Book Recommendation: The Shack

Last night I finished reading William Young's "The Shack". For anyone who doesn't know, "The Shack" is a fictional account of a man's encounter with God. Here is the description off the back of the book:

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.

Against his better judgment he arrives as the shack on a wintry afternoon and walk back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.

I could talk about the plot more, but I don't want to spoil anything. I want you to read it for yourself. But before I give my official reading recommendation (which I am going to do), I need to make two things clear.

First of all, this book could and should ruffle some theological feathers. Theologically, I don't agree with everything in this book. Some things in it bother me. I will probably follow this up with Timothy Keller's “The Reason for God” as well as finishing a John Piper book so that I don't veer off into any emergent confusion. (And I may follow that book up with “A New Kind of Christian” just to keep myself on my toes.) There is a good deal of controversy and some fairly heated debates surrounding this book. Of course that's almost a given with any popular Christian book. If you are not able to overlook this sort of thing, take my recommendation with a grain of salt.

Second, this book has changed me. It has hit on some pretty deep stuff for me. That does not mean it will change you. And it does not mean you will like the book. But, having given those disclaimers, on the off chance that this book could have the sort of effect on you it had on me:

Read this book!

I did not read this book in one sitting. It actually took me about a month, which is pretty slow going for a book clocking in at 246 pages. But the good part about that is that it's easy to pick up, put down, and pick back up awhile later and not feel lost. Parts of this book made me cry, parts somewhat bored me, and parts of it floored me. On the whole, whatever its faults, I can't ignore it. If you don't want to read it, they'll probably make a movie eventually (and some people are already working on that).

And now I'm going to switch gears very slightly and deal with one other thing. I picked this book up at Wal-Mart based on Eugene Peterson's incredible recommendation on the cover: “This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress did for his. It's that good!”

For anyone who respects Peterson's work, that's hard to ignore. So after reading it I have to ask myself if what Peterson said is likely or possible. Now, historically speaking, I know Pilgrim's Progress is huge. I'm not an expert at all, but I remember reading in an editor's introduction something about it being in nearly every Christian household right next to the Bible during its early printings, or something bizarre like that. As far as what effects it had, I don't know how to measure that, but I would guess: really huge.

Could “The Shack” potentially have an effect like that? I don't think so. First of all, it's not as great as Pilgrim's Progress. It just isn't. It's good but not that good. Second, I am sure that it can produce some change in some people. Maybe a lot of people. But the world is very different. And we're in a time when there is some pretty serious theological unrest which is not going to disappear anytime soon. This book has riled plenty of feathers. But who knows? And maybe the movie will be a big deal too. You just never know. The reason for this little tangent is that I don't want this book over hyped, but if you decide to read it, be open and you might find yourself changed when it's over.