The Shack Disagreement

[beatrice_otter]

For those of you who don't know, The Shack is a best-selling book about Christian faith, and particularly how we deal with loss and grief, and lots of Christians love it and some Christians hate it and it just got made into a movie, and I wanted to know if I should take my youth group to see it.  Having never read the book, I asked my fellow pastors in an online forum.  Most said it was great, not perfect but with some really great things to discuss, and one was vehement that it was a horrible, destructive, and misleading theology and view of God.  So I asked him why he thought that, since everyone else thought it was great.  His key arguments:

1. It uses feminine imagery for God, which contradicts Scripture.
2. God is only loved in the book, never feared, and in Scripture he is always feared.

But, uh, dude,

1. The Bible uses feminine imagery for God in several places, and particularly maternal--Jesus describes himself as "a mother hen" who wants to gather his chicks into his wings, in the Hebrew Scriptures God describes Godself as a nursing mother a couple of times ... yeah, God-as-woman is a small part of Scripture but it's woven throughout.  Denying the maternal and feminine aspects of God are the thing that truly contradicts Scripture.
2. The greatest commandment as given by Jesus is to LOVE the Lord your God.  Not fear, LOVE.  And you know what?  He got that from the Hebrew Scriptures, he's quoting there.  So while the idea of fearing God is in Scripture, so is the idea of loving God.  Also, Biblical ideas of what it means to "fear" God are not what we talk about when we talk about fear.  It's a sort of awe-filled respect and awareness of vulnerability that we don't really get in English.

So his two major arguments against it are COMPLETELY bogus.  And wrong.  And, actually, make me more inclined to take the kids to see it, not less.  He notes other problems that (if he's right about them) are definitely issues, but ones that I think we would benefit from discussing, so again, a reason to take them to see it, not to avoid it.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I actually threw it at a wall I hated it so much. However, none of my problems were those. Because those are deeply WTF!?

[beatrice_otter]

May I ask what your problems were?

[muccamukk]

It's been a while (ten years?), but they were largely stuff that the movie will hopefully fix. And partly stuff that I hated because I was very much not the target audience.

The book had a lot of dodgy race stuff. God was portrayed as a motherly black woman, but I'm pretty sure the author had never met a black woman and she sounded like the maid from Gone with the Wind. Wisdom was a Latina woman who was described as sexy every third paragraph. I remember liking Jesus. A First Nation's story was part of the central frame, but there was no acknowledgement that First Nations people still existed outside of place names, or that their religion was legitimate, or that comparing a young white girl to an "Indian princess" was at all a problem.

The quality of the writing itself was awful.

The set up with the prettiest cutest blondest child in the world being kidnapped and tortured to death felt REALLY manipulative. Especially since the author set the father up as blameless in the most contrived manner possible (he couldn't have been watching his daughter on the beach when she was kidnapped, because he was busy rescuing his other kid from drowning in the lake!) We're 100% meant to id with the grieving father, and the girl and all the other characters felt like plot devices. I know it's a frame for a theological discussion, but it was a shitty frame. I dislike violence against women being used to advance male spiritual awakenings, and I dislike it doubly when it's a child.

Did I mention it was poorly written? So many dull descriptions of scenery!

The actually throw the book at the wall moment:
God: I did not take your daughter to test your faith. I don't use suffering to advance my design.
Dude: What about Christ Crucified?
God: Oh, well that suffering was totes needed on every level and has been for all time. (No further explanation given.)

I found the theology an infuriating combination of unoriginal, and not thought through.

[heliopausa]

Endorsing all of that.

editing to say: that was the book, not the movie. I don't know anything about the movie.

[muccamukk]

I mentioned it to Nenya yesterday and she responded, "Oh that fucking book," with some heat. For similar reasons. Growing up in a religious household, I think the muddy theology bothered her more than me.

[heliopausa]

I was also really put off by the initial presentation, which left it open to the naive reader to think it was real. I knew naive readers who weren't quite sure if it was or not. :(

[muccamukk]

Not to mention the "Missy Project" at the end, where we're to honour the memory of a fictional (OR IS SHE?) murdered child by sending copies of this book to all our friends/libraries/churches.

Nenya said that if she'd been sent that book when she was actually mourning something, she'd have burned it.

[alexseanchai]

Sounds like taking the kids to see it is a good decision.

[labingi]

Very interesting discussion--and I totally agree with you.

Jesus describes himself as "a mother hen" who wants to gather his chicks into his wings...

Hm, Jesus as Naoe in Mirage of Blaze. (Yes, that is where my mind went.)

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you!

[tielan]

So I think that even if there were fairly big issues with the story, it would serve as a starting-point for discussion. "What do you think the bible says about this? Shall we look at what Jesus says about these things?"

I've heard praise about it from Christian friends of mine, they tend towards the Evangelical side of things rather than the liberal side, and it may very well be that they're happy about a positive Christian portrayal, rather than the caricature that we're accustomed to seeing.