Here to my mind is the objection to taking love as ultimate. There is no higher form of unity, I can agree. But we do not know love as the complete union of individuals, such that we can predicate of it the entirety of what belongs to them. And if we extend the sense of love and make it higher than what we experience, I do not see myself that we are sure of preserving that amount of self-existence in the individuals which seems necessary for love. - F. H. Bradley
On the face of it, the premise of The Shack is a promising one. A human individual whose life has been enveloped by a “great sadness”, a man haunted by the odious death of a child, receives an invitation from God to return to the place where she was murdered. Answering the call, he encounters the three persons of the Trinity (plus - not to spoil things - a fourth personifying the divine Wisdom) and rediscovers the possibility of faith, hope and charity in a seemingly blighted and chaotic world. The book, compared by some to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, seems to offer, in the spirit if not the style of the great Christian apologists, a point-by-point overturning of the cold world of spiritual desolation, a contemporary address stripped - as it must be - of religious piety but upholding the central gospel message of grace and forgiveness. This is something I should like to see done well, by a writer with something of Bunyan’s vernacular seriousness. It would be unreasonable to claim that The Shack squanders the opportunity, since a great many readers have found it very affecting, but the position of “contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress” in my view remains unoccupied.
Partly this is due to The Shack’s distracting mawkishness; partly it is due to a theological problem of which I suspect the mawkishness is a symptom. The Pilgrim’s Progress traverses a terrain in which evil (understood as a moral power capable of forcing the pilgrim out of his path) exists and must be struggled with; it is a work of pastoral imagination which acknowledges extremes of religious euphoria and dejection, and proposes as the only sure guide through these vicissitudes a continually-renewed subjective courage. The Shack, by contrast, takes up the “problem of pain” in order to de-problematise it: the subjectivity it indicates is ultimately the cosmic complacency plotted by the Desiderata: you are a child of the universe, which no doubt is unfolding as it should; don’t worry, be happy.
There is a serious line of thinking running through The Shack, with which I agree entirely - up to a point. In the rest of this post, I’m going to try to identify where that point lies. Rather than deal directly with the book’s theodicy (its attempted justification of the ways of God to men), I’d like to start with the question of human “perfectibility”, in particular the notion that Jesus represents a perfected humanity. The immediate difficulty confronting this notion is that human imperfection is not merely a lacking in degree of some attribute that could potentially be raised to the highest degree (e.g. we’re not loving enough, or wise enough, or sensitive enough, but we could be made perfectly loving, wise and sensitive - must try harder!). The crux of our imperfection is rather the mutual incompatibility of our desires and conceptions, the inherent inconsistency of our mental life. Not only are we not who we think we are, but our self-image is itself a chimera, a mish-mash of heterogeneous elements that only look like they fit together because we never get to see them all at once from the outside. (We can tell that this is so because we can see that this is what other people are like, and have no compelling reason to suppose that we are any different from them). The Shack presents its tormented Everyman, “Mack”, as an object lesson in imperfection of this kind.
Accordingly, when we speak of a “perfected humanity”, it is unclear which parts of our contradictory selfhoods are to be retained and which eliminated (since they cannot all be retained at once without contradiction). Is there any part which could be separated from the rest and shown, by itself, to be wholly innocent and good, or is it all a hopelessly inextricable tangle? The answer given by Paul is that there is no rule we can use to separate a good part of ourselves from the rest, no way to become pure by keeping the “base” and “corrupt” aspects of ourselves at bay; this is essentially the path of legalism, of reliance on the moral law which discriminates between the pure and the impure. Instead, Paul says, we must surrender ourselves entire to grace, which accepts the whole incorrigible tangle and “perfects” it by including it in the body of Christ (here to be understood as the historical form of an ongoing process of salvation). It is a mistake to think that we can be, or become, good in ourselves; rather, we must trust in a perfection that is the perfection of all creation, in which we are elected by grace to participate.
When the Pauline Christian tradition speaks of Jesus as the “perfect human”, therefore, it does not primarily mean that Jesus was - in himself - perfectly sensitive, wise or loving; or, indeed, good-looking, athletic or charismatically attractive. Where the Byzantine icon shows Christ as exhibiting some “holy” attribute to the highest degree - bathed in glory and radiating cosmic calm - it does so in order to proclaim the mystery that this rather common, plain and sometimes irascible human being was himself a kind of icon through which the very nature of God displayed itself. When Mack first encounters Jesus, he is initially disconcerted by how emphatically semitic he is. (I have to give the book some credit for reminding a predominantly US audience of the fact that the Christ they claim to adore would have borne a marked physical resemblance to some of the human beings their - and our - military forces have lately been bombing, shooting, torturing etc.). In fact, for “perfect humanity” not to be a contradiction in terms, it must denote, rather than a set of positive intrinsic attributes raised to the highest degree, a relation between the human (in all its tangled imperfection) and the divine (which exceeds every criterion by which this imperfection might be measured and found wanting).
