The God of sloppy kisses

It doesn't really bother me that Paul Young portrays God the Father as a woman per se. George Macdonald did so with profound effect over a century ago. But.....Aunt Jemima?? Macdonald's Wise Woman, whether kind or severe, was always gracious, but never to be trifled with and certainly not a dispenser of sloppy kisses. Young's though is not merely an African-American woman; she's a stereotyped African-American woman, and as such comes across to me as cartoonish and silly.

To see God rendered this way is like coming across one of the earlier attempts to animate the Lord of the Rings; it falls so far short that one wants to cry out "Noooo! Don't even try!"

This I believe is symptomatic of a wider problem with Paul Young's view of God. And that is, how shall I say it, the trivialization of God and of the impact He has on those who encounter Him.

What I mean is this: that when men encounter God in Scripture - or better to say, He encounters them - they are never unmoved. They fall on their faces, they repent in dust and ashes, they cry woe to themselves - in short, they are undone. Job, for example, after 30 chapters of nonstop kvetching, is silenced when God finally appears to him. The man who couldn't wait to confront his God suddenly has no more questions.

In The Shack, both the order of questioning and the role of questioner seem to be reversed from Job's experience. Mack has always brooded about the absence of God, until God appears to him in order to cajole him out of his sulks and entertain any and all questions he may have. With the opening of a door, we go from the Silent God to the God Who Can't Stop Talking. While Mack is taken aback by the idea of actually speaking to God, the God he faces has all the gravitas of a talk show host and we are not surprised that Mack is not moved in any deep way by God's very presence.

It seems to me that this portrayal is a deeply unworthy view of God. I understand what Young is trying to do. He wants to give us a picture of a God who will stoop to woo us - and in a certain sense that is correct. God spoke to Elijah in a still, small voice, Jesus humbled himself by "taking the form of a bondservant" and Augustine heard God's voice as that of a child chanting "take and read".

But the ingredient of awe is completely absent in Young's picture of God as a jolly, smoochy aunt. It lacks....verismilitude (to use a literary term). God is simply not like that, not in Scripture nor in my own experience.

God explains this approach to Mack as a device to disarm his resentment against God as an imagined cold and distant father and to engage him in dialogue. However, since we all know that any boy over the age of 10 would recoil from such embraces, it is hard to imagine them having much disarming effect on a grown man.

As a result, it is hard for me to enter imaginatively into the ensuing dialogue as a conversation with God. As I read it, in my mind's eye I keep seeing this scrolling disclaimer as if across a television screen: "literary vehicle for author's views".

And the whole notion of God needing to dialogue with Mack to bring him around also seems counterintuitive. This idea is encapsulated in God's statement "I often find that getting head issues out of the way first makes the heart stuff easier to work on later". Again, this seems to be the wrong way around from how God really works.

In my observation, it's not the head issues which typically keep people from God. More often, it is precisely the heart issues which do - and the head issues are thrown up as a defensive screen. When the Holy Spirit is working, a single word will find the chink in the armour and the proud tower of intellectual opposition comes down.

I believe that the reason it works this way is this: when God reveals Himself to anyone, He gives them a direct (though limited) perception of His nature. If I have misperceived Him as a cold indifferent father, the misperception falls away before the direct sense of Him as someone who loves me and knows me by name. No words are needed, God does not need to cajole me or draw me into dialogue.

Nor did He need to do so with Job. That is why Job, unlike Mack, fell down and fell silent before God. He was not just awed or intimidated into ending his questioning of Him but as he said: "I had heard of You second hand, but now I have met You."

And that was enough.