GOSPEL MUSIC ASSOCIATION AWARDS
"THE SHACK" MOVIE
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
(Friday Church News Notes, November 3, 2017, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - At its annual Dove awards, the Gospel Music Association selected The Shack as the "inspiration film of the year." The Shack,
authored by William Paul Young, is a fictional account of a man who is
bitter against
God for allowing his daughter to be murdered and who returns to the
scene of the murder, an old shack in the woods, where he has a
life-changing encounter with God. The "God" that he encounters, though,
is not the God of the Bible. Published in 2007, it has sold more than 20
million copies internationally. With the release of the movie, the book
has again risen to the top of the charts. William Young is not a member
of a church and is even reticent to call himself a Christian,
describing himself
as "spiritual but not religious" ("After The Shack, a Crossroads:
William Paul Young," Publishers Weekly, Sept. 21, 2012). Yet
the novel has been endorsed by Pat Robertson's 700 Club, CCM artist
Michael W. Smith, Gayle Erwin of Calvary Chapel, James Ryle of the
Vineyard churches, Andy Crouch, a senior editor of Christianity Today, Gloria Gaither, Mark Lowry (former singer with the Gaithers), Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, many Southern Baptists (such as Wade
Burleson, pastor of Southern Baptist Emmanuel Baptist Church of Enid, Oklahoma), and others. Fundamentally, The Shack
is about redefining God. In a 2007 interview, Young told about a woman
who wrote to him and said that her 22-year-old daughter came to her
after reading the book and asked, "IS IT ALL RIGHT IF I DIVORCE THE OLD
GOD AND MARRY THE NEW ONE?" Young therefore admits that the God of The Shack is different from the traditional God of Bible-believing Christianity. He
says that the God who "judges sin" is "a Christianized version of Zeus." In The Shack,
Young depicts the triune God as a young Asian woman named "Sarayu"
(supposedly the Holy Spirit, but the name is from the Hindu scriptures
and represents a mythical river in India on the shores of which the
Hindu god Rama was born), an oriental carpenter who loves to have a good
time (supposedly the Son of God), and an older black woman named
"Elousia" and "Papa" (supposedly God the Father). Young's
god is the god of the emerging church. He is cool, loves rock &
roll, is non-judgmental, does not exercise wrath toward sin, does not
send unbelievers to an eternal fiery hell, does not require repentance
and the new birth, puts no obligations on people, doesn't like
traditional Bible churches, and does not accept the Bible as the
infallible Word of God. (For a more extensive review of The Shack, see "The Shack's Cool God" at www.wayoflife.org.)
