I judge books by their ability to provoke conflicting thoughts and feelings.  The more conflicted the thoughts and feelings, the better the read.  The Shack is such a book.  I finished it being very much of two minds: one of disappointment at the inelegantly applied theology, particularly regarding the beginning of things and the other, of a profound awe at the perfect concept of the Holy Trinity and Its grand unified field theory of Love. 

I want very badly to dislike William Paul Young's tome of loss and redemption for leaving the job it starts half done.  The book has achieved impressive sales numbers among the churched and unchurched alike and has been the discussion topic for countless church small groups.  While a heartfelt and serious book, The Shack nevertheless suffers from a painfully applied theological formula, yellowed with cliché and stubbornly defying any meaningful effort at updating (however, this is a part of the Christian charm).  Its dramatic architecture comes off as an attempt to fashion a "workbook" for the Bible to be used in the non-denominational "Bible" churches that are virally replicating themselves in the United States and abroad. 

The Shack's theological paradigm is frankly post-Protestant.  There is neither a whiff of Catholic Marian apparition or Augustinian Original Sin or Calvinic sulfur here.  The Trinity is the book's theological center and Young does all he can to cast Tertullian's divine paradox in as many lights as possible, revealing the philosophy's manifold nature.  This is the book's greatest success.  By addressing the Trinity first, Young does not need to consider the the three parts separately.  In fact, the author makes every effort to present the Trinity as a single unit, even when the book's protagonist Mack Philips spends time with each entity ostensibly alone. 

The plot is a more satisfying rendering of Job, though with a more narrow focus.  Mack Philips loses a daughter in a horrible way, descending into a gray miasma confused negative feelings.  Several years later he receives a mysterious note from God to meet Him at The Shack, the last place of any trace of Philip's daughter.  While there, Mack meets a large black woman, Elousia (The Father); the Hebrew Jesus (The Son), and a sprite Asian woman Sarayu (The Holy Spirit).  Young uses these three characters, together and separately, to guide Mack through grief, acceptance, forgiveness, and redemption. As ham-handed as this politically correct trio is and as brutal as Young's attempt to smash stereotypes with blunt force, this assembly of characters works surprisingly well. 

This laudable presentation of the Trinity is almost completely sabotaged by the old-school treatment of the Eden story and the Fall of Man.  As a myth in the strictest sense — a story (not factual) that presents a fundamental truth — Eden remains a durable, if not arcane, vehicle.  But from a literal interpretation, the story can only be viewed as a superstition, replete with black cats, open umbrellas, and broken mirrors.  Augustine compounds this divine cartoon by linking the Fall of Man and the concept of Original Sin to the sex act, thereby ruining the healthy, natural sexuality for generations.  The Trinity addresses these matters with the protagonist Philips still cast in the old school garb.  Philips would have been better served perhaps with a more Darwinian view of "Original Sin:" 

Humans are animals like all other animals, biologically programmed to act in ways that will prolong the individual human's life.  If left to his or her own devices, humans tend toward the egocentric and self-centered without real concern for the whole.  If "Original Sin" is anything, it is this.  Young does address humans' longing to be the "individual" acting alone, self sufficiently and how this position lessens that of the community of humans, humanity.  Jesus tells Mack that it is the death of the individual that He longs for so the individual will join the collective whole with He, God, and the Holy Spirit.  This path ushers in the idea of "community:" that thread or remnant that extends through written Scripture and history, ostensibly creating the "church community" and thereby amplifying the concept that we all need each other.  This presentation of the Trinity itself in The Shack, magnifies this idea of community to its infinite conclusion. 

Where a more open-minded theological position is presented is in Jesus' dialog with Mack regarding Christians Christian in name only.  Jesus points out to Mack that He (Jesus) is not a Christian and that the idea of Christians is an affectation of Humans.  Jesus goes on to say: 

"...my life is not meant to be an example to copy.  Being my follower is not trying to "be like Jesus," it means for your independence to be killed.  I came to give you life, real life, my life.  We [The Trinity] will come and live our life inside of you, so that you begin to see with our eyes, and hear with our ears, and touch with our hands, and think like we do.  But, we never force that union on you.  If you want to do your own thing, have at it.  Time is on our side." 

It is here that Christ gratefully transcends human's flawed attempts to organize man's religious thought.  It is just not that complicated.  Jesus finishes his thoughts with His proper egalitarian flare, emphasizing that it is about the community and not what one calls the community that is important: 

"...Those who I love come from every system that exists.  There were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans, and many who don't vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions.  I have followers who were murderers and many who were self-righteous.  Some are bankers and bookies, Americans and Iraqis, Jews and Palestinians.  I have no desire to make them Christian [emphasis mine] but I do want them to join in their transformation into the sons and daughters of [God]." 

Young is not the first to stake out this position.  Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered his concept of "Religionless Christianity" in his writings from prison shortly before his martyrdom at the end of World War II:  

"Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the "religious a priori" of mankind. "Christianity" has always been a form—perhaps the true form—of "religion." But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless—and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any "religious" reaction?)—what does that mean for "Christianity"? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our "Christianity," and that there remain only a few "last survivors of the age of chivalry," or a few intellectually dishonest people that we are to pounce in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don't want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the Western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity—and even this garment has looked very different at different times—then what is a religionless Christianity? 

The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God—without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even "speak" as we used to) in a "secular" way about God? In what way are we "religionless-secular" Christians, in what way are we those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation? 

The Pauline question of whether [circumcision] is a condition of justification seems to me in present-day terms to be whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from [circumcision] is also freedom from religion. I often ask myself why a "Christian instinct" often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, but which I don't in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, "in brotherhood." While I'm often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people—because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it's particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable)—to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course."

This is what the imperfect book, The Shack, achieves perfectly: a vision of instinct and behavior that reflects The Trinity's love and compassion.  My mentor and friend told me of The Shack, "You will l wish it was this way."  I contend that it is our obligation to make it so.