As the story of Job illustrates, our relation to the divine is one of absolute, not relative, inadequacy. Jesus, who addresses God as “Abba” (which The Shack translates, gratingly but accurately*, as “Papa”), refounds this relationship as one of filiation, an act of creative blasphemy that Jewish and Islamic monotheism alike reject as nonsensical. One should take this objection seriously, as it in a sense constitutes the singularity of Christianity. It’s not a crucifying offense to say that Zeus, for example, produced human offspring by procreating with a mortal woman. Christianity’s formal signature is to be found in the passage from monotheism to the Trinity. Another virtue of The Shack is that it is impeccably Trinitarian, and raises up the Trinity as an emblem of the centrality of relationship to the divine nature.
So far, there seems to be very little disagreement between what I’ve been saying here and the Christology underpinning The Shack. The Jesus it presents is essentially a human being in perfect relationship with God, a configuration which is indistinguishable from God’s being in perfect relationship with Himself in human form. There is no discernible point on which The Shack’s Jesus is more or other than human; he represents, rather, the vanishing point at which divine self-limitation (The Shack understands kenosis primarily as surrendering divine potency or the ability to act as God) coincides with human other-actualisation (the capacity to be acted upon, or through, by God). His full divinity, in other words, is an in-filling of the human with the divine, which is simultaneously the full assumption by the Word of human nature.
Where I think The Shack goes wrong (or stops working for me) is in its image of redemption. The story takes a particular suffering human creature and shows its deepest wishes, for understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation, being fulfilled in a series of emotional tableaux. There are tears, there is laughter; the suffering creature comes to see itself as loved and known to a degree that its own capacity for self-love and self-knowledge cannot encompass. This may well be due to an emotional flaw in my own nature, but I found the whole sequence infuriatingly schmaltzy and pandering. The trouble is that it renders the divine love for the creature as an amplified, imaginary version of the creature’s self-love: “Jesus loves you” essentially as you love yourself, only more so, confirming your inner goodness and lovability. In between theology lessons, Mack is gently guided into the comfort zone of a pampered infant unshakeably assured that it sits at the centre of its parents’ libidinal universe. While in intellectual terms the trauma of his daughter’s abduction and murder is dealt with by rationalising divine non-intervention as kenotic self-limiting (God is a kind of agonizingly scrupulous pacifist), in emotional terms the remedy seems to be infantile regression.
Well, why not? Maybe that’s how one ought to feel. No doubt there’s more than a touch of hurt, angry pride in my refusal even to contemplate this as a valid emotional stance. But there is also a theological problem here. We have a notion of human perfectability, of which the icon is Christ, which rests wholly on relationship with God precisely because we know - and this is Paul’s lesson - that human nature is a chaotic amalgam from which no innocent part can be extracted. The amalgam cannot be purged or partitioned in such a way as to make it uncomplicatedly good; the only thing to do with it is to surrender it to grace. Now this awareness, which is constantly refreshed by Bunyan, is sacrificed the moment we pose, in terms dictated by the creature’s own emotionally-needy agenda, an image of redemption as restored innocence, a fantasy of emotional purification and the accomplishment (in Mack’s case) of a kind of saintliness. If we understand healing as the gratification of a sick desire, then we have not understood the sickness.
This will perhaps seem callous. What the sick desire is to be well, and The Shack follows the conventions of self-help literature in constructing an image of wellness that involves the surrender of false notions about oneself, acceptance of the past, and a healthy confidence about the future which makes it bearable to live fully in the present. What’s absent from this picture is, essentially, angst, and the subjective torsion that it generates: the subject relieved of his angst is finally able to straighten himself out. But it is on just this point that Christianity differs, for better or worse, from the canon of self-help. The Christian tradition gives another name to angst: it calls it “consciousness of sin”. The dialectic of confession and forgiveness of sin works to transform sinful consciousness (the conscience twisted by angst) into consciousness of sin (the direct experience of angst as a subjective “pressure point”), and consequent repentance. Its purpose is not to evacuate the present of spiritual anxiety, but to make the causes of anxiety present so that they can be addressed.
The human creature cannot live fully in the present, because the present it inhabits is a fractured one (Augustine’s “land of unlikeness”). The Shack vividly portrays Jesus as living moment by moment in the presence of God, but confuses this somehow with being effortlessly comfortable in one’s own skin. Christlikeness is not insouciance. He sweated blood. The two “presents”, the temporal and the eternal, are not identical; the latter contains the former, but only at the cost of its complete transformation, a bit of heavy lifting that the Christian tradition calls, amongst other things, “judgement”. It may be that the root cause of my discomfort with The Shack is not Christological but eschatological: its message is that the temporal present is already, in its immanent unfolding, a moment of eternity; that apparent “chaos” is already the “fractal” creativity of the Spirit providentially at work in all things. This is a consoling message, a message of infinite mercy; but it misses - for me - the dimension of judgement, of what Karl Barth called God’s great No to the world. The melodic strain that is largely absent in The Shack, and heard at key moments throughout The Pilgrim’s Progress, is that of laus et vituperatio, praise and blame, witness to judgement. I missed it, and no amount of pathos about the self-defeating folly of human “independence” could quite make up the loss.
* Or perhaps not. Hat-tip to Alex Andrews for this link…