USATODAY.com.
Now there are 1.1 million copies in print and, two weeks ago, FaithWords, a division of Hachette Book Group, signed on as co-publisher with Windblown. Hatchette agreed to a 500,000-copy press run in June and a national campaign in the secular market in July.
The Shack's success has changed Young's life — a little.
He no longer works three jobs running a manufacturer's sales office and working on websites. Kim still works at Gresham High School as a baker, but she's driving a new Honda. They've moved from the tiny rental house, where he wrote The Shack in the windowless basement near the washing machine, to a bigger rental nearby.
Holding hands and beaming at one of their grandchildren, the Youngs say they'd be fine if the money vanished tomorrow.
"Mack is me, a guy who has made a mess of everything," Young says. "The book takes him outside everything familiar, back to the worst experience of his life and lets him recognize God is so much greater."
Yet, as McVey, the minister from Tampa, says, "This pure grace of God has always divided people."
Mohler, Driscoll and other evangelicals pick The Shack apart plank by plank.
No, God can't be a presented as a woman. No, the three parts of the Trinity did not all become fully human. Yes, there is a hierarchy in the Holy Trinity with God the Father in command. Yes, God will punish sin.
Young shrugs them off. Out there in America, where only three in 10 people attend weekly worship services and millions are ignorant of the Bible, his readers struggle to find a good God amid their pain.
As for critics, he shakes his head.
"I don't want to enter the Ultimate Fighting ring and duke it out in a cage-match with dogmatists. I have no need to knock churches down or pull people out," he says.
"I have a lot of freedom by knowing that you really experience God in relationships, wherever you are. It's fluid and dynamic, not cemented into an institution with a concrete foundation."
"But it's not about me. I have everything that matters, a free and open life full of love and empty of all secrets."
I have not read this book but I have it on order. I just discovered I didn’t waste my money…
Let’s do a brief assessment: Love of God? Check. Grace of God? Check. Freedom? Check. Fundamentalist Evangelicalism hates it? Check. The author has such freedom in the love of Christ he’s not even bothering to fight his critics? Check. Yep, it’s gotta be good.
It’s always easy to identify quality. It’s got a clear message of the heart of God — and the, “Dogmatists,” are tearing it apart. They are not tearing it apart because of the message of grace, love and freedom though — that message they claim to espouse (though their hearts are so far from it.) No, they are tearing it apart because, as a novel, it doesn’t rigidly chant a chapter and verse based perfect literal orthodoxy in telling that story and getting its point across.
The same critics that have ignored the thousands of theological inconsistencies in the allegorical work of, oh, I donno, say C.S. LEWIS!!!!!!{SIGH} Clearly they hate the message — but lack the guts to say so…
