Pastoral Reflections on The Shack
- Where is God in Senseless, Innocent suffering?
- The problem of Evil. The shack addresses this problem head on. I’ve heard preachers tell people to praise God when evil happens because it is a part of his great plan to bring about a greater good for us. Or I’ve heard well meaning people tell others it must be some way they have sinned to have brought this on ourselves.
- Disappointment with God. Mack asks, God, how could this happen? P. 53 Later he accuses God by saying, “If you couldn’t take care of Missy, how can I trust you to take care of me?” p. 82 Then he utters the most powerful accusation of all, “God is to blame.” P. 161. The authos believes we can empathize with Mack and wants us to know it’s OK to be angry and frustrated with God as long as it doesn’t become our permanent condition.
- God suffers with us. Where was God when Missy was kidnapped and murdered? In The Shack God says, “There was not a moment when we three were not with her”. God does not explain how this occurred, but Mack is comforted to know Missy did not die alone.
- Evil and Free Will
i. Evil, God tells Mack, is here because of the will to independence and power in human beings. (the author does not mention angelic beings and their role or none in this scheme).
ii. God does not violate our free will because God is Love and love does not force itself on us. God has the power to stop all suffering and evil, but that would require God to take back His gift to us of free will.
iii. What about the Old Testament where God brings disaster on human beings? Filter that through Jesus.
- Is it an all or nothing proposition? I’m not convinced so. Turning our wills over to God, praying specifically for God’s will in a person’s life and other circumstances might be ones in which God may violate our free will.
- Is God really a family of three?
The Bible tells us in all of God’s appearances, that God behind those appearances is Spirit and Love. God is not literally a black woman, a Middle Eastern Man, or a wispy asian woman, but God may appear as many images.
- Like many of us Mack wants to understand the mystery of God’s oneness and threeness. When he asks, Which one of you is God, all three answer in unison, “I am.”
- Author wants us to understand God as a loving community of divine persons. God is a circle of love, with no hierarchy, the latter which is a construct of sinful humanity
- Jesus. The shack implies that Jesus emptied himself of his divinity and did not draw on it in his life. He lived in complete dependence on God, his Father. And he told us we could do all the great things he did if we learned that same dependence on God.
- The God of the Shack is a community of perfect love who wants us to share that relationship. He, or they, want to draw us into that love if we will only allow it. The God of the Shack cannot act apart from love and does not wish to dominate, control or overpower us. This God is true to the way God is portrayed in the Bible, beyond our full comprehension but also accessible to our understanding because of his loving action of stooping down to us in divine revelation and by becoming incarnate in Jesus.
- Is God in charge but not in control?
- In at least one place the book suggests that God has intervened to stop much evil, but humans don’t know about it.
- God’s plan for evil. First, God makes it up to innocents who suffer. The joys of heaven make up for all the pain of this world. Second, God brings good out of evil without making evil good.
- Biblical portraits of God in the Bible are many, but we filter them all through the lens of Jesus. Can we see Jesus kidnapping, raping and murdering Missy? Then if someone says God did this, we have to say their interpretation of God is faulty, even if that interpretation appears in the bible.
- So finally, we have to say that God is in charge but not in control. Evil exists even though God does not cause evil. However, evil cannot escape God’s overarching plan for history.
