Over the last year, there has been quite a stir about a book that has made the rounds in the Christian community. The book is called The Shack , and the reason that it’s raised a ruckus, is it has the ‘God’ character written as a 
grandmotherly African-American woman.
What shock me so much is this is NOT a new idea. No offense to Wm. Paul Young, but he’s just using a literary tool that other authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis have already employed. The only difference is the uproar that this is causing. Forgive me for saying this, but isn’t this a little bit of hypocrisy?
In The Chronicles of Narnia, Jesus is portrayed as a Lion (Aslan) until the very end of the series when he takes on “another” form. Also in the Space Trilogy by Lewis, his main character, Ransom, comes into contact with several allegorical God-like concepts. Peter J. Kreeft writes of J.R.R. Tolkien,
There is no one complete, concrete, visible Christ figure in The Lord of the Rings, like Aslan in Narnia. But Christ is really, though invisibly, present in the whole of The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings is like the Eucharist. Under its appearances we find Christ, who under these (pagan, universal) figures (symbols, not allegories), is truly hidden.
• This essay is an excerpt from Peter J. Kreeft’s book, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings.
So, with so many previous works of fiction showing Christ and God as different forms, why does God in The Shack cause such passionate negative emotion?
My thought would be that people were so taken aback by God’s humaness, that is shoock them to the very core. Could it be that people [Christians] weren’t ready for an African-Amercian Supreme Being? With the election of the United States first African-Amercian president, I doubt that to be true. It could still be a possibility, but I have another theory.
I believe that Christians have become institutionalized. In their minds, God can ONLY be an old WHITE man with a long white beard, sitting on high with a young, good looking, dark haired, brown eyed Christ sitting at his right side. Both dressed in supreme white, no blemish, no ‘dirt’ on their hands. In other words, their God is NOT REAL. They pray to Him, but they don’t believe that he could appear to them in ANY form, let alone the form that God chooses.
In The Shack , God, or Papa as she is called, explains why she looks the way she does.
“Mackenzie, I am neither male nor female, even though both genders are derived from my nature. If I choose to appear to you as a man or woman, it’s because I love you. For me to appear to you as a woman and suggest that you call me Papa is simply to mix metaphors, to help you keep from falling back into your religious conditioning.
To reveal myself to you as a very large white grandfather figure with a flowing beard like Grandalf, would simply reinforce your religious stereotypes, and this weekend in not about reinforcing your religious stereotypes.”
And that is what we Christians do, we stereotype God. As long as we are mentally able to put God in our nice, neat (controllable) boxes, we’re OK…anything other than that…we are completely at a loss for words.
But God is so much more than we can even comprehend. The reference to Aslan is that He is not a tame lion. And our God, our Creator, our Source, our Alpha and Omega, our Savior, Redeemer, and Maker of Heaven and earth WILL NOT be molded into a man-made icon to be prayed to and sung songs to only to be put into a box and swept away from our minds.
I think that Aslan put it best, when asked if He is in our world, His response is similar to Papa’s from The Shack ,
“That was the very reason you were brought here [to Narnia], that by knowing Me here for a little, you may know me better there. But there I am known by another name…”
Is God a man or a woman, black, white, Hispanic, Methodist, Catholic, or Baptists? I’m not sure that even matters, but God is pretty specific about WHO and What He is. The answer is found in Exodus 3,
And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”
But Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.”
Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
God said to Moses, “I am who I am . This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ “
What does God look like to you?
