 
God and The Shack:  
Interviews With William Paul Young

Copyright 2016 Grace Communion International

Published by Grace Communion International

Cover image: Grace Communion International

### Table of Contents

Introduction

How The Shack Was Written

Is God a Christianized Zeus?

Did an Angry God Force His Son to Die?

The Theology of Paul Young's Book The Shack: Interview With C. Baxter Kruger

The Shack Revisited: An Interview With C. Baxter Kruger and Paul Young Together

New Relationship With God: Interview With C. Baxter Kruger and Paul Young

The Trinity and Evangelism

About the Publisher

Grace Communion Seminary

Ambassador College of Christian Ministry

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

## Introduction

This is a transcript of seven interviews conducted as part of the _You're Included_ series, sponsored by Grace Communion International. We have more than 120 interviews available. You may watch them or download video or audio at www.gci.org/YI.

In ordinary conversations, thoughts are not always put into well-formed sentences, and sometimes thoughts are not completed. In the following transcripts, we have removed occasional words that did not seem to contribute any meaning to the sentence. In some cases we could not figure out what word was intended. We apologize for any transcription errors, and if you notice any, we welcome your assistance.

Grace Communion International is in broad agreement with the theology of the people we interview, but GCI does not endorse every detail of every interview. The opinions expressed are those of the interviewees. We thank them for their time and their willingness to participate.

We incur substantial production costs for these interviews and transcripts. Donations in support of this ministry may be made at www.gci.org/donate.

Our guest in the first three interviews is William Paul Young, author of the best-selling book _The Shack_ (Windblown Media, 2007), _Cross Roads_ (Faithwords, 2012), and _Eve_ (Thorndike, 2015).

Our guest in the fourth interview is C. Baxter Kruger, president of Perichoresis, a non-profit ministry. Dr. Kruger is the author of the following books:

Across All Worlds: Jesus Inside Our Darkness

God Is For Us

The Great Dance: The Christian Vision Revisited

Jesus and the Undoing of Adam

_The Shack Revisited:_ _There Is More Going On Here Than You Ever Dared to Dream_

_Sharing in God's Life: Interviews With C. Baxter Kruger_ (available as an e-book in the same place you obtained this one)

Paul Young and Baxter Kruger teamed up for the last three interviews. All the interviews were conducted by J. Michael Feazell, then Vice President of Grace Communion International.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

back to table of contents

## How _The Shack_ Was Written

**J. Michael Feazell:** A new novel has skyrocketed to the top of the charts, capturing the imagination of Christians everywhere.

What's so surprising about _The Shack_ by William P. Young is its portrayal of God: not the solitary God of popular imagination, such as the one portrayed by George Burns in the film, _Oh, God_ or by Morgan Freeman in _Evan Almighty,_ but the God of Christian orthodoxy – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – three in one and one in three, the Holy Trinity. The result has been hailed as life-changing. Let's talk to the author, William P. Young.

**JMF:** What is it about _The Shack_ that is capturing Christians' imagination?

**WPY:** I have no idea. (laughter)

No, I have some ideas. I think that for a lot of us who grew up inside religious kinds of environments, _The Shack_ allows God to become accessible and understandable in a way that hasn't been out there in the same kind of form. There's something about a story, there's something about art in general, that has a way of getting past our preconceptions and our paradigms and everything else. Music does that. It has a way of going right past our intellectuality and penetrating us in the heart.

I think that's why parables that Jesus would use were so effective, because they had a way of penetrating past people's preconceptions and their stereotypes and everything else. As a story it has a way of doing it, when you come to the character and nature of God.

I grew up as a missionary kid and a preacher's kid and I went to Bible school and seminary and we always try to find analogies or some way to comprehend the Trinity. I didn't intend to write a great book on the Trinity, that was an accident. What I did was want to communicate to my children, the fact that the very nature of relationship has to be embedded in the character and nature of God.

**JMF:** So you wrote this for your children to begin with – publication wasn't something you had in mind.

**WPY:** No. I'm the most accidental author you'll ever meet. I've never published anything, I've always written as gifts, whether it was poems or songs or whatever, gifts for my children, for my friends, for events, and this was no different. This was in obedience to my wife. She wanted me to write something for the children. She said, "I'd like you to write something that would help your kids understand the breadth of how you think, cause you're a little bit outside the box."

**JMF:** There must be a reason she asked you to do that, there must have been something shaping. This is a pretty enormous undertaking...

**WPY:** It's probably because I've done a lot of speaking, a lot of teaching, those kinds of things, and the transformation in my life came about through the process of the renewing of the mind, the healing process in my life, and she'd watched all that and then she also liked how I wrote. So the combination of the two things. My goal in 2005 was to get it done by Christmas, and get it to Kinko's, put it in a spiral bound, whatever, and have it for them for Christmas. No thought whatsoever, it wasn't even on the radar that somebody would want to publish it.

**JMF:** So what happened?

**WPY:** It got out of hand, is what happened. Even the electronic version, the first manuscript I sent to a couple of my cousins. It had this huge impact that I wasn't anticipating. And it would spill over. People would send it to other people, and we started getting this feedback about the book, and I didn't know what to do about it.

So after Christmas, I sent it to the only "for real" author that I know – that was Wayne Jacobson and he intentionally writes books. I just attached it to an email because one of his books had just came out that I really loved and I said, by the way, I've been working on this. Then he said, of course, he gets buried with these kinds of things. I understood that and said, no expectations, really.

