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I finished William P. Young’s The Shack yesterday, but I still have things that I want to say about it. There are some quotes that still stand out in my mind. Plus, I want to comment on The Shack‘s explanations for why God permits evil—its theodicy. Here are three items:
1. On page 98, Papa (God the Father) says this: “…The problem is that many folks try to grasp some sense of who I am by taking the best version of themselves, projecting that to the nth degree, factoring in all the goodness they can perceive, which often isn’t much, then call that God. And while it may seem like a noble effort, the truth is that it falls pitifully short of who I really am. I’m not merely the best version of you that you can think of. I am far more than that, above and beyond all that you can ask or think.”
But is seeing God as the best version of ourselves even avoidable? Whenever we define anything, we bring ourselves into our definition, right? In praise-and-worship, when I sing praises to a God whom I can’t even see, what exactly am I supposed to be praising? What’s supposed to be going through my mind? For me, its my conception of God, shaped by what I choose to focus on in the Bible. Fundamentalists may gasp at this: “Oh, you’re creating God in your own image, and picking and choosing from the Bible! That’s idolatry.” But let me ask them: whenever they praise God, do they focus on the Bible passages in which God commands the Israelites to slaughter Canaanite children? I’m not asking them if they believe in those passages—of course they do! I’m asking if those passages deeply impact their image of God, which they carry around in their day-to-day lives. Whenever we read and interpret the Bible, we bring who we are into the equation.
To be honest, and this may be because of my social difficulties, I have a hard time knowing what makes another human being tick, let alone God. Whenever I see a person doing something, I ascribe to him certain motives, which are based in large part on what would motivate me to do such an action.
But can the Bible challenge me and stretch me beyond where I am? Can it function as an authority outside of myself? Yes, in a way, it can. I don’t love a lot of people, for instance. God loves people perfectly. But would “Papa” say that, even here, my God is a projection of the best version of myself: one who is loving? Probably.
In my opinion, we almost have to bring God down to our level in order to interact with him. And, in the process of that, my conception of God shares common ground with who I am as a person. Otherwise, would there even be a bridge connecting me with God?
2. On pages 134-135, Mack and Sarayu (the Holy Spirit) have this discussion (which I’ve conformed to a dialogue format):
Sarayu: Let me begin by asking you a question. When something happens to you, how do you determine whether it is good or evil?
Mack: Well, I haven’t really thought about that. I guess I would say that something is good when I like it—when it makes me feel good or gives me a sense of security. Conversely, I’d call something evil that causes me pain or costs me something I want.
Sarayu: So it is pretty subjective then?
Mack: I guess it is.
Sarayu: And how confident are you in your ability to discern what indeed is good for you, or what is evil?
Mack: To be honest, I tend to sound justifiably angry when somebody is threatening my ‘good’, you know, what I think I deserve. But I’m not really sure I have any logical ground for deciding what is actually good or evil, except how something or someone affects me. All seems quite self-serving and self-centered, I suppose. And my track record isn’t very encouraging either. Some things I initially thought were good turned out to be horribly destructive, and some things that I thought were evil, well, they turned out…
Sarayu: Then it is you who determines good and evil. You become the judge. And to make things more confusing, that which you determine to be good will change over time and circumstance. And then beyond that and even worse, there are billions of you determining what is good and what is evil. So when your good and evil clashes with your neighbor’s, fights and arguments ensue and even wars break out.
I identify with this in some areas, but not in others. In terms of my disagreement with the passage, I don’t see what’s wrong with developing a moral judgment based on what helps and hurts me. In my opinion, that could very well be how ethics developed in the first place: people didn’t like being hurt, and so they developed rules that would protect everyone from the hurt that results from immoral actions. This isn’t totally subjective, for most of us are hurt when we are the victims of certain sins: theft, assault, etc.
Also, I think it’s good for us to help people. And, as with (1.), I bring myself into the equation to determine what helping people means. I like things that benefit myself. If I’m sad and lonely, I like for someone to express concern. If I’m looking for a job, it’s good when someone gives me some leads. But, if I like that for myself, shouldn’t I do that for others as well? Jesus himself tells us to think about ourselves in developing an ethic for how to treat our neighbors: that’s what the Golden Rule is all about, as well as the command of “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Sure, we should also remember that people are different, and so what helps me may not help somebody else. I can’t really make an absolute, iron-clad rule, here. All I’m saying is that self-interest plays some role in our ethics—when it comes to us determining what our rights are, and what others’ rights should be.
But I can see the quote’s point in that people do not always (or even often) do what we want, or fulfill our needs and expectations. Also, as the book points out elsewhere, God can use pain to accomplish good. But that doesn’t mean that I should inflict pain on another person, thinking that it will help him or her develop character. Rather, I should try to enhance others’ lives.
My problem has long been that I’m okay at obeying the negative part of the Golden Rule—the part that says that I shouldn’t steal from others (or do other negative things), because I wouldn’t like others to do that to me. But I find the positive part difficult. I want others to reach out to me, but I’m nervous about reaching out to them.
What’s interesting is that The Shack isn’t big on a Christianity that’s based on rules, and yet it sounds rather fundamentalist in the quotes that I feature in (1.) and (2.): it says that we shouldn’t get our picture of God or our morality from inside of ourselves, but rather from the outside—from God (even though our picture of God and our morality bear our own imprint, in some way, shape, and form).
3. I was thinking last night about The Shack’s theodicy, and how it’s basically the same old evangelical spiel about why God permits evil. The Fall is brought in. The book says that God doesn’t like to violate free-will, for God desires love for him that is freely-chosen. We even see some version of the Armstrongite spiel that God gave man 6,000 years to do his own thing, apart from God, and to reap the disastrous results of that. Granted, the book doesn’t contain that exact scenario, but it speaks a lot about how we want to be independent from God, and so God grants us our wish, with the unfortunate result that evil exists in the world.
I don’t feel as if I’m trampling on sacred territory by questioning these theodicies, for they’re not in the Bible! Or they’re not emphasized in the Bible. Let’s take the Fall and the human desire for independence. Sure, the Bible says that the Fall brought death to the world. But that didn’t stop God from punishing the wicked after the Fall! God killed Er, Nabal, and others in the Bible. In the Bible, God doesn’t really treat human free-will or independence as a reason to permit evil.
It’s interesting that, when we come across a book in the Bible that tries to tackle theodicy—the Book of Job—God’s response does not contain the usual evangelical platitudes: God permits evil because he respects free-will, the Fall brought all this evil that Job is observing, etc. Rather, the existence of evil is presented as a mystery. The New Testament indicates that trials can build our character, but I agree with The Shack that God doesn’t directly cause our pain: God just uses it.
I think that some of the typical evangelical spiel has wisdom to it. God may very well allow free-will to take its course, to prove a point—that evil is bad, that we really need God, etc. But I don’t consider that to be the definitive, God-given answer for why evil exists. If it were, then why isn’t it explicitly stated in the Bible?
But evangelicals are probably doing the very thing that I was defending under (1.) and (2.): projecting their own ideas onto God. We live in an age that glorifies choice, so is it a surprise that people appeal to “free-will” to explain why God permits evil?
