Book Review
Recommended Reading:
You mean THAT isn’t in the Bible?
7 Biblical truths you won’t hear in the church
Author: David A Rich Grace Camp Ministries
At first glance I thought the content of the first title to be very basic but once I started reading I have found this book filled with tremendous insight and truth of the Word. Fascinating and highly recommended!
This Little Church went to market
This Little Church stayed at home
“I just wanted more land” – Jabez
Author: Gary Gilley Southern View Chapel
“This Little Church” are must read books to understand the thinking of the entertaining church today.
The Schack – A Must Read?
A very strange phenomenon is happening in the church today.
Walk in a Christian bookshop and they have the “The Shack” stacked to the roof. Please note these are not specifically catholic bookshops! If it was catholic, then I could understand why it is the No.1 best seller.
I believe it is very important to understand the contents before you read this book.
The foreword explains that this is a true story of factual events that actually happened to Mack and his family. Somewhat like the Da Vinci Code. Written as a novel but perceived as truth? Christians believe that is is a true testimony despite the fact that they know deep in their hearts that the contents is doctrinally incorrect. But they get caught up in a tremendous emotional book which is in fact – ALL FICTION!
The first 1/3 of this book is a very emotional, thrilling story of Mack who went on a camping trip in the forest with his children. His one daughter gets abducted and killed by a serial killer in a remote shack next to a lake. Mack wrestles with this tremendous tragedy and all the questions that go along with that. He then receives as strange letter a few years later inviting him back to the shack.
The 6th chapter starts like this:
.. No matter what God’s power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.
That is unscriptural. It is not rather mankind who try and reduce HIM to our level in an effort to understand HIM. God cannot reduce Himself or limit Himself because He is GOD, He is Almighty and He is Holy.
Here Mack meets the Trinity in person and the rest of the book is all about the Trinity. The problem is that the book paints such a vivid picture of God that you will see a black African American woman standing before you, every time you close your eyes to pray!
Somebody recommended this book to me and said that we have put God in a box in the past. Whether a Baptist box, Charismatic box, Traditional box etc. and that this book tends to “break Him out of the box”.
But this book actually puts God in a SHACK!
Think about this:
It is not about putting God in a box. It is about getting into HIS box!
About the Author:
By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY
PORTLAND, Ore. — By rights, William Young, 53, should be a mess.
Emotionally distant from his missionary parents. Sexually abused by the New Guinea tribe they lived among. Grief-stricken for loved ones who died too young, too suddenly. Frantic to earn God’s love, yet cheating on his wife, Kim.
Young functioned by stuffing all the evil done to him and by him into a “shack” — his metaphor for an ugly, dark place hidden so deeply within him that it seemed beyond God’s healing reach.
His adultery, 15 years ago, finally blew the doors off that shack, forcing him to confront his past. “Kim made it clear,” he says. “I had to face every awful thing.”
Now, his first novel, The Shack— centered on dialogues between a miserable main character, Mack, and three unorthodox characterizations of the Holy Trinity — telescopes Young’s transformation to a man spiritually reborn and aware every moment of God’s love. It slams “legalistic” religions, denominations and doctrines. It barely even mentions the Bible.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2008-05-28-the-shack_N.htm
The Discerning Reader Review - very good!
The Shack: Ramshackle Theology
by Tom Neven on Jun 19, 2008 at 9:12 AM
The Shack has become a publishing phenomenon, a bestseller by a first-time author that has rocketed up the sales charts with rumors of an impending movie, not bad for a book that was self-published by the author, William P. Young, and is being sold out of a garage.
The glowing reviews for The Shack hail it as everything from the new Pilgrim’s Progress (theologian Eugene Peterson, translator of the Bible paraphrase The Message) to “the best novel of 2007″ and “one of the rare fiction books that could change your life” (various Amazon.com five-star reviewers). According to the book jacket, Young was raised by missionary parents living among a stone-age tribe in New Guinea. He wrote the novel for his six children to explain his own journey through pain and misery to “light, love and transformation,” according to a profile in USA Today. The “shack” of the story was the ugly place inside him where everything awful was hidden away, a result of his history as a victim of sexual abuse, his own adultery and the ensuing shame and pain, all stuffed deep in his psyche, Young explained.
This background is important, because Young’s past appears to greatly color his view of both God and Christianity, resulting in a severely flawed view of both. The story begins with Mackenzie “Mack” Phillips, a father suffering great pain — a Great Sadness, according to the story — because of the death of his young daughter at the hands of a serial killer. Mack receives a note from “Papa” to meet him at the rundown shack in the woods where police had found evidence of his daughter’s murder six years earlier. Mack already understands that “Papa” is God based on his upbringing by a hypocritical, vicious and abusive father who was also a pastor. Mack approaches the shack with rising anger, wanting to lash out at God for allowing his young girl to be killed. Instead of the old man with a long white beard, as Mack expects, he’s suddenly embraced by “a large beaming African-American woman” who introduces herself as Papa. (How many of you are already visually casting Oprah Winfrey or Maya Angelou in the movie version?)
Mack is then introduced to the rest of the Trinity: Jesus, a Middle Eastern man dressed as a laborer, and the Holy Spirit, a woman of “maybe northern Chinese or Nepalese or even Mongolian ethnicity” named Sarayu. The rest of the story is a conversation among the three members of the Trinity and Mack as they work through issues of creation, fall and redemption.
Subtle and not-so-subtle heresies
Young’s intentions are good. He wants to introduce readers to a loving God who was willing to sacrifice his own Son to save us from our sins. But all heresies begin with misconstruing the nature of God. From Jehovah’s Witnesses to Mormonism to even Islam, they all get it wrong when it comes to understanding the God of Scripture. Young joins their company. Part of the problem arises because his story is confused and inconsistent. I don’t think he sets out to mislead, but he himself is misled, either by himself or others.
Article continues…: http://www.boundlessline.org/2008/06/the-shack-ramsh.html
More: http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/08/shack.htm
Joh 1:18 No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.
Exo 20:4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness…..