"Anyone who is strongly influenced by the imaginative world of The Shack will be totally unprepared for the far more multi-dimensional and complex God that you actually meet when you read the Bible."

From Nathan Heller at http://www.slate.com] Slate

http://www.slate.com/id/2255741/ Why We Love The Shack

Theologically speaking, there is something for everybody in The Shack, but mostly in the sense that there is something for everybody in a meatloaf. The book takes what it can from several systems of belief and bakes them together into a doctrinally unidentifiable mush.

I’ll see your mush and raise you a pound of tripe.

I don’t understand the notion that on the one hand it’s only fiction and shouldn’t be taken seriously while in the next breath advocating its use in a Bible study setting??? False teaching is false teaching, and I’d rather have steak than potted meat, or sit at a nice clean well-set table to eat instead of digging through the dumpster behind McDonald’s for a chicken nugget.

Keller is wrong about one thing- I’m the last person on earth to not have read the book. That’s why I read reviews- so someone else can waste their time reading the book and warn me not to waste mine. :p I have to be enormously curious to delve into a book that so many have found objectionable.

I have not and have no intention in wasting my time reading that book. I’m actually kind of surprised that it still is generating this level of publicity.

I will say, I am dismayed at those that I know who I view as spiritually mature being caught up in the hoopla surrounding this book. I don’t think I’m terribly spiritually astute, but all I got when I heard about this book was “danger, Will Robinson” http://smileys.on-my-web.com/repository/Unhappy/unhappy-089.gif[/IMG]
feelings! Perhaps that’s because we had so recently come out of a very bad church situation and I was more in tune with spiritual deception.

…and I think Keller’s review is spot on. I “had” to read the book, as I’ve listened to various people (some family members, some acquaintances, etc.) tell me what they loved and hated about it, and ask my opinion of it. It happened enough that I grudgingly put it on my “to read” list sometime last year and finally got around to reading it last month. The subtitle on the front cover is what really got me: something about this book being this generation’s Pilgrim’s Progress…yeah, right!

Julie,
you are better than me…I would read 10 pages get mad and quit…after about half of it…I gave up….one of the few books i never finished.

[rogercarlson] Julie,
you are better than me…I would read 10 pages get mad and quit…after about half of it…I gave up….one of the few books i never finished.

I would read it, get mad, and start griping at it, and my dh would give me the boogy eye until I finished it.

Yes, I also talk to the television, especially when watching the news. http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys.php] http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/smiley-angry013.gif

[rogercarlson] Julie,
you are better than me…I would read 10 pages get mad and quit…after about half of it…I gave up….one of the few books i never finished.

This is really what I felt like doing. It’s not “my kind of book” stylistically; isn’t gripping in any way or particularly well written. I kept getting really hung up on the “Trinity” characters. I didn’t think I would…thought I would maybe see them as (flawed) symbolism/literary devices, but would be able to look past that element to the book’s “deeper problems.” Not so…I got fed up with the words and behaviors attributed to “Jesus” and “Papa” (“Papa” was a woman…too much for me.). And then, all of the flawed, touchy-feely “doctrine”…I wanted to put the book down many times, but a family member was eager to hear my feedback as I turned each page and kept asking if I’d finished it yet. I brought the book home, thinking I’d go back and make notes in in sometime, so that I could comment as needed in the future, but I haven’t done that yet. At least I can say I read it…

Julie,

I totally understand. I did the same thing with the Da Vincie Code. I had an unsaved sister that really wanted my opinion. Dan Brown was a better author but it was still very hard to read. I thought that I could get through the Shack….I just couldnt for the same reasons as you. You just had more discipline than I had. :)