A Basin and Towel by The Door

I have a rough confession to make.  I am not sure if I will forever lose some of you, but it is just that I have a point that I want to make.   Okay, here is goes….I am a life long fan of the New York Yankees.  Yes, the fourth place New York Yankees.  Yes, those overpaid, underperforming prima donnas!  But here is something that you may not know…at every home game played at the soon to be torn down Yankee Stadium the players pass through a long hall as they make their way out of the club house and into the dugout.  As they make their way through day after day during the long season they pass under a sign which contains a quote from the great Joe DiMaggio, “I want to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee.”  That sign was put there to remind these players every day that they are upholding a tradition.  Many of the players in passing under the sign will reach up a hand to touch it, to remind themselves of who they are and what the uniform they wear means.

In my home I have a similar token that I pass by every time I leave the house and every time I arrive home.  It is not a sign, but a symbol.  The symbol is a basin and towel.   Some years ago my wife hung it there on the wall following a sermon I preached at the ordination of one of our deacons.  I preached from John 13 on the actions which Jesus took among his disciples on that night in which he was betrayed.   There are two times when Jesus told his disciples to ensure that they were imitating him, doing exactly what he did. One was in regard to love and the other was in regard to serving one another.  The basin and the towel remind me every day when I leave the home that I am to serve others.  It reminds me that my purpose in life is not to pursue my own ease or pleasure, but that of others.  And as I pass it on my way into my home, it reminds me that I am not done with service.  I have a wife and four children (five this year with a foreign exchange student from Germany living with us) who need me.  Home is a refuge, home is a place to recover, but it is also a place where I need to take up the basin and the towel.  Though you may not place the symbol in your home, may I exhort us all to ensure that we take it with us when we leave the home and remember that we do not lay it down once we reenter the home!

James Savastio

The Faulty Foundations of The Shack – Part 4

William Young’s The Shack is built on four faulty theological foundations: a misunderstanding of the Fall; a misunderstanding of God; a deficient view of justification; and a pervasive anti-authority antinomianism. Young also builds a defective theological superstructure on this faulty foundation of anti-authority antinomianism. We considered the first defective superstructure: his view of God, and thus his understanding of the work of Christ on the cross. There are two more dangers that stem from Young’s anti-authority antinomianism.

Second, Young’s anti-authority antinomianism not surprisingly obliterates male headship. Young suggests that the notion of authority in marriage is a result of the Fall, not something established in Creation (147). There is a theme of male incompetence in the book from Mack’s drunken Bible-quoting child-abusing father, to Mack himself, to Young’s maternalistic presentation of God. “Jesus” says, “The world, in many ways, would be a much calmer and gentler place if women ruled.” (147,148) “Jesus” then goes on to advocate an egalitarian view of the genders in which both are equally submissive to each other. When Mack asks “Jesus” about why He came “in the form of a man” (as in male), “Jesus” does not explain the two federal headships of Adam and Christ as Paul does in Romans 5:12ff, but launches off into more relations-speak. “Jesus” tells Mack that Adam had to be created first so that Eve could be taken from him so that they would exist in relationship. Here is an allusion to 1 Corinthians 11:12, but Young ignores the context of that verse which concerns the exercise of and submission to God-constituted headship (authority). He thus mishandles the Word of God again and proves himself to be an unsafe guide. Sadly, Young’s theological building does resemble a shack!

