A Discussion on The Shack, with Greg Thompson and Bill Wilder

The series will be taught in an interactive manner by Greg Thompson and Bill Wilder, addressing the four major themes below. In each case, we attempt to affirm goodness and truth where it is found in this book while gently challenging some of the book’s assertions and assumptions in the light of a distinctively Christian and Biblical perspective.

Below is the logic of the series as it was outlined ahead of time. Given the back-and-forth between Bill and Greg and those in attendance,the actual discussions were a little more--shall we say--dynamic.

• The Shack: God shows up in the strangest places

 In The Shack, Mack meets God (all three persons) in the very place where his young daughter had been brutally murdered. We need to affirm that God is indeed present in our deepest places of pain, as indeed he is in all the experiences of life. However, The Shack tends to oppose our experience of the God’s presence to the study of Scripture and tradition and leaves very little (if any) room for the gathered people of God and the sacraments. We can expect God to show up in these strange places as well, because he has promised to do so.

• Images of God: Who would have thought God looked like that?

In The Shack, Mack is surprised to find God the Father appearing as “a large, beaming African-American woman” and the Holy Spirit as a diminutive Asian woman. (Jesus appears as a more conventional carpenter.) While our images of God certainly need to be challenged, what if God has done so in a far more counter-cultural and surprising way: by asking us to submit ourselves to the very particular ways God has revealed himself (and humanity) in the person of Christ and in his Word?

• Systems and Circles: Does God really deliver us from power for the sake of relationship?

In The Shack, God (Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu) makes much of the fact that “systems of power” (including economic, political, and religious institutions) are inherently opposed to “circles of relationship,” which are characterized by non-coercive, egalitarian love.  Perhaps the Bible calls us to re-imagine a community and a world in which power and love are not inversely related but commensurate—in which power is given precisely to enable (imperfectly now but perfectly in the age to come) expressions of love in the Kingdom of God.

• Rumors of Glory: Can God really bring good out of evil?

 We concluded on the theme which gives The Shack its power: the pervasive hope that God can and will redeem “The Great Sadness” in our lives. (The subtitle of the book is “Where Tragedy Meets Eternity.”)