Book Reviews -- By: Matthew S. DeMoss

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 166:663 (Jul 2009)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss


Book Reviews

By The Faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity. By William P. Young. Los Angeles: Windblown Media, 2007. 256 pp. $14.99.

This book was written by a Christian father for his children, to help them understand his relationship with God. The book addresses the most difficult of all theological dilemmas, the goodness of God and the problem of evil. Where is God in the midst of pain and suffering? How can a good God allow the kinds of horrific evil that humans and other creatures experience? Why does He not do something to stop it?

In this novel the protagonist Mackenzie Allen Phillips receives an invitation from God to meet at a shack in the woods. It takes Mack a little while to decide to keep the appointment, but his curiosity and his pain eventually convince him to make the trip. When he arrives at the shack, it and its environment are transformed by the presence of God into an idyllic setting. Mack, too, undergoes a remarkable transformation, although that change takes longer to accomplish.

Four years earlier Mack’s youngest daughter Missy was kidnapped during a family outing. Her body has never been found, but the evidence pointed toward her murder at the hands of a serial pedophile at this abandoned shack in the Oregon wilderness. These years have been difficult for Mack and the rest of the family, a period he describes as “The Great Sadness.” But after spending a couple of days at the shack with God, Mack returns home a changed man. He has begun to understand how God’s love provides the basis of forgiveness and the power to change human lives. The transforming power of redemption through forgiveness is the theme of the book.

The horrific nightmare this family experienced is every parent’s worst fear, and thus the story connects with the reader at a deep level. The story stresses God’s love for His children, emphasizes human freedom as the cause of sin and evil, focuses on forgiveness and reconciliation as the solution to sin and evil, stresses the hope of eternal life in God’s presence in a new creation, and encourages the reader to interact with the human characters and God in a deeply meaningful way. Yet there are serious theological errors and problems that make it impossible to recommend the book.

Although the book itself is fiction, the author claims that the conversations between God and Mack reflect conversations he had with God. After years of such dialogues, Young was looking for a way to hand them down to his children. Thus the story is not real, but the conversations were. “So is the story true? The pain, the loss, the grief, the pr...

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