Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God.
—George MacDonald
What if instead of Papa, it was Mack’s real dad who flung the door open and ran toward him, drunk again, stick in hand and eyes full of rage, ready for another round of beatings? Huckleberry Finn’s dad was a drunk, too, and mean as a snake. When Huck heard his dad calling his name, he ran for his life. For the one thing Mack and Huck knew was that their fathers were not for them. There was no baptism of unearthly assurance. Theirs was a baptism of outright fear.
I once asked Paul about his favorite line in his book. He responded quickly, “That’s easy: ‘Freedom is an incremental process’ ” (97). We want a quick fix, but that’s not how it works. The freedom of living loved is not the sort of thing that happens overnight. Hearing Papa takes time. We are all so wounded and blind; we bring a lot of baggage into our hearing. Life, history, wars and beatings, abusive parents, evil systems, and our own invisible world of assumptions and prejudices all work against us, shouting that God is like Mack’s real dad, and Huck’s. He could not possibly be for us. And if God is not for us, we certainly don’t want to hear him shouting our name.
It would take an entire weekend of love, acceptance, and conversation before Mack could begin to hear the truth. And for Paul himself, Mack’s weekend at the shack represents more than a decade of his own life. Lewis’s journey was much the same. He says that his imagination was baptized when he was reading one of George MacDonald’s books, but that it took years before that baptism reached the rest of him.1 There is something deep within us that tells us it can’t be so, that God cannot be for us. Even Missy, who called God “Papa” like her mother, nevertheless thought that God was “mean” (33) and wondered if she would have to die. Perhaps all this talk of the love of Papa is just romanticism.
Yet we know that God is good, else we would not care a whit about problems in life. They wouldn’t be problems really, they would just be life: the way it is. But we know that it is not supposed to be this way. This is why tragedy is so tragic to us and hurts so brutally; we know that life is supposed to be good.2 We have heard the music. We have tasted of something beautiful, and somehow we know we belong to it. It is our own despair, our own frustration and pain that tell us we are made for peace. For how can you be homesick if you have no home? How can you despair if you don’t know that you are meant for abounding life?
We are in two minds. Even Papa made Mackenzie “nervous” (119), and her offer to be the Papa he had never had “was at once inviting and at the same time repulsive” (94). It all translates into a question of serious importance. Is God really for us? Note this depiction of Jesus’ Father:
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.3
This image of Jesus’ Father is from Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Thankfully, this is not the full picture of Edwards’s vision, but it is unfortunately the most famous sermon in American history.4 It makes sense to our broken, wounded minds. Needless to say, it stands in dramatic contrast to Young’s Papa and her determined love. Edwards’s God is full of wrath, bound by a law of abstract justice. We have failed; we deserve to suffer. God is angry. You wouldn’t expect this God to say, “I have really been looking forward to seeing you face to face. It is so wonderful to have you here with us. My, my, my, how I do love you!” (85).
The anger of Edwards’s God, terrible as it is, may not be as bad as his arbitrariness. He is aloof. He has no obligation to his own creation. Love is not an essential part of his being; it’s merely an option. He is not for us. And it is this divine ambivalence toward us that causes our real hearing problems. Why should he not let the arrows fly? Who wants to hear this God call our names? Who really wants to go to this God’s heaven?
But in Young’s Papa there is no ambivalence at all. There is not a shred of indifference or neutrality. There is no Maybe, or Perhaps, or If-Then. Young’s Papa is for us, always has been, and always will be. She doesn’t even have a quiver of arrows. Love is the core truth of her very being: “I am love” (103); “The God who is—the I am who I am—cannot act apart from love!” (104).
Most of us, like Mackenzie, while wanting to believe, have too many shadows and a thousand questions. What about wrath? What about holiness and judgment, faith and repentance, heaven and hell? God cannot simply love us because that’s the way he is. Don’t we have to do something?
