeneralizing seems to spring from the mistaken assumption that most of traditional evengalicalism is just like the conservative churches from which they came. That betrays the narrowness of many of their backgrounds and helps to explain why their rhetoric and appeals to postmodern sensitivity sound so absolutist: this is the language and rhetoric on which they were weaned.

Read that last paragraph again, if you wish — I had thought to add emphasis but that would have meant italicizing all of it.

In summary: tradition-centered American Churchianity is contributing to a lot of this. In speaking the language of churchese, making up unwritten, extra-Biblical rules for God's House, and promoting antique evangelism, it's not only turning many people away from Christianity, but resulting in overreactions from ECM writer Brian McLaren and others, who despite their sometimes-accurate descriptions offer anti-Biblical prescriptions for the Church.

Ergo, thanks a lot, Churchianity.

But even then, as Carson points out, many of the ECM leaders' absolutist condemnations of the supposed evils of absolutism or “modernism” ignore the great accomplishments and work of God Almighty, inherent in even what now might qualify as irrelevant Churchianity. Some of those traditions were relevant at one time; we don't need a genius to remind us that traditions change.

And ECM proponents seem to forget that all they're doing is setting up alternate traditions. Scented candles, visualization-based “conversation” verbiage, and postmodernism-versus-modernism wordplay likely won't be playing in about 25 years. It won't be evil to cling to extra-Biblical tradition then, just as it isn't evil now.

Indeed, the Bible is clear that the only sin in following tradition is expecting everyone else to do the same and getting your head stuck in the clouds or elsewhere if other people don't. Is that not similar to what ECM proponents are doing now? Perhaps history — or at least the history of Church movements — is cyclical after all.