Technically my vacation isn't over. I'm lollygagging at the 2008 Comfort Inn location of the year in lovely Sturbridge, Massachusetts. (And it is lovely! New England's rolling, nearly mountain-sized hills covered in birch trees and balsam firs are lovely. At least they are in the summer.) Anyway, I can't watch TV because I want the kids to go to sleep, so why not blog a little bit before hitting the road tomorrow?
OK, what I read. The Shack. It was on the living room table with the other detritus that made it in from my family's convergence on The McKinley House in Bass Harbor, Maine. I'd heard of the book but literally knew nothing about it, other than that it was of a religious nature. My mother-in-law brought it with her, but she didn't like it. So I decided to read it.
Quickly into the novel I realized I had ventured into the dread regions of inspirational fiction, where plot, character development, credible dialogue and a nice turn of phrase are all sacrificed on the altar of doctrinal truth and point-scoring. But I pressed ahead because I knew that you, my legions of adoring readers, were starving for new material from me, and I had to provide it for you in the form of this book review!
Until I got to the middle of the book when the protagonist, a bereaved father, chills out with the Triune God for a weekend in a log cabin in the woods. I just had to set it aside then, not because I object to the book's iconography of the Holy Trinity as Queen Latifah, Lucy Liu and a swarthy, middle-eastern carpenter. I mean, I'm a mainline Christian. I read Beyond God the Father as an undergraduate! Back in the day, everybody I knew was calling the Almighty "she." I had to set it aside because the book was so late 1980s, you know?
But that's what the conservative Evangelicals do. They ridicule "liberal" Christians for both capitulating to culture and for being irrelevant to the culture (a contradictory argument if there ever was one). And then they pick through the best mainline scholarship of the previous generation and regurgitate it. So Open Theism is conservative evangelicalism stoned on process theology, and I'm guessing The Shack is a little Moltmann, a little feminist theology, and assorted theodicies ground up into a sausage of awful prose. I swear, if liberal Protestantism didn't exist, evangelicals would have to invent it.
I'm saying I'm guessing because I didn't finish the book. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia. Is that unfair? Augustine put off converting to Christianity for a long time because he was such a literary snob that the idea that the New Testament was divine revelation scandalized him. Am I a snob?
Well, not enough of a snob to not be a Christian. But like P.D. James, I detest it when cynics mock excellence as elitism. Here's the thing: after Dostoyevsky penned Ivan Karamozov's devastating takedown of all attempts to justify God's power and love in the face of natural and man-made cruelty, the only solution to the "problem of evil" is his brother Alyosha's rejoinder, also penned by Dostoyevsky: he kisses his brother on the cheek. There is no good explanation for why evil exists if God is sovereign and good. There are only acts of love grounded in resurrection hope. By the time I was a third of the way through The Shack I had a pretty good feeling that the author wouldn't be able to demonstrate that in an artful manner.
So, onto a better written book, whose myriad of (theological?) anthropologies, while not Christian, were far more entertaining and thought-provoking. Yes, I'm talking about Watchmen. In the meantime, I googled I Hate The Shack, and the White Zombie song Shack of Hate was the third hit. That inspired me to create a White Zombie channel on Pandora. So all is not lost!
Recent Comments