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| Description | The Shack (bestsellers) |
| Author | William P. Young |
| Media | Paperback |
| Publication Date | 31-July-2008 |
| Dimensions (L x W x H) | 201 x 132 x 20 |
| Shipping Time | Ships within 2-5 days |
| Stock Available | 25+ |
| Price | $18.95
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| Saving | Save $3.00 (14%) on RRP |
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| Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?" The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You'll want everyone you know to read this book! | |
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Problem of pain meets psycho-babble.,
26 December 2008
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The problem of pain meets psycho-babble in The Shack. Its success--#1 on the New York Times Paper Trade Fiction list on December 19, 2008--was predicted around the year 67 A.D. Paul, the apostle, predicted, "For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear." (2 Tim. 4:3)
On the one hand, The Shack does succeed in describing the unimaginable pain of having ones little daughter slaughtered by a conscientious-deprived serial murderer, who leaves a blood-soaked shack to confront Missy's dad Mack with theology's greatest problem, "If God, why evil?" On the other hand, unlike the majestic, transcendent God of the book of Job, who appears to pain-ravaged Job "out of the storm", in The Shack, you get Chicken Soup for the Ego, full of wrong ideas about the God of the Bible and about His answers about evil and your relationship to Him.
You get psycho-babble, ideas long on massaging the ego, long on encouraging self-centeredness, feeling good, comfort, and "can't we all get along", but ideas short on the truth that even the most inexplicable evil is caused by free-will and whether you are the victim or the victimizer, the Biblical view of God and evil is summed up in Job's reply to God: "I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted." (42:2)
The best fiction, whether secular or Christian, takes evil seriously and if it presents a resolution, it makes clear that "responsibility" is a big part of the solution, using free-will to choose what is good, making conscientious-driven choices, primarily in the interest of others rather than the self. The worse, untrue, and perhaps diabolical fiction sounds like The Shack when it says, "My words are alive and dynamic--full of life and possibility; yours are dead, full of law and fear and judgment. That is why you won't find the word responsibility in the Scriptures." (p. 205)
The Shack's words ring false when put in juxtaposition to Job's words, "My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." (Job 42: 5,6) In a world ravaged by irresponsibility and evil, we need accurate depictions of evil and theology, not tickled ears, even in fictional books.
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