Anyone here read The Shack? Walter Henegar criticizing the book is akin to complaining about your aunt’s macaroni casserole, because everyone seems to love it no matter how bad it is for them. But The Shack may be worse than bad family cooking.

More significant, when Mack mentions biblical events or concepts (often in gross caricature), “God” promptly brushes them off and glibly explains how it really is. Unlike the biblical Jesus, who constantly quoted the Old Testament and spent many post-resurrection hours “opening their minds to understand the scriptures,” The Shack’s Papa [God the Father], Jesus, and Sarayu [Holy Spirit] turn Mack’s attention away from Scripture, coaxing him to trust instead their simplistic lessons set in idyllic, Thomas Kinkade-like scenes and delivered in the familiar therapeutic language of our age.

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Good fiction has the potential to illuminate biblical truth, but not when it effectively supplants it. We need the Bible, not The Shack. The true Word takes more work to understand, and it won’t always tell us what we want to hear, but we can trust it to reveal a greater, wiser, more loving, and more gloriously Triune God than any novelist could conceive.

I heard tonight Haven Ministries’ radio show on this book. They have a comment blog about it, and announce at the top of the page that they intend not to endorse or bash the book, but to engage it. This they say while offering the book to all donors who request it. Isn’t that an endorsement? Haven links to John Stackhouse’s blog for weightier comments like this: “It seems to me important that authors of fiction defend art as needing no justification on some other grounds. From a Christian point of view, a well-rendered novel—or short story, or poem, or song lyric—needs only to be good in and of itself.”

Also: “The Shack skims briefly over the surface of theology of religions, raising the question particularly of whether God reveals himself to and saves people of other religions. . . . I am strongly inclined myself to a theological conviction that God’s salvation is extended beyond the range of those who have heard the Gospel, understood it, and accepted it as true.”