Third, Young’s anti-authority antinomianism wrecks havoc upon the Scriptures and the church. A biblically informed reader will recognize allusions to biblical texts and themes, but The Shack betrays a low view of Scripture. “Sarayu” encourages us to think that we can receive revelation from the Spirit in our own thoughts or “in a piece of art, or music, or silence, or through people, or in Creation, or in your joy and sorrow. My ability to communicate is limitless, living and transforming, and it will always be tuned to Papa’s goodness and love. And you will hear and see me in the Bible in fresh ways. Just don’t look for rules and principles; look for relationship- a way of coming to be with us” (198). The church is not at all respected in The Shack. It is profoundly disconcerting that, according to WORLD, neither Young, nor his publishers Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings (all former pastors) are not members of any church. Why? What could have happened that has caused these three former shepherds to detach themselves from the church? I cannot speculate, but this matter is highly troublesome. Yet the last meal that Mack has with “Papa,” although eaten “without any ritual, without any ceremony,” consists of bread and wine – an obvious allusion to the Lord’s Supper. That Supper, however, is a church ordinance, not a private meal. Young individualizes the intimacy that Christ has with His Body the church and in so doing he does not judge the body rightly (1 Corinthians 11:29). Christ has given the keys of the Kingdom to His church and to slight the church is to slight the rule of Christ. I suspect that “rule of Christ” would be a discomforting phrase to Young. With all of Young’s sentiment and sweetness, there is a strain of real rebellion (note my repeated use of the prefix “anti”).

Indeed The Shack is replete with evidence of Young’s anti-authority antinomianism. An aversion to anything that even looks like a command can be found in almost every conversation Mack has with the characters depicting the Trinity. Indeed, it would appear that God Himself, who is not at all adverse to using the imperative mood in Scripture (think “Ten Commandments”), is The Antinomian of all antinomians. I appreciate that on p.202,203 Sarayu refutes the idea that men can be “made righteous by following rules.” However how one is “made righteous,” that is justified, is not adequately treated in The Shack. We just kinda suppose that Mack is a Christian and that his problem has more to do with what we would call “progressive sanctification.” Commendably, Sarayu also states that Jesus alone succeeded in obeying the law completely. This would have been an opportune moment for Young to inject instruction on justification and imputed righteousness. He does not. Sarayu then goes on to articulate the classic antinomian interpretation of Romans 6:14 – the law “no longer has jurisdiction for you.” The envisioned Christian is not told that Jesus says If you love Me, you will keep My commandments (Jn 14:15). “Papa,” however, says, “Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse.” But David says, I will walk at liberty, for I seek Thy precepts. And I shall delight in Thy commandments, which I love. And I shall lift up my hands to Thy commandments, which I love (Psalm 199:45,47,48). Whereas Young can’t bring himself to use the words “love” and “commandment” in the same sentence, David is not so inhibited. David knows that if you are spiritually alive, you will love God and you will express that love by obeying His commands. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome (1 Jn 5:2,3).

It is ironic, given Young’s antinomian aversion to the law, that the central tension of The Shack centers on the violation of the sixth commandment (as well as the ninth commandment). It is satisfying to the reader to have the matters of injustice resolved at the end of the book: the bad guy gets caught and justice is served. So it appears that justice is essential to “relationship” after all. This should alert us to the fact that we need more than some sentimental “relationship” with a nice therapeutic god. We need resolution in the theater of our conscience and in the courtroom of God. The issues of God’s law, our standing before God as our Judge, the concerns of God’s wrath and His just punishment of sin must be foundational to our understanding and proclamation of the gospel. The gospel must include the good news of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection declared as the basis of our acceptance with God. We need our sins to be forgiven on the basis on His curse-bearing. We need His righteous obedience imputed to our account so that by repentance and faith, we then stand in God’s courtroom in Christ, having passed from judgment into life. These essential forensic concerns are far too foreign to Young’s gospel in The Shack. Without the material of God’s holy justice and righteousness, The Shack is built on a faulty foundation.

Well, have I succeeded in pointing out Young’s theological flaws while treating Young as a brother in Christ? It is not easy to speak to real dangers in a man’s theology and to address them as serious concerns without slipping into something that sounds ad hominem. Young is obviously Arminian whereas I’m Reformed. Those theological differences are significant and they drive a lot of my concerns about The Shack. Nevertheless, as much as I am compelled to make a polemic response to Arminian antinomian theology, I want to relate to my Arminian brethren as brethren.