I just had the nudge (and sometimes the Holy Spirit gives us a nudge just so we learn how to hear his voice, not for any outcome). But in this case he actually started reading and he promised me he would read at least 20 pages. He called me back up and kind of freaked me out, because (I've come to know that Wayne is like this, but I didn't know it at that time) he started off – "What were you thinking sending me this manuscript?" I thought, "I have pushed all his hot buttons." I'm backing up in the basement. "Oh man, what do I do?" I said, "My relationship with you is way more important than some sort of manuscript...just put it on the shelf."

He said, "No, you don't understand. I can't print the pages fast enough. I don't remember the last time I read anything where my immediate response was "I have six or seven people that I need to send this to right now."

So I said, "I trust the Holy Spirit in you. Send it to whoever you want." He said, "I already did." This is from Friday to Monday. That sort of got the ball rolling.

I went down and met with him and his buddy Brad Cummings – they do the "God Journey" podcast, and Bobby Downs from Christian Cinema came around, and we began to just talk about and work on how to bring this about, which started a 16-month process, because we all have jobs and busy-ness and everything else.

We very collaboratively worked on the book – then nobody would publish it. We sent it to everybody. Nobody wanted it. Either they didn't respond, or if they did, they said, "It doesn't fit our niche." It's either too edgy or too much Jesus, depending what side of the farm they're on. So the guys said, "Well, we've always wanted to be a publishing company," so they created their own – with one title – _The Shack_ – and attached it to a website.

Wayne's and people from the podcast were the initial ones who purchased the copies, and then they'd come back and they'd buy four, and they'd come back and buy six, and then a dozen, and then a case, and we just watched this thing begin to blossom. Even to date, we've only spent a couple or three hundred dollars in marketing and promotion, total. It's all been through relationship, which is the earmark of the book itself. It's all about: this has got to be a relationship with God or else we're just not going to be good enough to achieve that whatever it is that we're supposed to be doing.

**JMF:** There's a perception of God that most people have, kind of a "God's out there, we're down here."

**WPY:** He's watching from a distance, like that silly song.

**JMF:** Yeah. What do you see as the problems of that kind of perspective – that's how most people think of God?

**WPY:** Any theology of separation creates a gap that is up to _us_ to traverse.

**JMF:** Now, theology of separation, you mean...

**WPY:** A lot of us grew up with an idea that everything was based on our performance. Instead of a new covenant understanding of union with Christ, we still function as if we lived in the old covenant...

**JMF:** Separated from God.

**WPY:** Separated from God. When we have any perceived separation, that separation's our problem, it's our fault and it's our sin, it's our whatever – and so it's now up to us through behavior to get across that separation to wherever God is – to enter his holiness.

Even modern believers use language that is a language of separation. "We are now going to come into his presence" – as if we've been out of it. All of that language is old covenant language, and the whole performance-based paradigm is definitely old covenant, but we've just modified it – changed some of the words – and now we can eat shellfish. But we also have another thousand extra little rules that we've added as well.

**JMF:** When you talk about relationship, as opposed to this theology of separation, this is what you get into as you unfold the God-character in the book. The Trinity plays a very important role in that – but the Trinity is not something the average Christian thinks much about. It's a doctrine, and the church holds it as a doctrine as important and key, but...

**WPY:** But it's a more of an intellectual kind of affirmation than anything else, and people don't see how crucial the reality of the relationships amongst or within God are to us. Again, I didn't intend to write a book on the Trinity, but by describing them relate to each other, all of a sudden it makes sense.

**JMF:** That is, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

**WPY:** Exactly. You begin to see God within – God's very character is relational and cannot be un-relational. For example, God has never done anything by himself. There's always been three involved. In the creation, he says, "This is a great creation, it's all good. But there's one thing that's not good. We have a creation here, a human being who doesn't have anybody to collaborate with. And that's not good." In God's very being, you have collaboration and relationship, that's why there's verses about the Father being the creator and the Spirit being the creator, and Word, Jesus, being the creator.

We think in our independent theology, individualistic theology, that somehow we can do this by ourselves – that we're going to be alone. It's relational for us because we are made in his image, and his very nature is relational. It begins to change everything – the dynamics of how this all works.

So when Jesus comes to us, when God the Father comes to us, the Spirit comes to us, it's all about relationship. That's why to me the central passage of the new covenant in Scriptures is John 14, 15, 16, 17, when he's talking about, "this is what we've been going after. We are coming to live inside of you – we're going to make this a habitation and not just a visitation. We've been dealing with visitation, but it's all going to change now and we're going to come live inside of you."

**JMF:** Typically people think of that in terms of rules! God has a list of rules, commandments and we obey those, and that's how we have a good relationship with God and with each other.

**WPY:** Good luck with that! If you think that it's on the basis of behavior – especially those of us who've been damaged, which would probably include most of us. But the more damaged that we've been, behavior is not going to work for us. We have to have some form of transformation, or there's no hope for us. We're not people that are necessarily self-disciplined. Our flesh got hurt somewhere in the process and we don't have the bent for that or the ability for it. So if we make everything behavioral in terms of relationship with God, we're toast. This is not going to happen.

**JMF:** Does it take a degree of honesty for Christians to see themselves in that light?

**WPY:** Absolutely, and it takes time, it takes process, and for us, to become honest is a process by itself. You have Jacob, right? Jacob is in the later part of his life and he's still not been honest. It has taken this whole time. God has been consistently working at him and present with him, and he's now going to face his brother who he thinks is going to kill him. He sends everything out until he's got nothing left to work with, and then he takes on God.

