An excellent review concerning The Shack. I have not wanted to wade into this, but my conscience would not be clear before God if I did not take the opportunity to tear down stongholds and arguments so obviously raised up against the true and clear knowledge of God as He has revealed Himself in Scripture (2 Cor 10:4,5). I would remind us all that truth is not measured by the amount of true statements or assertions detected. Truth is measured by the absence of falsehood. That is what makes heresy so easy to swallow; it contains enough true statements to divert us from the deceptiveness and subversiveness of the lies.
I don’t care about the author’s intent and neither should you. Only he and God really know the answer to that one regardless of what the stated intent of the author was. I don’t care who he wrote it for; his kids, his wife, his Sunday school class, his English lit professor. I don’t care to argue how it stacks up against Narnia or Pilgrim’s Progress as a work of fiction. All those are peripheral arguments until the main issue is dealt with; what the author actually said, wrote, asserted, affirmed, insinuated, alluded to, encouraged, and mocked compared to what the Scriptures teach. That’s what I care about. And as this article so clearly points out, what the author actually said when compared with Scripture, regardless of the emotional packaging it is wrapped in, and regardless of the true statements that make it the emotional appeal that much more gripping, ought to make a Christian son or daughter recoil in righteous anger and indignation at the blaspheming of their Father.
Thank you Tim for such a helpful, careful and God honoring handling of this controversial work.
