Several people I know have compared the author (William Paul Young) to C. S. Lewis, and raved on about how they have bought copies of the book for all of their friends.  So I figured it couldn’t be all that bad.

Unfortunately, the book not all that good.  The story opens with a completely gratuitous, semantic-free, emotionally manipulative series of images.  Every hackneyed, melodramatic tear-jerking theme is compressed into the first 60 pages – a young boy watching his mother get beaten, being beaten himself by his father, murdering his father and running away, and having his child be murdered.  The storytelling has the over-the-top hyperbolic emotional feel of a southern revivalist preacher who likes to “soften up” his audience with manipulative stories to elicit a response.

If you are at all familiar with C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Homer, Shakespeare, or The Bible; you will know that emotions can be used to add a deep dimension of meaning and symbolism to stories.  This is a sign of good literature, and when you have learned to appreciate such masterful use of emotions to add semantic value to storytelling, you readily notice the lack of substance in the gratuitous manipulative use of emotions demonstrated in books like “The Shack”.

Worse yet, after “hooking” you with the mindless tear-jerker, the story shifts abruptly.  Very abruptly.  The protagonist finds himself in a shack, spending time with God the Father (a black woman), Jesus (a middle-eastern man), and The Holy Ghost (an Asian woman).  For the remaining 200 pages of the book, the plot consists of the protagonist having conversations with these three.  This is what passes as brilliant storytelling.  The author “hooks” you with a tear-jerker, and then makes you listen to 200 pages of boring intellectual sermons, in the form of carefully-scripted conversation that is completely unrealistic and forced.  In this sense, it feels a bit like one of those spiritual bubble-gum Richard Bach books, or like an Ayn Rand novel, where half the book is soliloquy.

Apart from the poor caliber of storytelling, the author displays a rather pitiable set of prejudices in an attempt to appear “culturally diverse”.  It’s as if a white-bread pastor from Minnesota sat down and thought, “What things would I have to show off in order to appear ‘universal’ to all Americans?”.  The result is an almost comical amalgam of the sorts of stereotypes you’d see only from watching too much “Oprah”.  In fact, the author explains in the opening notes that he dreams of this book becoming a Hollywood movie, so this isn’t exactly a surprise.  Not only does the book ape various television stereotypes in a rather naive and unsubtle way, the author panders randomly to various “causes du jure”.

Furthermore, the content of the 200 pages sermon is the sort of content that will not appeal to a broad audience, and is inaccessible to many for whom it might appeal.  It’s almost entirely theology; and a sort of cheesy spiritualized theology aimed squarely at readers of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”.  This isn’t to say that it’s terrible, but there is a very small, exclusive audience who can swallow this stuff.  This sort of navel-gazing spiritual fluff is preaching to the choir, and I imagine that many who give the book to unbelievers would be upset to find out how decisively the average non-believer will be repulsed by such a book.

My wife urged me to be charitable, since “not every popular book needs to be great literature”.  And that is true.  This book may well be of the caliber of a Tom Clancy novel, but I wouldn’t know, since I don’t read Tom Clancy.  I just want to be clear that this is absolutely no comparison to C.S. Lewis.  It’s not even in the same planetary system.

In terms on theology, I actually didn’t find much to complain about.  There were a handful of places where I felt the author was gravely wrong about important issues.  But there were scores of areas where the author was completely right about issues which confuse most people.  So, on the whole, I thought it was pretty good.  I am looking forward to hearing what my pastor thought.  If his points concur with mine, it will be a great occasion for me to puff myself up with pride and vanity.

Some of the things that disturbed me about the theology:

• The author argues that God never punishes his children, because “Love never coerces”.  The author himself seems to be unable to draw a distinction between abuse and discipline.  Hosea 4:14 comes to mind.
• The author seems unable to distinguish between selfish tears of frustration, and tears at God’s greatness and mercy.  He states that “it does a soul good to let the waters run once in a while”.  This is a stunning perversion of the “healing waters” that Theresa of Avila treated so thoroughly in her writings.
• The author seems very confused about the role of “forgive your enemies”, and often flirts with what seems like a theology of karma.
• The author often flirts with the idea that everyone may one day be redeemed, and that one day “all death will be gone”.  It appears that the author may not believe that anyone will be ultimately condemned to eternal death.