In the wrestling match, God finally says, "I'm done. We're not doing this anymore. This is your whole life. I'm not going to play this game anymore."

Jacob says, "I'm not going to let you go until you bless me."

God says, "Ok, tell me your name."

When I first ran into that during my process of healing, I immediately went back to Jacob as a young man and he goes in looking for the father's blessing. I'm not going to leave until you give me the blessing. His dad says, "What's your name?" And he says, "Esau."

We're right back there, in that sense, but all these years later – and now he's wrestling and saying "I'm not going to let you go until I have the father's blessing."

And God says, "What's your name?"

He finally says, "Jacob. I'm a liar, I'm a heel-grabber, I'm a cheat, I'm a usurper, I'm all these things."

Then God says, "Ok, I'm not only going to bless you by putting your hip out, so that you have something that will remind you everyday of who you are and where you've come from, but I'll change your name, too. You'll be a conquered one, you'll be conquered by God."

That level of honesty is what _The Shack_ is part of. It's about being honest. _The Shack_ is a metaphor. It's the place where we got hurt. It's the place where we got damaged, it's the place that we messed up so royally – or that we've been piling all the stuff. And we don't want to go back there. We want God to come in and just yank us from where we are, to somewhere where we think we ought to be. And he says, "No, we're gonna actually begin to heal the emotions, and heal the thinking, and heal the heart, and do all these things. But to do that, we've got to go back there."

For me, it took 38 years to get to the shack, it took 11 years to get through the shack, and I condense that 11 years to a weekend for Mackenzie Allen Phillips, the main character. And in that "shack," it's time for all secrets to come out, because we are as sick as the secrets we keep. A lot of times, the religiosity side – this performance-based paradigm – either forces us to hide our stuff, or just flat out lie about it.

**JMF:** To ourselves.

**WPY:** To ourselves and to everyone out there, and to God. It's just like somebody said to me: "Oh. I couldn't really tell God this." It's like he doesn't know. All because he is separated again – he's over there somewhere and this is just between you and me, I can tell you, but I couldn't really tell God these things.

We again have that idea of God as not being inside this process with us. He is outside, seeing how good at the process we are, and judging us at every point for our inability to be perfect in it. We only feel as good about ourselves as our last moment of perfection, inside that paradigm. It's a devastating paradigm, and I think it's false.

One of the reasons I wrote the book for my children was to save them maybe 40 years of legalistic-performance-oriented baggage. I don't want them to run with 750 million pounds of weight, and they're so far ahead of where I was when I was their age, and I'm grateful for that.

**JMF:** Why, even though we know this about God, do we tend to be so addicted to rules?

**WPY:** Part of it is bad theology. Maybe intended or unintended – but we got the idea somewhere along the road that we're still in the old covenant, the language changed a little bit. The other part of it is that – think of where we've come from, where before Jesus Christ came to live inside of us and make us spiritually alive, all we had was the flesh, all we had was this mortality, and everything was dependent on how we looked, who we knew, how good we thought, if we could sing or not, everything was performance and competition. That's how we think about everything.

So when Jesus now comes to dwell inside of us, he doesn't automatically transform the flesh. It's in a process of being saved. I reject the Buddhist kind of mentality that says (and it's in Christianity to a degree) that somehow we need to disappear so that Jesus can be revealed.

He's already come – the Father is well pleased with the Jesus that is part of the Trinity. He doesn't need a billion Jesuses – what he desires is to come and live inside of _you_ – the epitome and apex of his creation. As great and incredible as the macro universe is, as incredible as the micro with quantum mechanics and everything else, it's nothing compared with one human being. The intricacy and the incredible wonder of that person, he comes to make alive and then begins from the inside to transform out.

We're not used to that – we're so performance-oriented that we want to take the rules and think that they are going to affect my behavior from the outside. That's the intention of rules, is that they will modify my behavior and they'll tell me what to do. That's why we love self-discipline without understanding that it's a work of the flesh – as opposed to self-control, which is a fruit of the Spirit that comes from the inside and works its way out.

We have this natural affinity with rules, because all of our sense of worth, our value, our security, all of our understanding of reality is attached to performance. I can judge you, I can compare myself with you – or I can find somebody else, if you're better than I am. It's all based on performance, and it's what we're used to.

How do I understand significance? Behaviorally. I've got to do something in order to be significant. God says, "That's not the truth. You're made in my image. I love you. There is nothing you can do to change that. You can't add to your significance, you can't take it away." And yet the issue of significance inside the Christian community is as rampantly a driving force in the lives of people – especially men – as outside.

The whole paradigm is a very coercive, imprisoning paradigm – because it all comes back to "how good at this I can be?" You know what? It doesn't change us. All it does is modify our behavior. But give us enough time – it will all explode again, anyway, because all we're doing is repressing the shame and the guilt and the condemnation – the things that God nailed to the cross, because he knew it couldn't achieve one ounce of righteousness. None of those things can produce righteousness.

The law can't. All the law could ever do is say, "You're guilty, I'm here to tell you." In the book I used the illustration of – it's like a mirror. You've been working under the car all day, you've been wiping your face and you don't know how dirty you are until you look in the mirror. And the mirror says, "You need soap."

And you say, "Oh if can just take the mirror and scrape myself clean" – which is what the legalistic paradigm says. Somehow, I can embrace these rules in such a way that I can accomplish them.

Then Jesus comes along and says, "You can't even have the _desire_ to break one of those [laws] inside of you, because if you do, the whole thing's lost."

