Beauty and the Beast appears to be on the way to becoming one of the year’s most profitable movies, even though Evangelicals are wildly annoyed about a ‘gay moment.’ Ho-hum. Unfortunately, the hubbub over Beauty and the Beast is overwhelming the no less significant release of The Shack.
For those who aren’t in the know, The Shack tells the story of a man who visits the scene of a remote cabin where his daughter was brutally murdered. There — What do you know? — he meets god and they have a talk, et cetera, et cetera.
Y’all will probably not be surprised to learn that Albert Mohler has serious theological problems with a movie which presents god as bigger and kinder than a busybody know-it-all Baptist.
As I pointed out in my review of the book, tracing back to its publication, “The Shack’s” theology is not incidental to the story, indeed at most points the narrative seems mainly to serve as a structure for the theological dialogues, and those dialogues reveal a theology that is unconventional at best, and undoubtedly heretical in certain respects. As depicted in the book, the literary device of an unconventional Trinity of divine persons is itself sub-biblical and dangerous. But the theological explanations that emerge in the dialogue are worse. Papa tells Mack of the time when the three persons of the Trinity “spoke ourself into human existence as the son of God.”
Nowhere in the Bible is the Father or the Spirit described as taking on human existence.
Yeah, well — ho-hum to that, too. Theology rests upon unverifiable, improbable, and unnecessary premises, and for that reason should not be considered a serious intellectual enterprise. Shame on anybody who takes anything that Albert Mohler says as anything but a threat to common sense and common decency.
But this morning’s news item about the success of the movie-version of The Shack tickled a vague memory; wasn’t there a popular book featuring an extended dialogue with Our Invisible Friend about 15-years ago?
There was — Conversations With God. That book, too, sold in the millions, and also drew the ire of theologians.
This interests me, for several reasons. The commercial success of those books suggests that, at least amongst people who read books for purposes other than entertainment …
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The big questions remain vital, and there is an audience for books that aim to deal with them in a manner that isn’t self help-lite.
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There must be a widespread sense that the established religions aren’t answering them very well.
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As a literary device, the dialogue is very old; it was invented by Plato ~ 400 B.C., and even philosophers rarely use it nowadays. It is much more common to present philosophical ideas in the form of a novel, as in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Who wants to place a bet on how long it is before some yahoo declares that The Shack is inerrant?