I subscribe to a lot of preaching podcasts – Piper, Dever, Duncan, Sproul etal. All highly rated in the reformed world – and yet I find their preaching boring. I don’t know why. I just do. So I have quit subscribing. There are now probably two, maybe three preachers who for me, are passionate, biblical, interesting, applicational and inspiring. Don’t get me wrong – the above preachers are biblically strong – for for me, they just don’t inspire anything – nor do I leave having been stretched in my thinking, either spiritually or practically. There, I have said it!!
Daily Archives: April 20, 2009
Re-imagining God in the Shack
An interesting take on the shack by Mary Kassian – read the whole article HERE
The Shack contains terribly wrong concepts about God. Plain and simple. If you think it doesn’t, then you’re well on your way to accepting the image of the Christa on the cross. In a few years, you’ll be hanging her up in your church. I don’t think I’m overstating the case. In my book I’ve carefully documented the way it happened in mainline churches. The arguments used to justify their feminist Christa are the same ones the Shack uses to justify its feminized version of God. In essence, there’s no difference between the artistic image of a feminized Jesus (a.k.a. “Sophia”) hanging on a cross and the artistic image of a feminized Aunt Jemima Papa god in a book. If the latter doesn’t offend you, then the former really shouldn’t.
When it comes down to it, my primary interest is not to engage in a debate about the merits of the Shack. It’s OK if you liked the book. There are some good messages in it, and parts that I liked very much. And it’s apparently helped people in some significant ways. So that’s the good part. But I do want you to think about the false gender-blended image of God this book insidiously presents. And I do want you to base your thinking about God and masculinity and femininity on Scripture, and not on the spirit of this age. The thing that bothers me the most about the Shack is that it wraps destructive ideas up in an appealing package and feeds it to people who have neither the discernment nor the desire to carefully separate truth from error. Most Shackites don’t have a clue about the magnitude of the implications of messing with Trinitarian imagery.
Mary Kassian