Somehow we think, "No, God gave us this whole new set of rules – the Ten Commandments plus whatever our religious environment and sub-culture has added to it – to do certain things, to not do certain things, whatever. If we can just embrace that. And God gave us the Holy Spirit to help us do the rules now."

I'm sorry, it's not going to work. If you think you can do this, I've got a book for you: "One thousand and three hundred and forty two steps to holiness." I guarantee you at step number two, you'll be dead.

**JMF:** Now, surely, you get objections from some sectors of Christianity that say, "By saying this kind of thing, you're just encouraging people to sin and you're taking away any kind of..."

**WPY:** I've got good company there. Is this not the question that Paul raises in Romans? "So, are you saying that we should just go out and sin so grace would abound?" [Romans 6:1]

What's his response? "You don't have any idea of who you are, do you?" Because when it comes to God, the central issue is his character – who is this God? When it comes to human beings, the central issue is identity – _who_ are you?

We have a theology that has told us that we are still stuck in a paradigm that identifies us as an old nature. But we have a new nature now – and these two are duking it out, and it's kind of, "what nature are you going to feed today?"

But they don't tell us if the feeder [the one who is doing the feeding] is part of the old nature, or part of the new nature. If it's part of the new nature, it's only going to feed the new nature. If it's part of the old, maybe it gets confused. In that paradigm, which comes down to performance, you're always going to consider yourself fundamentally as the old nature.

The issue is "identity." Did anything really happen when Jesus Christ came to live inside of you? Or is it just all positional and intellectual? Because if it's just positional and intellectual, I'm back working at this as hard as I can – just like I was before.

But maybe, maybe he came to dwell inside of this flesh, not to eradicate it, but to heal it. If that begins to happen, here are some things that I won't be... There's a possibility that I wouldn't be. My emotions begin to be healed. I begin to feel things differently. My thinking obviously gets transformed. It's renewed – all this transformation takes place because of the renewal of the mind. I begin to look at people differently. I begin to touch people differently. I begin to relate to my circumstances differently. Those changes, for a lot of us, we couldn't go and say, "This caused this change, or that caused it." God is the only one inside of us who can unwrap this healing in such a way that it doesn't destroy us.

**JMF:** Isn't it like a sheer force of will, that rules and laws are about _you_ deciding you're going to do something right? Whereas we're not talking about that. We're talking about actual relationship.

**WPY:** Yeah. You cannot use the flesh to defeat the flesh. You cannot use self-discipline to become self-controlled. That's the whole Galatians 3 thing. Paul says, JB Phillips translation: "Dear idiots of Galatia, who has bewitched you? Having began in the Spirit, do you think you're gonna be perfected by the flesh? Don't you understand who you are?"

To use an easier illustration that might help – there are a lot of folks that pray for patience. Do you find anybody in the New Testament who prays for patience? Can you think of one prayer in the New Testament where somebody prays for patience?

**JMF:** Nothing springs to mind.

**WPY:** Exactly! Cause it isn't there. There is an understanding that patience is a fruit of the Spirit, that when Jesus comes to live inside of me, patience comes to live inside of me. Patience has wed his life with mine in such a way that my nature is now patient.

But if I think I'm still the old nature, and I'm still impatient, I will continue to function because that's what I think the truth about myself really is. Instead of beginning to understand that for me to act impatiently is to go contrary to my nature – that who I am in Christ – that's the core of this new covenant that I'm a part of. That's the central element of identity, is that union – relationship. Jesus says, "I'm coming inside. In fact, not only I'm coming, the Father is coming. We're going to make a habitation in you." It's not a visitation, where you're once in a while empowered so that you can create holiness in your life, or righteousness.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

back to table of contents

## Is God a Christianized Zeus?

**JMF:** Thanks for being with us again, Paul. And, by the way, you do like to be called Paul, even though your name is William P....

**WPY** **:** It's a family thing, my dad is William Henry, I'm William Paul, my firstborn is William Chad, and my first grandbaby is William Gavin.

**JMF:** And the thing you have in common is no one goes by William.

**WPY** **:** No. You know what's funny is, I've had people recommend the book to _me_ who are my friends, because they did not connect that I'm the Paul.

**JMF:** Hey, there's a guy by the name of Young who's written a book...

**WPY** **:** Yeah, you related to him?

**JMF:** What kind of people are reading _The Shack_ _?_

**WPY** **:** It's across the board. It's people who are from a conservative Christian framework, there are people who are totally outside. There are people in prisons, and people from every kind of walk of life you can imagine. I get 30 to 50 e-mails a day, from all over world. It is really across the board – theologians, to people who have never ever read the Bible, and so we're getting people who are attracted to the story and it's impacting their lives – from every walk that you can imagine.

**JMF:** What are some of the common themes of positive response that you're getting?

**WPY** **:** Believe it or not, there have been a lot of people who've been hurt by religious institutions.

**JMF:** That's shocking!

**WPY** **:** Totally shocking. I don't mean that facetiously – there's a lot of hurt out there because of – systems have a way of manipulating people of accomplishing their goals in a very non-relational or un-relational framework. So there are a lot of folks who are coming with a whole lot of hurt that way. There are people who are in the middle of great sadnesses themselves – who have issues with their family or health, and they bring that.

One of my favorite quotes – not because I love it, but it was so penetrating to me. There's a gal in Atlanta who is struggling with cancer who said that the book really yanked her out of the depression that she was in, and it's serious. She is facing life and death. When she wrote, she said, "I wasn't afraid to die. I was terrified at the look of disappointment on his face when we meet." That encapsulates, for a lot of us, our experience within religious systems.

