just read your reply to a question about the book “The Shack”. I appreciate your work and generally believe that you are right on and Spirit lead in your writings.
However all things considered I think this book is more of a tool of Satan to compromise and distort the Truth than a tool to help us understand God’s love.
I encourage you to read the commentaries I’ve included and consider todays headline on FoxNews.com about the state of Christian faith today.
This is clearly a work of fiction. It is not nor does it pretend to be a theological work. There’s no call within the book to believe what it says nor does it make any claim to truth. It’s simply one person’s opinion on what one facet of God’s character (His love) is like.
I could have saved a lot of time by just leaning on the reviews of others, but as I said in my answer I have read the book itself, therefore I don’t need the opinions of others to help me form mine. I value your input but I also have faith in the discernment the Lord has given me. In my opinion, the Christian community has cried wolf so many times about things like this that we have little if any credibility left in the world. Often our outcries only serve to make the things we protest that much more popular.
I’ve heard people complain that the book doesn’t say anything about sin or salvation, but it’s not about that. It’s about the healing of a believer who has suffered a tragedy few of us could endure by bringing him to a state of forgiveness. Others say it claims that all paths lead to God, but what it really says is that God’s followers have come from many places.
I would never recommend The Shack as the basis for a Bible study, and I wouldn’t use it as a discipleship tool. Nor do I believe the author intended it to be used that way. Besides, we already have a book for those things, the Bible. The Shack is not a parable, and it’s not an allegory. It’s a work of fiction and that’s all it is. Why can’t we just leave it at that?