The Shack

From a review by Fr. Lawrence R. Farley of The Shack, which I found on the Little Shavings blog.

The Trinity as pictured in The Shack is utterly devoid of any awe-inspiring numinus. Moses may have been full of fear and trembling at the manifestation of the God of Sinai (Heb. 12:21), Isaiah may have declared himself undone at the sight of the Lord of Hosts in the Temple (Is. 6:5), Ezekiel may have fallen on the face before the Lord at the River Chebar (Ezek. 1:28) and even St. John fell at the feet of the glorified Christ as if he were dead (Rev. 1:17). But the sight of the Trinity in this volume excites no such reaction at all. All is warm and casual, comforting and cozy—a God who giggles, and calls you ‘honey’, a God who drops and breaks crockery, a God who never condemns or is disappointed in any of us. In short, the God who is your buddy, so characteristic of modern Evangelicalism and celebrated in their feel-good choruses. It is not the God invoked in our baptismal service, “whose glance dries up the deep, whose interdict makes the mountains melt away”, the God who “touches the mountains and they smoke, who clothes Himself with light as with a garment”. All of the other errors and mis-steps of the volume pale in comparison with this basic mis-presentation of the divine. The awesome God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has become the comfortable demi-god of the emergent church. The face of the King has been distorted...