People are coming with their own stuff. I got a note from a gentleman who's in prison. And another one from the guy who is the chaplain of, I believe, Leeds Prison in London – the largest prison in London – he was saved under Nicky Cruz – he was a Hell's Angel and doesn't like Christian fiction, but really loves this book. It's penetrating into those areas.

We're finding that it's being a bridge for reconciliation even between the African-American community and the arch-conservative White community – just because, for a lot of people, they've never been able to use any imagery of God other than Zeus. We've Christianized Zeus – or Gandalf with an attitude. But now for the first time it's like – let's get God out of the box that we've placed him in, because he's frankly left anyway.

**JMF:** The old gentleman, kind of like Gandalf with a flowing beard, out there... judging..

**WPY** **:** And with the lightning bolts, and it's all our behaviors, so as soon as we step aside...

I had some young men, and I know about a discussion that they had about the character of God. One particular young man who's a friend of our family was struggling last year with his relationship with God because they had concluded that God was Zeus, and that doesn't create a lot of relationship. My wife, Kim, handed him the book last summer at a wedding and said, "Just read this." He called me up about three weeks later and said, "Paul, when Papa came through the door, my whole world changed."

It's not about me coming up with all the effort necessary to bridge the gap – but that God actually crosses it himself in pursuit of us. The only time you see God running anywhere in Scripture is when the object of his affection is coming toward him – that's the prodigal father – he runs. Other than that, it's all walking, it's all relationship. I wanted God to just come across that divide – because that's how I believe he is, and everything that I understand about Scripture says that's the God that we are in love with and who loves us, and pursues us.

**JMF:** You've had objections from religious circles.

**WPY** **:** Yeah, I had a few.

**JMF:** The question comes up, "This is just your idea of God that really isn't biblical."

**WPY** **:** I wrote God as good as I knew how, and he is better than I wrote him. It's fiction. This was not an attempt for a systematic theology, so there are things that are not in there. This was a story for my six kids. It's a fictional account. There's a lot of truth behind it, in terms of – the pain's real, the process of coming to wholeness is real, the conversations are very real conversations and the character of God is as good and as real as I could write him.

We are getting some push back, but it's very minor, and very small. Just some people who are vocal minorities. It just tends to be that way. I have a couple thousand emails from people whose lives and relationship have changed – and stories all the time. That stack is what I really care about.

I am not opposed to answering any of the [doctrinal] questions, but a lot of times [this type of] conversation doesn't push us across into loving people. It's just kind of a theological place. Unfortunately, there are some folks who, when they ask you a question, they're asking for a piece of wood they can burn. They're not asking for a conversation. Those are not the conversations I get involved in. They're just not valuable.

But I got an email the other day and this gal writes, "Your book's the most juvenile piece of trash I've ever read. It's pedantic, it's slow..." it's whatever. She really gave it to me. She's the kind of conversation that I love...

To just step back a second. I had a fellow say to me this weekend: "When somebody asks me about _The Shack_ , this is what I say to them: 'Your response to this book will tell me more about _you_ than about the book.'" That is so accurate. I don't have a sense of ownership. This was a gift, all of what's happening with the book is so outside the box. My favorite quote is from Tyson, who goes to Oregon State. He says to my 19-year-old daughter, "Amy, this book is so far beyond your dad." That's my favorite quote. With all that in mind, when people are telling me, I have nothing that I need to protect. I don't have a territory here. This is not my identity. I'm not a writer in terms of... I wasn't doing this in order to be significant or because my security was involved here, my sense of worth.

So when this gal writes me this note, I wrote her back. I was very careful because I wanted my response to be affirming and positive. People who are word smiths, we know how to put a knife just under the surface of a word – you know what I'm talking about? So, I wrote her back: "I'm so impressed that somebody would have the self-confidence to write an author and trash their stuff like this." I said, "I am so impressed." And I said, "I'm attaching about two week's worth of emails that I get, about 20 pages, and email snippets, and you maybe absolutely right. This could be the most juvenile piece of trash you've ever read. But look at how it's changing peoples' hearts and lives, look at how it's bringing people into a relationship with Jesus Christ? The beauty of that is that God could take such a juvenile piece of trash and impact peoples' lives this way. I am so pleased to be a part of this."

Four days later she wrote me back and said, "I need to ask for your forgiveness." Which is beautiful, because if I've been all defensive and said this or that or "you can't even spell all your words right" or whatever, there's no relationship in that. All I've done is protected my little kingdom, my little territory, my little sense of identity or worth.

So yeah, we're getting some push back. I've been labeled a Hindu, and I've been labeled a Universalist and I've been labeled somebody who hates the local church. But there are folks out there, and they're bringing everything they've got to the table, and part of what they feel they've got is that there are people behind them, and they want to protect them from people like me. It's what they've got, this is what they're bringing to the table. I think they're wrong, that the people behind them don't need protection – that the Holy Spirit can speak to them – all of that. But it is what it is.

We can deal with individual questions, like being Hindu, because I'm not, being a Universalist, because I'm not. All of these kinds of things are part of the ongoing conversation. But it is a small group compared with how this book is simply, in the best way, ruining people's lives – in the best way. It's just transforming, and all of a sudden God in Three is becoming accessible, and is on their side to help them deal with their stuff and there's no shame in that process.

