Articles

The implications of “The Shack” in our time
By John Langemann

I read “The Shack” after a Gospel artist told me that reading the book had changed his life because he had received insights about God and His love that he never had before.
After reading the book, I could not sleep that night. I had never before read such a clever insidious attack on the Trinitarian God, His Holy Word, the Bible, and on His followers, Christians. What made it especially distressing for me was that the attack was made from within Christendom and under the guise of being “Christian”.

Each of the collaborators involved in the production of “The Shack”. William Paul Young, Wayne Jacobson and Brad Cumming, despite protestations to the contrary, have individual and shared agendas to shake the very foundations of Christianity as it has been known for over two thousand years. They have used “The Shack” as a weapon to eradicate presuppositions that its readers may have had about God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, the institutional Church etc.

The Church (institutional and non-institutional) is ripe for annihilation because for too long, it has flirted with, courted and tolerated, doctrines, philosophies and practices that have been antithetical to what the Bible has clearly taught. The leaven that has been permitted to infuse the Church over many years, has now almost entirely leavened the whole lump (Galatians 5: 9).

The author, Paul Young claims that he only wrote the book for his children, yet he actively sought to have the book published by both Christian and secular book publishers (26 in all) to no avail. Wayne Jacobson and Brad Cummings formed their own publishing company to sell the book. When they receive challenges as to the misrepresentations made of God and Christianity in the book, both Young and Jacobson have often railed that “it’s only fiction”.

Of course their misrepresentation of God is a fiction, but they were hoping to hide their “out of the box” theology behind the guise that the book is merely a fictional story. All three have a very distinct theology which they have disingenuously propagated using a work of fiction as a vehicle to disseminate it. They believe, as truth, the doctrinal words which came out of the mouths of the four fictive characterisations of God found in the book.

It is my opinion that each one of them has soiled their minds by reading and imbibing materials over the years that Christians should have nothing to do with. They openly name fantasy, mystical, Gnostic and occultic writers as inspirations and co-formulators of their way of thinking.

They are also Postmoderns. Postmodernity is a philosophy which does not believe in universal, abiding, or objective truths. Any group of consensual people, according to Postmodernism, may develop and validate their own truths. It believes that nothing should be taught as truth. Everything must be subjectively evaluated and validated. It is also anti-foundational, whereas for Christians, Christ is their Rock of all ages.

“The Shack” has seduced and duped literally millions of people into believing that the fictional god depicted therein, is the same God as the God of the Bible. Millions have had their “itching ears” (2Timothy 4: 3) soothed by being told what they would like to hear about a god who looks the other way when one sins, who ultimately gets everyone to Heaven, whether they believe in Him or not and whether they repent of their sins or not.

The faux love, peace and freedom of the nineteen sixties eventually spewed out a Charles Manson. Only God knows what the false love, peace and freedom of the theology of “The Shack” will spew out in due course. Bible believing Christians should be alert and prepared for a total onslaught from the enemy of our souls while he is in his death throes, as well as for the return of their own Lord, Jesus Christ.

Can a Christian be a Postmodernist?
By Jordan Pickering

Christian postmodernists (CP) urge the church to ‘transition’ from their stagnant modernist Christianity to reflect the postmodern mood that pervades the rest of society. This is punted as a cure for churches that feel that their teaching and traditions no longer ‘fit’, and who are dissatisfied with the old way of seeing things. The trouble is, the CP movement urges us to choose between modernism and postmodernism, whereas, in comparison with the Biblical worldview, these are both inauthentic kinds of Christianity.

Disagreeing with postmodernism
Seminal CP books such as McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian dismiss the work done by the likes of Francis Schaeffer (and more recently, James Sire) in identifying the core elements of the Christian worldview. Without offering any argument, CP seems to treat Christianity as something that one adds on to whatever worldview rules the day, but not a worldview of its own.

Having dismissed the search for a Biblical view of the world, CP writers seem also not to concern themselves with comparing the core beliefs of postmodernism with scripture either. On page 19 of A New Kind of Christian, McLaren writes:

“Can you explain postmodern philosophy to me?” Neo replied: “I could, but I’m not sure it’s necessary… I believe it’s possible to describe postmodernity – the broad culture defined by its having moved beyond modernity – without having to go too deeply into postmodernism as a philosophy.”

So, while we are explicitly being told to change our theology in order to align ourselves with the postmodern world, we’re not being told what kind of philosophy is informing these changes.

