The heart of the New Testament is the relationship between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.
—James B. Torrance
Mackenzie’s meeting with Papa, Sarayu, and Jesus is a weekend within a much, much larger story. As we have seen, the weekend represents eleven years in Paul’s own life. But both Paul’s life and Mackenzie’s weekend fall within the larger narrative of the purposes of the triune God for the human race. The beautiful portrayal of the relationship between Jesus, Sarayu, and Papa (107, 122ff.)—its nonhierarchical nature (121ff.), their amazing freedom to embrace Mackenzie in his anger and pain and unbelief (84ff.), the shocking nail scars on Papa’s wrists (97, 104, 109, 166, 224), and Jesus’ profound comment that he did not come to be an example for us to follow but to share his own life with us (151, 114f.)—all point back to this larger story. We must take time to think about it. If we don’t, we are apt to miss some of the healing the story offers us. This is important, and very relevant to our own lives, hurts, and freedom.
Paul’s larger vision is rooted in “the evangelical theology of the ancient Catholic Church,”1 to borrow a phrase from theologian Thomas F. Torrance. This vision involves you, me, and everyone else on the planet in a breathtaking relationship with Jesus’ Father—the Papa we always wanted. It is trinitarian, incarnational, relational, thoroughly biblical, Christ-centered, and cosmic. It is the truth being told in every line of Paul’s book. I want to explore this trinitarian vision as a way of opening our eyes to the larger context of the book so that we will have a framework for understanding the various topics and issues raised in The Shack. But first I will attempt a brief summary of the trinitarian vision.
From all eternity, God is not alone and solitary, but lives as Father, Son, and Spirit in a rich and glorious fellowship of utter oneness. There is no emptiness in this circle, no depression or fear or insecurity. The trinitarian life is a great dance of unchained communion and intimacy, fired by passionate, self-giving, other-centered love and mutual delight. This life is unique, and it is good and right. It is full of music and joy, blessedness and peace. And this love, giving rise to such togetherness and fellowship and oneness, is the womb of the universe and of humanity within it.
The stunning truth is that this triune God, in amazing and lavish love, determined to open the circle and share the trinitarian life with others. As Papa said to Mack, “We want to share with you the love and joy and freedom and light that we already know within ourself” (126). This is the one, eternal, and abiding reason for the creation of the world and of human life. There is no other God, no other will of God, no second plan, no hidden agenda for human beings. Before the creation of the world, the Father, Son, and Spirit set their love upon us and planned for us to share and know and experience the trinitarian life itself. To this end the cosmos was called into being, the human race was fashioned, and Adam and Eve were given a place in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, in and through whom the dream of our adoption would be accomplished.
Before Creation, it was decided that the Son would cross every chasm between the triune God and humanity and establish a real and abiding union with us. Jesus was predestined to be the mediator, the One in and through whom the very life of the triune God would enter human existence, and human existence would be lifted up to share in the trinitarian life.
When Adam and Eve rebelled, ushering chaos and misery into God’s creation, the Father, Son, and Spirit did not abandon their dream, but wonderfully incorporated our darkness and sin into the tapestry of the coming Incarnation. As the Father’s Son became human, as he submitted himself to bear our anger and bizarre blindness, and as he gave himself to suffer a murderous death at our hands, he established a real and abiding relationship with fallen humanity at our very worst—and he brought his Father and the Holy Spirit with him. It was in Jesus himself, and in his death at our bitter hands, that the trinitarian life of God pitched its tent in our hell on earth, thereby uniting all that the Father, Son, and Spirit share with all that we are in our brokenness, shame, and sin, thus adopting us into their circle of fellowship.
In the life and death of Jesus, the Holy Spirit made his way into human pain and blindness. Inside our broken inner worlds, the Spirit works to reveal Jesus in us so that we can meet Jesus himself in our own sin and shame, begin to see what Jesus sees, and know his Father with him. The Holy Spirit discloses Jesus to us so that we can know and experience Jesus’ own relationship with his Father, and be free to live in the Father’s embrace with Jesus. As the Spirit works, we are summoned to take sides with Jesus against our own darkness and prejudice, and take the “incremental” (97) steps of trust and change. As we do so, Jesus’ own anointing with the Spirit—his own fellowship with his Father, his own unearthly assurance, his own freedom and joy and power in the Spirit—begins to express itself in us, not diminishing our own uniqueness as persons but augmenting and freeing it to be expressed in our relationship with the Father, in our relationships with one another, and indeed with all creation, until the whole cosmos is a living sacrament of the great dance of the triune God.
