Paul: No one is born a leader…I have never seen a baby care for anyone but themselves. Jeremy: Do you think people are born leaders or develop into leaders? Still didn’t understand it, but was disappointed. Paul: I didn’t comprehend that I was not black, but white, until I went to boarding school when I was six years old. Jeremy: Tell us something odd/unique about you. From my perspective, if you read this as a fictional story of one man’s speculation about God, it can be a powerful encouragement for experiencing or renewing your own journey with God through the Bible. His encounter with God changes his life forever, and it may just change yours as the reader too.īecause of the book’s massive success, Paul has been criticized by some for his theology in the book.

The book tells a fictional story of a man who gets a letter from God inviting him to a shack for the weekend where a horrible event took place in his life. The book will soon be appearing in more than 30 languages around the world and in audio versions in many countries as well. As of this writing, The Shack is still the #1 NY Times Bestseller, 36 weeks running, over 6 million in print. It is not worth reading for the story and certainly not worth reading for the theology.Paul Young (he actually goes by his middle name) is the bestselling author of the book, The Shack. And in this case, the theology just is not good enough.īecause of the sheer volume of error and because of the importance of the doctrines reinvented by the author, I would encourage Christians, and especially young Christians, to decline this invitation to meet with God in The Shack. In theory this is well and good in practice the book is only as good as its theology. This story is meant to teach theology that Young really believes to be true. There is a sense of attempted or perceived reality in this story that is missing in the others. It seeks to represent the members of the Trinity as they are (or as they could be) and to suggest through them what they might teach were they to appear to us in a similar situation. Lewis simply asked (and answered) this kind of question: What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours? The Shack is in a different category than these more notable Christian works. Nor can The Shack quite be equated with a story like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where C.S.

The Pilgrims Progress, after all, is allegorya story that has a second distinct meaning that is partially hidden behind its literal meaning. But really, this is a bit of a facile comparison. It is neither as good nor as original a story and it lacks the theological precision of Bunyans work. Eugene Peterson says this book is as good and as important as The Pilgrims Progress.

Paul young author of the shack