My rejection of The Shack’s theology is moderated by my desire to embrace Young as a brother in Christ. Had I not watched Young being interviewed on TV, my perspective of The Shack would have been less ambivalent. Young strikes me as being sincere in both his struggles and his faith. The crisis out of which he wrote The Shack, no doubt, goes a long way to explain the theological imbalance and emphases made in The Shack. But I find myself asking questions even about Young’s depiction of himself as “Mack,” an association which Young makes in his interviews. Young’s “shack” and Mack’s “shack” are not the same. In Young’s “shack,” he victimized his wife by his infidelity. In Mack’s “shack,” Mack was the one who was victimized. I don’t know what to do with this disparity. It is one thing to come to terms with the evil done to me and another with the evil I do to others. If The Shack is Young’s gift to his kids to explain how God’s grace enabled him to recover from fatally wounding his marriage, one would expect that The Shack would more explicitly express the gospel given to victimizers. Perhaps Young was writing from the vantage point of his wife and children, attempting to instruct them as the victims as to how to forgive him?

Again I remind myself of what The Shack’s defenders demur: The Shack is an allegorical metaphor and, we are told, that genre ought not to be theologically critiqued as critically as, say, an essay. Yes, after all, an author must be allowed to emphasize what he wants to emphasize. But deflecting theological analysis because the work is an allegory only goes so far. The Shack may be a metaphor, but it contains extensive dialogue and that with God! It is not unreasonable for us to expect that a Christian writer who is attempting to explain forgiveness and “relationship” with God, to be explicit in expressing justification through grace alone, by faith alone, in Christ alone. Instead of finding clarity, the biblically informed reader is challenged to decipher just a faint outline of an evasive gospel that lies far too distant from the more prominent presentation of ardent anti-authority antinomianism. Sadly, Young’s refusal to give place to God’s Law cripples, if not murders, the orthodoxy of his gospel.

I want to be graciously accepting of William Young, but too much about The Shack is problematic. Theologically astute readers will be frustrated by The Shack. Unconverted and uninstructed Christians will be misled by The Shack. It is a powerful book that addresses powerful issues. People are obviously being moved by its message that “God is good and He is involved.” I fear, however, that the good that The Shack does is a “good” severed from God’s essential holy justice. The Shack is built on faulty foundations and, theologically speaking, like a shack, it is an undesirable dwelling place. Those who build their theological shack on such sand, are liable to find in the Day of God’s Judgment that they built (their shack) upon the ground without any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed, and the ruin of that (shack) was great (Luke 6:49).

Alan Dunn, Pastor

Grace Covenant Baptist Church

Flemington, NJ

The Faulty Foundations of The Shack – Part 1

The Faulty Foundations of The Shack – Part 2

The Faulty Foundations of The Shack – Part 3

Is Your Church a Friendly Church?

A few months ago weather delays forced me to miss a flight connection and thus to spend an unscheduled weekend at a hotel near the airport of a major city in a foreign country. I asked the concierge at my hotel if there were any churches within walking distance, and he said that there weren’t and that I would have to return to the airport for an ecumenical service. Of course there was no way that I was going to do that. But I also suspected that he was incorrect. I had noticed a sign at an intersection, indicating that a church was located down a side road. On Saturday evening I went walking to look for the church, found it, made note of the time of worship the next day, and planned my schedule in order to attend. From all appearances, it was an evangelical church, and I looked forward with real anticipation to attending the next day. When one is stranded in a hotel at an airport over the Lord’s Day, the prospect of worshiping God is very pleasant.

On Sunday morning I made my way over to the church and entered the sanctuary about 10 minutes prior to the beginning of worship. It was a small older building with about 15 people present at the moment. To my surprise, no one greeted me. Several people looked over at me from a distance, but no one made an effort to speak with me. In fact, in all the time I was there, not one person, not even the minister, sought to initiate a conversation with me. The whole congregation that morning totaled about 30 people, so I was not missed in a swarm of attendees. I was quite conspicuous, and would have thought that in such a small assembly (which was, by the way, evangelical), significant attempts would have been made to meet and greet this stranger in their midst.

As I walked back to my hotel, I reflected on this experience, and a conversation I had a few years ago came to my mind. On that occasion, I was preaching at a Reformed Baptist church here in the USA. The pastor asked me an interesting question, something like this: “In your travels, do you find Reformed Baptist churches to be friendly and welcoming?” As we talked, he told me that on several of his trips (I think for vacation) he had visited other Reformed Baptist churches and found them to be less than outgoing and friendly. His experience was a sad commentary on the state of the churches he had visited.