**JMF:** The common perception of God is being a Judge, and you are separated from him until you say the sinners' prayer. You deal with that in pretty clear terms as the characters are unfolded in the book.

**WPY** **:** Absolutely. If you look even at Jesus, and I always go back to "how does this play out in the life of Jesus?" He called them "disciples" a long time before they were alive. He even said to them, "I no longer call you servants – reflecting the old covenant kind of mentally – but I call you friends." They're not even alive yet.

In the same passage he's saying, "I'm going to go to the cross, I'm going to come back, receive you to myself, on that day you'll be alive." Then he says, "The work that I do, you will do also." Which means, not the work that I _did_. "I didn't come to model this. I came to _continue_ to do my work. But now, I'll be in you together, we'll be able to collaborate, participate together in what I'm doing."

Even in relationship to the disciples, you don't have this sense of separation. The whole point of the Incarnation is his identification with us – it's not a sense of separation. This is where we've done a huge injustice to the Trinity. It's like God the Father is the Holy One. Jesus is the one who's allowed to get his hands dirty. God has to be at a distance, you know, like you're saying earlier – watching us from a distance, because holiness means he can't look upon sin or he can't be around it. And we're going, "how does that fit with the omniscience of God? How does that fit with the Incarnation? Isn't Jesus fully God, and fully man? If he's fully God, then God must be in the middle of it.

One of the dominant metaphors or images that I used, is that there are nail scars on Papa's wrists – God the Father. I've been given some push back about that. But that's scriptural, and everything that is embedded in the story – and I didn't do this just by myself – I had help from some very smart theologically trained people to make sure that the realities that are inside this parable, this story, are validated by Scripture.

This one's 2 Corinthians 5:19 For Papa – God, "for God the Father was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself not counting their sins against them." Is that separation? Where did reconciliation take place? It was on the cross! Where was God the Father? He was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. This was a collaborative event where God, in the power of the Holy Spirit, in Christ was involved in getting inside all of our loss and all of our pain with the express purpose of healing us. Not "I'm sorry, you've got to deal with all the bad stuff, I'll be back in three days." That, again, would be separation, and that's what I was trying to go against.

**JMF:** "I and my Father are one."

**WPY** **:** Yeah, "you've seen me, you've seen the Father."

**JMF:** Yet at the same time, in the book, you maintained the distinctions, Father, Son and Spirit while also bringing together the unity.

**WPY** **:** Which turned out to be so beautiful. I'll tell you, a lot of people have asked me, "Who did you read in order to portray God this way?" I hardly read anybody about the Trinity. I've started to read a lot more, because it's out there from the Catholic experience, from the Protestant experience – there are some beautiful things, Eastern Orthodox has beautiful portrayals of the Trinity. My guiding phrase was Ravi Zacharias' little phrase: "Unity and diversity in the community of the Trinity." That little phrase was what framed everything that I did when I was talking about how they related to each other – how they loved each other.

I wanted my kids to stand back and say, "That's the kind of life – that's the kind of dynamic relationship that I want, not only between me and God, or involved with me and God, but I want it in terms of my experience with the people that I love. And with my enemies even," because it continues to extend.

God's nature is agape. I want my children to bask in the love of Father – and that's the central thing that I was trying to communicate, as well as his character and the consistency of his character. Then, let's take a look at some of the worst situations that we could ever imagine, and let those situations ask the questions that all of us feel in our hearts.

**JMF:** In light of the response, the overwhelming response that you didn't even expect as the book has been distributed – word of mouth, not even by...

**WPY** **:** It's through relationships. It's people who care about somebody, who gives it to them, and it's like these conversations just emerge. How you respond to the book will tell you more about you, as you respond, it tells me more about you than about the book, a lot of times that's very true. But it raises conversations that have never happened before among people that thought they knew each other.

There's a lot of people who respond, "This is exactly the way I always thought God must be like." And there are people who are responding and going, "I'm so afraid to believe this because I've been disappointed so many times... Is God really like this? Is this a possibility?"

And there are folks who are saying, "There's just not enough wrath in this book," because there's wrath in Scripture. Yes, of course, there is. A friend of mine who is an Old Testament professor and theologian, when asked that, he says, "Can you name me one thing that God lets Mack off the hook on and says, 'Oh, that doesn't really matter'?" There's nothing. God goes after every single thing.

**JMF:** Mack, being the central character.

**WPY** **:** God goes after everything in Mack's life that is wrong, everything that's not truthful, that's not honest, everything that's a lie, everything that's false, and to me the wrath of God is God's very character against everything that is wrong. The fact that a doctor comes to someone and wants to perform surgery to cut a piece of your body out because it's got cancer, doesn't mean that he hates you. In fact, he's after that which is destroying you.

When you look in [God's] face and you see anger, you might misunderstand that he is making a value statement about you. But he's not. He is coming after everything that keeps us from being free and being whole. The full set of his fury is against that. Even what he did in the Old Testament in terms of what _we_ call the plagues, many times is referred to as the miracles, or the great workings, or the wonders, the nine wonders – because he went after every point of idolatry that was locking the Egyptians into their losses, as much as it was locking the children of Israel into that bondage. That's a beautiful thing, you know.

If we want to understand the Old Testament, we've got to first look at Jesus, because he is the most obvious expression and manifestation of the character of God – "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father; I and the Father are one." All those things are true. Some people think that God got saved somewhere between Malachi and Matthew and during the 400 silent years. This is the same God who's been there. Just because our conceptions are so wound by performance – and by these kinds of frameworks that we don't see clearly – doesn't mean that he is what we thought he was. Like one gal wrote and said, "My daughter just came in, she's 21, she wants to know if she can divorce the old God and marry this new one."

