No matter how many ways I find to describe God He seems always to be “in between” them all. There’s always more to Him than my words or thoughts can capture. It’s a bit like trying to count the members of a transfinite set.

No matter how many axes I use to try to measure Him, there always seem to remain an uncountable number of axes orthogonal to all the ones I’ve already found.

My descriptions of Him, though they were all perfectly true and even if I go on with them eternally (believers _will_ praise Him eternally, after all), will always comprise an enumerable set. The real God will always be there in, around, and far beyond all the truth we can ever utter about Him.

This link between creation and redemption, which I know is not a novel observation, is still powerful. It also seems to me in certain ways a link between the great, world-changing action of God, and God’s action in my own life. (I know that the scope of God’s redemptive activity is far broader than just my own life, but my life is included within that scope.) I “get” people who want to stress how “big” God is, His “otherliness,” and sometimes I want to stress that, too, but I can’t leave that without recalling the many times in the Bible and in my own life where God has reached out in significant, small ways to get my attention, to give a blessing to me, to help me to learn. Some of the unusual little stories of the Old Testament are meaningful to me in the fact that this amazing, powerful, Creator of all things has stopped to touch the lives of people on an individual level. And that gives me hope that God will continue to reach out to touch me, too.

I have problems with The Shack, but not for theological reasons. I think it says more about our culture than the Godhead. God has morphed into a black grandmother from a white grandfather. (The Oracle in The Matrix movies was also a black grandmother.)

We want God to draw near and explain life, but he doesn’t often do so. Even Abraham, the Father of the Faithful–not to mention three world religions–only “saw” God about once every twenty years on average.

Perhaps a better comparison would be C. S. Lewis’ _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_. No disrespect to Brian McLaren, Randy Alcorn or Paul Young, but what are the chances that they will still be winning significant numbers of new readers in 50 years? Or, put another way, what are the chances you personally will re-read _The Shack_ multiple times because you gain something spiritually significant?

Lewis still is read and re-read because the story is magical, the writing is simple, yet profound, the truths powerful, and the imagery (Christ as a lion) has a sort of fit with biblical text.

The current bestseller list (like money making in general) has a way of skewing perspective. I will be pleasantly surprised if _The Shack_ is still selling well and impacting lives for good in 10 years–not to mention 50 years. Same with McLaren and Alcorn. They seem to be more current than have the timelessness of Dante and Bunyan. History has a way of weeding out the nice and the good from the great.

There is in scripture an astonishing blend of otherness (take off your sandals for you are standing on holy ground; don’t touch the mountain or its base) and closeness (so they saw God, and they ate and drank–Ex. 24:11 and the passage you mention about Abraham feeding the three men and talking with the Lord).

To focus on one or the other is not of itself a problem–though an implicit denial of one or the other has historically been grounds for deep concern.

I was well on my way to joining the five-pointers’ stampede to diss the novel, and then I listened to a roundtable discussion at Regent (here).

John Stackhouse, a Regent theology prof, was one of the panelists. He begins by emphasizing that “The Shack” is fiction! If you wish, you can read his insightful comments at this blog.

By the end of the discussion, I’d done a 180!

“The Shack” is fiction, a novel that re-tells one person’s spiritual journey. In no way does it present a full-orbed systematic view of the Lord God Almighty, nor is it intended too. If it did, it probably (certainly?) wouldn’t be on the NYT Best Seller list.

I’ve now changed teams and celebrate the unintended consequences: Jesus is back front and center in a fresh new way! Yes.

PS On a humorous, but telling note, Maudine Fee comments on the Regent panel that she and Gordon, her husband, read through “The Shack” every night before bed, but Gordon kept dozing off. I say, “telling,” because Fee, the brilliant NT Scholar, like many (most?) of us scholastic types don’t get fiction. We — and I include myself here! — are a product of the Enlightenment: we want things screwed down nice and tight, so our first impulse is usually not to fall asleep, but trash it …