When you do pay attention to the basic philosophy behind postmodernism, you discover that its core belief is not in ‘Grand Narratives’. In other words, postmodernism disbelieves that there are any ‘big stories’ that are true for everyone. So, we are free to believe the gospel as a story that is true for us, but it is not objectively true. At the heart of scripture, by contrast, is the belief that Jesus is the truth, and that the gospel is the key fact of history that determines the eternal fate of all people. They believe instead of so-called 'Petit Narratives' which are changeable, depending on the local context.

Secondly, postmodernism blames wars and suffering on people who are zealous for their big truths and who are willing to force their beliefs on others. So, postmodernism doesn’t like any authorities that might be trying to gain power over others. Postmodernism has no time, therefore, for the belief in authoritative, true scriptures, or a Great Commission that proclaims Christ as Lord, or for anyone who preaches that God will judge and punish the wrongdoer.

So, it’s obvious why McLaren avoids explaining postmodern philosophy. He’d have a hard time convincing us to transition to a worldview that is patently opposed to the gospel if he did.

The new is an old temptation
Christians have often been guilty of trying to conform Christianity to the worldview of the day. When Christian doctrine was still being worked out, Origen tried to understand scripture in the framework provided by Gnosticism, and did so successfully enough to inspire a number of later heresies.

What we now know as Modernist Christianity or Liberal Theology emerged from the work of a handful of theologians who made just this mistake. FC Baur was enamoured with the then-fashionable philosophy of Hegel, who saw ideas progressing through conflict and synthesis. Baur tried to read scripture in this way, and so imagined a strong division between Jewish and Greek Christians in the Early Church. This in turn led him to dismiss books such as Acts and Ephesians as being inauthentic (because they evidence unity, not conflict). For some reason, scores of theologians believed him.

Another modernist theologian, Rudolph Bultmann, found that supernaturalism in scripture clashed with modernist thinking. So he sought to ‘demythologise’ scripture in order to remove the embarrassing elements and to liberate the ‘true spiritual meaning’ behind the text. And, of course, the ‘true meaning’ happened to accord with just how the fashionable existentialists of his day thought.

Thus, as we move into a period dominated by another philosophical fashion, it should come as no surprise that some Christians are trying to fit Christianity in with the spirit of the age. Christian postmodernists are making the age-old mistake of trying to contemporise Christianity, instead of letting Christianity transform contemporary culture.

Learning from postmodernism
Postmodernism may be essentially anti-Christian, but that doesn’t mean that we are unable to learn anything from it. No movement can gain popularity without having truth within it. For example, where we tend to assume our own rightness and superiority to others, postmodernism has reminded us that the human grasp of the truth is often weak and slippery, and that we might indeed be wrong about many things and in need of correction, even from those we once thought inferior.

Secondly, postmodernism reminds us that people are corrupted by power, and that religion is abused as a mechanism for power plays. Religious people do use their God-given privileges in order to manipulate one another.

Thirdly, postmodernism eagerly tears down structures and authorities, and prefers to emphasise equality and relationship. This can serve as a reminder that our faith is organised around a network of relationships too, and so we should never let rituals and systems and programmes dominate our gatherings so that we lose sight of our communal partnership in the gospel.

Being a holy nation within a pagan world
The ruling principle for Christians in our engagement with our culture is that we are to be in the world, but not of it. We should know how to speak the same language as the world around us; we should know what concerns the world, and what bothers them about us. But we should also know to whom we belong, and the location of our citizenship.

Firstly, Christ has called us to be holy even as he is holy, and to imitate him. We learn what this means when we develop a Biblically saturated, Christian worldview. ‘You are my friends if you do what I command,’ he said.

Secondly, Christ has called us to take up our cross and follow him. This means that we must be willing to bear the shame and suffering of a world in which we are ‘aliens and strangers’ (1Peter 2:11). It presupposes that our faith will not fit in.

Thirdly, Christ has called us to proclaim the gospel until he returns, the apostolic gospel that must be protected from distortion and unstable teachers. Novelty and syncretism are the enemies of the good deposit that we’ve been told to guard (cf. 2Timothy 1:8-14).

The CP movement wants Christianity to keep in step with our culture; they want our theology to change so that it ‘speaks’ to a postmodern world. However, in so doing, they surrender too much of what is distinctively Christian, and rather than speaking to the postmodern world, they sound just like the postmodern world. They are in the world and of it.