**JMF:** Already been done. The concept of wrath itself – the definition of wrath, when we talk about the wrath of God, we like to put the definition of our own wrath, when we are angry about something that's offended us – and we project that onto God, and so that's the way God must be.

**WPY** **:** Absolutely. For a lot of us, our theology has been maybe our own father, or authority figures in our lives, projected to the ultimate level. And we don't...

**JMF:** Angry...

**WPY** **:** And out of control, and I'm constantly disappointing him and I'm constantly failing. It's a, "You got an A minus – that's ok, but I know you can do better." "Yes, you played great defense, but your offense was awful." Whatever it is, we are constantly put onto a scale of performance and say, "You failed."

What's the main question in legalism? It's "How much is enough?" And the answer is always, "More." How much is enough prayer? How much is enough reading Scripture? How much is enough giving? How much is enough? And legalism says, "More." We can't do that.

**JMF:** And even if it's more, it's got to be better.

**WPY** **:** Yeah. More as in perfect. Yeah, you figure it out.

**JMF:** And then how do you define perfect?

**WPY** **:** Exactly.

**JMF:** Your life has changed as a result of an enormous amount of... You have everything from interviews, everything's turned up-side-down, I imagine, in you life as a result of the spread of this book.

**WPY** **:** Yeah, it's had a little impact.

**JMF:** So, what do you do for relaxation to get away, hobbies, or...

**WPY** **:** I have two grandbabies. Part of my relaxation is to spend time with them. Any grandparent knows. That's as close to being in heaven as you can imagine. I have six children, I still have three at home. So I'm involved with some sports activities and drama and being involved in their lives as well. And I'm married to the woman who saved my life, and I think all men, for the most part, marry up. I have a community of friendships and relationships that are all a part of that, that are wonderful.

Life is lived at one day at a time. This is a funny, different kind of season for us, and we're tracking it one day at a time. We don't have any guarantees we'll be here tomorrow. So I want to spend this day in the present, in the presence of the one who loves me best. I don't want to project it into what's going to happen into the future and be freaked out. This is where he lives with me.

It goes back to the prayer I prayed at the beginning of 2005, when I came out of the shack: "I will never ask you again, Papa, I'll never ask you again to bless anything that I do, but if you have something that you're blessing that I could hang around, I would love that. Because I want to know at the end of the day, you did this." My whole life is religious. At the end of the day, I couldn't tell you whether I did it or I performed it because of insecurity or a need to be significant and I coerced people into getting things done and I shamed them into doing stuff. I'm done with that.

**JMF:** Isn't there a certain confidence... like Mack finally saw in the book that, regardless of what you wind up being involved with, you can rest assured that God is there with you in it – whether it might have been the best choice or not-so-best, he's there.

**WPY** **:** Absolutely. There's a huge rest in that. Jesus says, "My yoke is easy, my burden is light." Where does he live? He lives inside of us. If my yoke is not easy and my burden is not light, what part of God have I picked up? I picked up something that doesn't belong to me.

Rest is the environment in which we do everything. We live our lives and that happens today. Today is the day of salvation. Today, enter my rest, today. This is where eternity intersects my life – today.

I love the bride of Christ. I bash any institutional systems generally. I don't care whether they are political or religious or whatever, because frankly, they are part of the world's system – a way to coerce and manage human beings. But I love "the bride." I don't care whether "the bride" meets in a used building or has a steeple.

The church is "people." It's people, always has been. You either are the church or you're not. To gather together is a gift – always has been. We were intended to be in community. How you do it, it's going to be different from culture to culture and situation to situation. If you are under persecution, it's going to look a whole lot different than when you're not.

All of that is to say, "God decided to do something with this story." When I asked him if it would be okay for me to hang around something he was blessing, I never thought it would be something that I did – actually wrote. That wasn't on the radar. I was just saying, "I'm available." I said, "I don't care if I shine shoes or open the door, or clean the toilets. It doesn't matter to me, if I can just be hanging around you." Because that's where I am in my life, that's all that matters to me.

All the gifting of family and friendships and community of faith – all of that – is just the gift he brings to encompass his presence. That's where I want to stay, that's where I want to live. Between you and me (and I guess everybody out there), if this all went away tomorrow, I'd be fine. My identity is not in this book. My significance in not connected to this. My security is not. He's everything. If it goes away, great! I want to be around whatever he's blessing. This doesn't have to be it.

When somebody attacks it, and attacks me or whatever, it's just part of being part of this process. They don't know me, so they can't be attacking me. If they knew my history, they'd go, "Why in the world would God have loved a man like that?" I'd say, "It's just the way love is. Grace is wasteful, and he wasted it on me – like he wants to waste it on all of us. He has already." Don't we love being in the middle of his embrace? Absolutely. Do we want to leave it for some temptation, for something else? Not anymore.

**JMF:** Any more ideas for writing on the horizon?

**WPY** **:** I write little things, so far, and I post them on WindRumors, which is the website that I write stuff on. I've got ideas, but you know what? The beauty of this is that I want to walk it out a day at a time. If I do it, I'll do it as a gift. I don't even know if I'll do it under my own name. I don't know. I don't know any of these things today. But I'm always thinking about stuff and working on different ideas and things, I love that.

