Reading The Shack…Early Response

The necessity of God to reveal himself to us also is seen in the fact that sinful people misinterpret the revelation about God found in nature.  Those who ‘by their wickedness suppress the truth’ are those who ‘became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened…they exchanged the truth about God for a lie’ (Rom. 1:18, 21, 25). Therefore, we need Scripture if we are to interpret natural revelation rightly.  Hundreds of false religions in the world are evidence of the way sinful people, without guidance from Scripture, will always misunderstand and distort the revelation about God found in nature. But the Bible alone tells us how to understand the testimony about God from nature.  There we depend on God’s active communication to us in Scripture for our true knowledge of God.  Grudem, 149 (emphasis mine)

Compare that quote from Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology text to this quote from the book The Shack.

In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course.  God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects…Nobody wanted God in a box, just a book.  Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges? 65-66 (emphasis mine)

I am just reading this book, knowing it has been wildly popular in America for quite some time.  It was given to one of the youth at our church, so I wanted to read it and evaluate it for myself.  My early remarks is that it strongly devalues very important Christian doctrines; i.e. the necessity of Divine Revelation through the Scriptures.  Instead, personal experience is placed above the Scriptures in importance.  This is a very dangerous, though not new, concept.  If Christians begin to place our spiritual experiences above Scripture, we run the high risk of creating false gods (since the God you experience trumps the God revealed in Scripture).

This is a very slippery slope, one that many emergent church leaders have run down, to the ruin of many.

What do you think?

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