My visit to the church near the hotel, and the memory of this conversation have made me think deeply about this. There really is no excuse for churches to be cold and unfriendly. We need to teach our people to greet guests warmly, to engage them in conversations and to find ways to welcome them. And those of us who are elders need to lead the way.

Is your church a friendly church? When the stranger who is stranded at the airport comes into your assembly and then walks back to his hotel, what does he think of your congregation?

James M. Renihan, Dean 

The Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies

http://www.reformedbaptistinstitute.org/

 

The Faulty Foundations of The Shack – Part 3

We must respond to The Shack by William Young with discerning caution. The bedrock flaw of The Shack is Young’s deeply rooted aversion to legitimate authority. The Shack is then built on several faulty theological foundations. We’ve considered two of them: Young’s misunderstanding of both the Fall and God.

Third, Young obscures the essentials of justification. Biblical vocabulary like “sin,” “repentance,” and “justification” are conspicuously absent in The Shack. Young continually advocates a “relationship” with God, but this “relationship” is not concerned with the legal issues that stem from God’s righteous and just character. As previously noted, Young fails to recognize God’s righteous justice due to his inadequate understanding of the Fall. Young tells us in his TV interviews that “God is good and He is involved,” but in The Shack he fails to defend God from the Satanic slander that He is not righteous or just and that He cares little about punishing sin. Young does not deal adequately with God’s command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the punishment of death for violation of God’s Law. Consequently, when Young presents the work of Christ on the cross, these legal concerns are absent and God’s mercy is severed from His justice. “Sarayu” (the Holy Spirit) explains that Jesus “chose the way of the cross where mercy triumphs over justice because of love. Would you instead prefer he’d chosen justice for everyone?” (164,165) Young appears to pit mercy against justice rather than to present mercy as the satisfaction of justice so that God might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Romans 3:26). Unconverted and untaught readers will be liable to think that God’s mercy has nothing to do with His justice. It is a deficient Christian allegory that recounts a sinner’s discussions with each of the Persons of the Godhead on topics like hell, the law, wrath, forgiveness, and the work of Jesus, and fails to articulate clearly the doctrines of sin, repentance, and faith in Christ as our substitutionary sin-bearer. It is an unacceptable Christian allegory that promotes a gospel that fails to explain clearly that Christ’s death paid the penalty of our sin and that His resurrection is the basis of our justification. This too is a faulty foundation.

Fourth, Young’s view of the Christian life is infected with antinomianism (against law). Several walls of “the shack” are built on this faulty foundation. For Young, all authority is suspect. Without the foundation of God’s righteousness and justice, authority becomes a pretense concocted by man to control and dominate others with rules. For Young, authority is, by definition, a function of an abuse of power which prohibits the summum bonum: “relationship.” Here is the essence of Young’s definition of what is evil and wrong in the world. He refers a couple of times to Nietzsche’s “will to power” as descriptive of all authority that men exercise. The “Beasts” therefore are religion, politics, and economics – systems of authority that dominate people and force them to comply with rules. Young does not give credence to legitimate, God-constituted authority. “Papa” explains: “Once you have a hierarchy you need rules to protect and administer it, and then you need law and the enforcement of the rules, and you end up with some kind of chain of command or a system of order that destroys relationship rather than promotes it. You rarely see or experience relationship apart from power. Hierarchy imposes laws and rules and you end up missing the wonder of relationship that we intended for you.” “Authority, as you think of it, is merely the excuse the strong use to make others conform to what they want.” (122,123) Young would have us think that in order to obtain power to manipulate others, men make rules whereas God only wants “relationship.” Young’s anti-authority antinomianism is a faulty foundation upon which a defective superstructure is then built in at least three ways.

