WHAT’S ALL THE HOOPLA ABOUT THE SHACK?

Recently Amy Deardon, an acquaintance of mine, emailed me and asked my opinion about the book The Shack. Every now and then a book will create a buying frenzy and catapult to the best seller list for reasons we can’t always pinpoint.

Cases in point would include the Left Behind Series, the Prayer of Jabez, and the Davinci Code. This seems to indicate that people are spiritually hungry and may gravitate toward books that scratch their itch, even when some might seem a bit bent in their theology. (I won’t name which of this list fall into that grouping.) There’s nothing new under the sun, just a new way of putting a spin on it.

Whatever the case, the Shack ,which is a fiction work and, unless I mistaken an allegory, hit this quirky niche and the rest is history. Not having read the book (I usually tend to steer clear of books that create buying frenzies because I am naturally suspicious of them.) I could not give my friend much feedback.

One person on one of my writers’ lists couldn’t stomach the book because she felt it was wrong to depict God with feminine charactersistics and it was disrespectful to him. I did tell Amy that I took issue with at least the feminine characteristic argument, having read the scripture passages in Genesis which talk about “Let us create man in our own image,” didn’t feel we could rule out God having a feminine side.

We try to disect him with our finite brains, but he still defies description. Therefore, it is very possible that he does have feminine characteristics, especially since he created both male and female in his image.

That said, Amy wrote back and gave several sources that have looked at the Shack and reached their own conclusions. She also posted her own thoughts regarding the book on her blog.

http://amydeardon.blogspot.com/2008/07/shack.html

Two that give a negative/cautionary tone are:

http://www.mynameisrush.com/blog

http://www.challies.com/archives/book-reviews/the-shack-by-william-p-young.php

More balanced views can be found here

http://www.breakpoint.org/listingarticle.asp?ID=7830

http://lifestream.org/blog/?p=530

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Teena Stewart, Editor DreamBuilders Ministry in Motion Blog

Author, Successful Small Groups from Concept to Practice

http://www.ministryinmotion.net/teena_stewart.html