So, Christians should not succumb to the temptation to try to fit in with the belief systems around us. It is our distinctiveness as Christ-like communities of light that makes us attractive to the watching world, not our ability to carve our truth into the awful likeness of whatever darkness is in fashion.

Christians imitate Christ. We see the world as our Lord does. We can’t be postmodernists without tearing out the heart of our faith.

No need to own or rent a Shack
By John Langemann

The use of a shack, by Paul Young, as a metaphor for where one hides the memories of one’s shameful acts of sin, is quite a well conceived idea. Millions of people who have read The Shack resonate with that, because almost all of them have done at least something in their lives for which they are ashamed of, and would not like anyone else to know anything about. And some are still doing things that they would not want friends, family members or business associates to know about.

Some of those people are Christians, and some are not. It is a relief to be told that does God not disapprove of one living in such a shack, and that He also calls it beautiful to boot, and furthermore, wants to crawl into the mess inside the shack. This is such a wonderful thing to hear, that it seems too good to be true. Well, like when most people who have burnt their fingers in investment schemes that seemed too good to be true; causing them big losses, this notion proposed by Paul Young, Wayne Jacobson and Brad Cummings (The writers of The Shack), is also too good to be true.

The three people involved in producing The Shack, often giggle and chuckle about the fact that they made God “Too good to be true for some people”. But where do they get the notion that a person’s mess is beautiful to God and that He wants to crawl into it? God only knows. They certainly did not find that notion in The Bible. Although we should also keep in mind that Young tells us that he treats things that he conjured up in his imagination as being real.

The real truth is that God does not treat sin as a thing of beauty, nor does He crawl into anyone’s mess. He is willing and able to extricate anyone out of their mess, but only under His stated conditions. Only if we confess our sins and repent of them, will God forgive us and start the process of extricating us from the slimy mire of our sins.

“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1: 9). If we do not confess and repent, God will not cosy up to us in our filth and we will not be forgiven, and we will be forced to live in, and to maintain the shack (or more appropriately, the outhouse). The façade that Paul Young put up while he was doing ‘Christian’ work and pretending to be a Christian, will be the façade that the unforgiven person will have to maintain until he she dies, or is forgiven.

It is strange for a Bible believing Christian to hear Paul Young say over and over, that his period of healing only began when he was caught out by his wife having an adulterous affair. He never mentions in his ‘sermons’ or interviews that the ‘transformation’ in his life began when he asked God to forgive him of his sins, or that he repented of them. One will also not find repentance in The Shack. In fact Young uses the character ‘Sophia’ (the supposed wisdom of God) to pooh pooh the idea that one needs to repent. Mack asks her: “What if I repent? What then? ‘Is there something you wish to repent of, Mackenzie?’ she asked, unfazed by his outburst.” It is as if she was saying: “What would you want to do something like that for, you silly boy.”

In the very first sermon that Jesus preached when He walked on earth, He said: “Repent for the kingdom of God is near.” (Matthew 4: 17). Repentance is not only being sorry for sinning against God (And it is certainly not about being sorry for the mess we’re in), it is about having a change of heart; a turning 180 degrees from how we were thinking and living, with and by the help of God’s Holy Spirit.

If you are a born again, Bible believing Christian, and you are reading this article, know this; that no matter what you have done in the past that has been shameful, something for which you would be mortified if anyone found out; if you have sincerely repented of that sin, or number of sins, and asked God for forgiveness, He has forgiven you. There is absolutely no need to hide in a filthy shack. Psalm 103: 12 tells us that God casts the memory of that sin (juridically speaking) as far as the East is from the West (How far is that?). “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8: 1).

Christian! Do not be duped into thinking that you have a secret Shack. If you have handed your secret sin over to Jesus and repented, He has forgiven you. The accuser, Satan, will try and resurrect the memory of past sins, but where there was previous guilt, you now stand under God not guilty. There is no reason why you need to tell anyone else about your past (unless God clearly directs you to do so). There is also no need to carry a burden which Jesus has already lifted from you. Jesus is busy preparing a room in a mansion for you. You do not need to be living with the pigs (Luke 15: 15-22) “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” (Isaiah 1: 18).

If, however, you are living a lie, behind a false façade, Repent, for nothing else can pull you out of the mire, or break down the shack where you are living at present. You cannot be in Christ without first acknowledging your sin, confessing it and repenting of them. God will never crawl into your mess with you. Young claims it took eleven years for him to get out of his shack. If the Son has set you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8: 36). You will be free of the guilt instantly, even if you may have to deal with some of the consequences of your actions for a while.