First, Young’s anti-authority antinomianism conditions his view of the Godhead. “Papa” describes the inter-Trinitarian relationships on p.122: “Mackenzie, we have no concept of final authority among us, only unity. We are in a circle of relationship… What you’re seeing here is relationship without any overlay of power. We don’t need power over the other because we are always looking out for the best. Hierarchy would make no sense among us. Actually, this is your problem, not ours.” “Jesus” speaks to Mack about the inter-Trinitarian relationships on p.145,146: “We are indeed submitted to one another and have always been so and always will be. Papa is as much submitted to me as I to him, or Sarayu to me, or Papa to her. Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect. In fact, we are submitted to you in the same way.” “Why would the God of the universe want to be submitted to me?” asks Mack. “Jesus” answers: “Because we want you to join us in our circle of relationship.” But anyone who has read only the Gospel of John knows that Jesus accomplished our redemption by His perfect obedience to the will of the Father. Paul wants us to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ (1 Cor 11:3). Young, however, views headship, a hierarchical position of authority, as intrinsically bad. Therefore such a bad thing cannot characterize the relationships among the Persons of the Trinity. Here Young confuses the ontological equality of shared deity by the Persons of the Godhead with their hierarchical relationships and functions in the economy of salvation. As equally divine, God the Father loves us and planned our redemption, God the Son accomplished our redemption, and God the Spirit applies the Father’s love and Christ’s accomplished redemption to us. When God saves a sinner, the Persons of the Godhead act hierarchically: the Son submitting to the will of the Father and the Spirit to the joint will of the Father and the resurrected Son. Young confuses God’s Being with God’s acting. This is a serious error on Young’s part.

An example of how Young confuses God’s Being with His action is his interpretation of 2 Cor 5:19, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. In His interviews, Young emphasizes this verse and interprets God was in Christ in a dangerous way: that the Father suffered in Christ or with Christ on the cross. This interpretation is depicted in The Shack (95,96) where “Papa” is seen has having the scars of the crucifixion on “her” wrists. “Papa” speaks of the cross and says, “We were there together.” In other words, the Father suffered with Jesus, in Jesus, on the cross. This is an ancient heresy called “Patripassianism” from the Latin meaning “the Father suffers.” It is a form of “modalism” which teaches that the one God has appeared in three different modes. The orthodox view of the Trinity is that the one God exists as three divine Persons. The orthodox teaching is that it was the second Person of the Trinity, the Son, who was incarnated, suffered, died and rose again, not the Father. Young mishandles 2 Cor 5:19. Verse 19 is an explanation of verse 18, Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ. The phrase in Christ in verse 19 is synonymous with through Christ in verse 18 (an instrumental dative). Paul is explaining what God has done by means of Christ’s work, not asserting that the Father was ontologically located in Christ so as to suffer as Christ! No, these things are from God whose reconciliation is accomplished by Christ, through Christ, in Christ. By means of Christ’s work, God acts. His actions are described by three participles which are connected to the verb was in verse 19: He was reconciling, not counting, and having committed to us the word of reconciliation - and that all in Christ.

If the Father suffers in or with Jesus, then a distorted picture of God’s wrath emerges. The essence of Jesus’ suffering was His judicial separation from God, His tasting of death, His experience of hell. Separation from His Father under wrath is what the Son suffered so that we would not be cast away from the presence of the Lord into eternal separation from Him under His wrath in hell. Such a distorted view of God’s wrath born for us by Jesus on the cross is the result of Young’s deficient view of the Fall, as mentioned earlier. By not giving due emphasis to God’s righteousness and justice as our Law Giver and Judge, Young empties the curse that Jesus bore on the tree of its judicial essence. Jesus bore God’s wrath, which entailed (how can we conceive of it?) His separation from His Father, a cup which Jesus drank, a suffering which Jesus bore and by that atoning work, is the basis upon which God now reconciles us to Himself.

I want to acknowledge the grace of God in William Young as a fellow believer (Acts 11:23), but he frustrates me by his sometimes dangerous doctrinal confusion. I’m afraid that he is not a safe theological guide. In the fourth and final article, I’ll discuss two more defective superstructures that Young builds on the faulty foundation of his antinomianism as well as some concluding thoughts.

Alan Dunn, Pastor

Grace Covenant Baptist Church

Flemington, NJ

The Faulty Foundations of The Shack – Part 1

The Faulty Foundations of The Shack – Part 2