It needs to be read with discernment as do all books, and I’m afraid theological discernment is not a virtue and skill developed by the average church experience.

And there are things to appreciate about the book. Nothing troubled them about the book because some things should. I am disturbed that most of the time I hear Christians say, “I love the book.” Period. But I’m not sure that’s really a fault of the book, but a fault of the church in educating Christians about Christianity. My main concern about The Shack is that I fear that the average Christian with no basic knowledge of the Trinity will form their idea of the Trinity from the book, which will be a serious misunderstanding of this very basic and important doctrine of Christianity. The reason I’m open to that argument, though, isn’t really because of the inherent limitations of our ability to represent the Trinity accurately in any medium it’s because most Christians don’t really have a basic operating understanding of the Trinity to have the discernment to recognize the limitation. That may be a serious enough liability that nothing warrants doing that. So granted at the outset there’s no way to represent the Trinity without representing a misunderstanding of the Trinity. Any depiction of the Trinity in isolation will be a distortion, problematic if it shapes a misunderstanding of God.

Literature, or any other form of expression, that compares the Trinity to or represents the Trinity as something we’re familiar will necessarily not fully and accurately accomplish that since there is nothing else comparable. We can never fully comprehend it, though it’s worth studying the Trinity because there is much we can understand and it leaves you in awe of how unique beautiful our God is.īut there’s no way to illustrate the Trinity without leaning toward one misunderstanding or another, if not falling into outright heresy, because there is nothing else like the Trinity. The Trinity isn’t hard to define, but it is hard to understand because it is so wholly other than anything in the created world. The Trinity is a core doctrine of Christianity because it tells us about the very nature of God as revealed in Scripture. It does reveal some things about God well and things I’ve never really seen attempted in literature before.

The shack book william p young