It is this trinitarian vision that forms Young’s core beliefs, and they inform every page of The Shack. While it would take twenty volumes to set out the details and nuances of these ideas, it is important that we take some time to explore the leading thoughts here more carefully.
In most great stories there is a twist that no one sees coming; something happens that catches both the characters and the readers by surprise. And once it happens, everyone’s understanding of the story changes. In The Shack, the twist—at least the main one—is Papa. In the biblical story, it’s the incarnation of the Son of God. Not a single character in the long drama of Israel anticipated that God would come in person. While not at all inconsistent with the love of Israel’s Lord, such personal presence wasn’t even a blip on Israel’s radar of possibility. After all, there had been four hundred years of prophetic silence; who would ever have dreamed that the Lord himself would suddenly appear? But according to John the Baptist, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, even doubting Thomas and Saul of Tarsus, this is exactly what happened.
Jesus Christ stepped into Israel’s history not merely as a great prophet, a revolutionary priest, or even the best of Israel’s kings. He stepped into Israel’s history as the One Israel called “the Lord.” The shocker of the New Testament is that Israel’s Lord became human. The Creator, the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are constantly sustained, entered into his own creation and became one of us—Immanuel, “God with us.”
In itself, the identification of Jesus with Israel’s Lord, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, was not necessarily at odds with Israel’s nonnegotiable commitment to monotheism. It was surely a shock and perhaps unbelievable, but it simply meant that the Lord himself had come in person. But Jesus was not alone. And this was the rub, or perhaps I should say, the revelation, for the Lord identified himself as “the Son” and lived his life in relationship to One he called “my Father.” And in the midst of this remarkable relationship moved One called “the Holy Spirit.”
The New Testament fits into Israel’s history like a newfound scroll that recasts the whole story in a new light. It is loaded with revolutionary ideas that call for a serious rethinking of everything we thought we knew about God, about creation, and about human life and history. It does not read like a collection of letters from pipe-smoking old men. There is urgency; there is passion; there is scrambling. Every writer stands on his tiptoes, stretching his imagination to see and to say. Jesus rocked the world! His presence was too big, too stunning, too beautiful to be understood, yet it had to be told. His life involved the whole cosmos and every single human being within it. And most important of all, his presence involved God.
For the disciples, Jesus is not a mere prophet heralding the latest divine message. Jesus is a revolution. Note the very first verse of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” These three simple statements carry hitherto unknown and inconceivable ideas about God that are destined to change the world. As a good Jew, John certainly knows the first verse in the Hebrew Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”2 But John has met Jesus, and “saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.”3 While John certainly agrees that God created all things, he cannot leave it at that, for he has seen something that has changed his understanding of everything. Note the parallel and the difference between Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Having met Jesus and beheld his glory, John makes the staggering move of placing Jesus with God in the beginning. In this unprecedented move John is filling out the notion of God with the idea of relationship: the God who created is not alone and solitary, but relational.
While the ancient world was replete with gods and goddesses, John is not simply adding another to the list. The Word or Son who was in the beginning “was with God.” The preposition with here carries the Hebrew idea of being face-to-face. It is an idea of personal relationship, of intimacy. At the end of his introduction, John adds another image to solidify this point: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.”4 This imagery is not cold or sterile; it suggests profound familiarity, a deep, personal relationship of mutual affection, delight, and love. And John is saying that this beautiful fellowship exists within the very being of God, and thus frames the story of Creation itself. The twist in the tale turns out to be a double twist: first, God has come in person; second, this God is the Son of his Father. In Jesus, the kaleidoscope of human thought turns and all things appear new—including God. The incarnation of the Father’s eternal Son, anointed in the Holy Spirit, is a flash of eternal light enlightening all human knowledge of God.5