Mack knew that what he was hearing, as hard as it was to understand, was something amazing and incredible. It was as if her words were wrapping themselves around him, embracing him and speaking to him in ways beyond just what he could hear. Not that he actually believed any of it. If only it were true. His experience told him otherwise. (104)
As I read through The Shack, especially the conversations about goodness and love, I thought again and again of Athanasius, one of the early Church heroes. Note what he says about Jesus’ Father:
The God of all is good and supremely noble by nature. Therefore he is the lover of humanity.5
As, then, the creatures whom He had created… were in fact perishing, and such noble works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good, to do? Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning?… It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.6
I first read Athanasius when I was a senior at Ole Miss, having followed up a footnote in C. S. Lewis’s God in the Dock. As a son of the Bible Belt, I was shocked when I read the two statements quoted above, and the many more I found like them. This Athanasius fellow, I thought to myself, writes as if the Father loves us passionately, as if he is for us, not against us. The God of Athanasius is all heart, intent on the single-minded purpose of blessing us beyond our wildest dreams. It’s as though we are the reason for the whole creation—the apple of his eye. He has stunning dreams for us, and he won’t let them go. This Father doesn’t have to have his arm twisted by Jesus to love us, or to forgive us. He is not distant, aloof, uncaring. He is thrilled with his creation, and loves us all. For Athanasius, Jesus is the proof.
This was a different world and a different God from that of the Calvinism of my youth. The sheer love of Athanasius’s God captured my imagination. Far from being a stern Judge ever watching with his disapproving heart, or the faceless, nameless omni-being, Jesus’ Father is good, and “therefore he is the lover of humanity.” What, then, is this Father to do when his creation, when Mackenzie Allen Phillips, when you and I are trapped in such dastardly confusion and on the road to ruin? Throw up his hands and scream at Jesus, “I knew this would happen! I never should have let you talk me into such a stupid thing as creating human beings! You can go and fix it if you want, but know this: I don’t care; let them squirm and die in the miserable mess they have made. They have offended me. They make me sick. Where is my quiver?”
In Athanasius’s view, it never crossed the Father’s mind to go back on his lavish dreams for the human race. He is not fickle; he did not grudgingly grant us life, only to watch for an excuse to abandon us. He is good, and therefore loves us forever. Inconceivable as it may be to us, before the creation of the world the Father, Son, and Spirit set their love upon us, and dreamed of the day when we could be included in nothing less than the very life and goodness, the fellowship and joy, the unbridled delight that they share together from all eternity. As Papa says to Mackenzie, “We created you to share in that” (101).
It was unworthy of the goodness of God that creatures made by Him should be brought to nothing through the deceit wrought upon man by the devil; and it was supremely unfitting that the work of God in mankind should disappear, either through their own negligence or through the deceit of evil spirits. As, then, the creatures whom He had created… were in fact perishing, and such noble works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good, to do?7
When Adam fell, when he introduced independence and thus chaos, dying, misery, and death into the world of God’s dreams for us, the response of the Father, Son, and Spirit was as simple as it was passionate: “No! No! No! Not on our watch! We did not create you to perish, to die, to live in such appalling pain and blindness and brokenness. We created you to share in our life, to taste and feel and know and experience what we have known from all eternity.”
Adam chose to go it on his own, as we knew he would, and everything got messed up. But instead of scrapping the whole Creation we rolled up our sleeves and entered into the middle of the mess—that’s what we have done in Jesus. (101)
Papa’s unflinching heart reflects the passionate love of Athanasius’s God, and putting the two in vivid contrast with Edwards’s God helps us see a confusion at work in our own hearts, or at least a duality. Like an overturned tackle box, the two pictures of God have left our beliefs in a tangled mess. How can we hear Jesus’ Papa call our names, and believe it when we do, when there are two very different Gods knocking around in our minds? It is, I fear, even more complicated than this, for our notions of God shape our understanding of why God created us, of who we are, of what happened in Adam and then in Jesus, and of the very nature of life, just to name a few.
And there is another question lurking here. How have we developed our ideas about God? Who told us? Was it our parents, our church, a religious leader, the Bible, or are our ideas of God a compilation of various notions that just seem right to us? Or do they arise from our wounds? Perhaps, like Mack’s, our view of God is influenced by iconic figures such as Gandalf (75) or Santa Claus. Or could our God be our own image writ large and projected into heaven, as Papa said to Mack?
The problem is that many folks try to grasp some sense of who I am by taking the best version of themselves, projecting that to the nth degree, factoring in all the goodness they can perceive, which often isn’t much, and then call that God. And while it may seem like a noble effort, the truth is that it falls pitifully short of who I really am. I’m not merely the best version of you that you can think of. I am far more than that, above and beyond all that you can ask or think. (100)
For Mackenzie, hearing Papa was largely about the removal of his alien ideas. As Papa said in a simple but loaded statement, “I am not who you think I am, Mackenzie” (98).