I love the freedom that says, "Just stay in my presence, everything will be fine," and if I get the chance to do some other things and creative stuff, if I live past today, he'll be there, we'll figure it out – we'll work it out. It's a journey and it's a process. As much as we'd like the blue or the red pill, it's a process, and it's a great one.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

back to table of contents

## Did an Angry God Force His Son to Die?

**JMF:** The view of God that you present in _The Shack_ is a sound biblical perspective that strangely is foreign to the way many people have traditionally thought about God.

**WPY** **:** We have lost, or a lot of us have never had, the conversation about the nature of God. We've been so focused on our ability to keep the rule, or the law, or whatever and it's all been behavioral. We haven't had a conversation about what is this character. We live in such world of uncertainty. Everything about our lives is uncertain. We could get a call from the boss today and what we thought we were heading toward is no longer there. A sale could go sideways, a truck comes across the middle line, and changes our lives. So we're filled with uncertainty.

**JMF:** And especially about what God thinks about us, we don't know... we're afraid of him.

**WPY** **:** We try to create something that will get his behavior to be certain. "If I can just do the right things, in the right order, to the right degree, then God is rather obligated to do it" – to do whatever it is that we think we want him to do. That can be having enough faith, for example... Whatever our formula is, to get the result... so that we can get God's behavior to be certain. There's a word for that, and it's called _magic._ God doesn't like magic. Magic is, if I have the right formula, the right incantation, the right something, I can get the right result. We try to use magic to get certainty.

If there's no certainty in our circumstances, and there's no certainty in God's behavior, where is there any certainty? It has to be in his character. If we get his character wrong, or if we think that he is not good, that he is not loving – and we get that wrong, then we are by ourselves, and we're back to issues of fear and control, because we try to get control over uncertainty in many ways. Anger, or dulling the pain of it through addictions of one sort or another, depression... there's a million ways that we try to gain some control. Instead, if we begin to understand the character of God – that he comes into this relationship with us, for us, to heal us – that is a place we can put our feet down and begin to stand and move forward. Otherwise, we're just on our own.

So the characterization of God in the book is an attempt, in fiction, to try to describe that solidity of character that I think a lot of us have not trusted. We don't trust... That's Mack's big issue – that he doesn't believe God is good. But he doesn't know to get from where he is to believing it either, and God is very gracious about that process and says, "You can't do it by yourself, but together we can do it."

**JMF:** In the midst of tragedy or great pain, that's when it's very difficult to believe that God is good...

**WPY** **:** Yeah, because everything has become uncertain.

**JMF:** There's a place in the book where you talk about the Father versus the Son, the Father being so holy and so great that he can't be touched by our evil and our wickedness. But Jesus on the other hand is the good guy. Kind of the good cop, bad cop... Let me just read that section briefly.

#### Mack [the central character] says, "But I always liked Jesus better than you, he seems so gracious and you seem so mean." "Sad, isn't it? He came to show people who I am and most folks only believe it about him. They still play us off like good cop, bad cop most of the time, especially the religious folk. When they want people to do what they think is right, they need a stern God, when they need forgiveness, they run to Jesus."

And yet as you portray the characters here, we're not talking about two different Gods of different character, we're talking about one God who is for us...

**WPY** **:** Unfortunately, we have some theology that has come alongside and said, where God the Father is, his issue is our sinfulness. He can't hang around us. That is sort of like Jesus has made friends with us and God the Father is a little perturbed about it. He wants to say, "Can you find a better quality of friend? I mean, they come to my house, they mess it up, they leave things dirty, they don't do the dishes. If you just find a better quality of friend. I know I'll be ok because you love them." We have the mentality that Jesus is trying to convince the Father that we're worth enough to love.

**JMF:** We use the word "advocate" because he's an advocate with the Father for us, but... he needs a lot of convincing.

**WPY** **:** And to make even matters worse, we have this idea that God comes to us and says, "You and I have a problem. Your behavior doesn't meet up to the standards required, but I have a solution: For you and I to be ok, I'm going to take my innocent Son, whom I love more than anything else in the world, out to the woodshed, and kill him – and then you and I will be ok. Oh, by the way, trust me."

We're going, "Is there a disconnect here somewhere? Is that what had to happen for God the Father and me to be ok?" We're going, "That's not it at all... that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, it was God the Father that crawls inside of this very thing."

People say, "What about, 'My God, my God why have you forsaken me?'" That is Christ on the cross, for the first time as a human being, experiences a sense of separation. He doesn't believe that it's real – because the next thing he says is "into your hands I commit my spirit." There is no real separation, but he feels the sense of it, but God is in him in that whole process. There is no abandonment like that. That cry is a cry of those who have experienced abandonment. For some of us that is such a hope for us.

**JMF:** There is this sense that you get from preaching sometimes that the Father is so angry, he's furious; the wrath of God is cited, because the word _wrath_ appears in Scriptures. The sense is that he is so angry that somebody has to pay, and so Jesus steps in and says, "Well, kill me if you have to kill somebody." So we have the resolution that, "Christ died for my sins, therefore I'm absolved" – but there's still that angry God. He has calmed down, but when he is going to break loose again?"

**WPY** **:** Exactly – we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and we fall back on performance, we fall back on our behavior being the basis for his mood. We have to maintain at least an adequate amount of behavior so that he feels good about himself and doesn't take it out on us. So we have this schizophrenic God, we have the "good cop, bad cop" type of God. We don't know whether we're waking up on the side of his love, or the side of his justice – or his holiness. We think holiness is a manifestation of his reaction against sin. The truth is, he was holy before there was sin. What makes God "other" [i.e., holy] is his very nature of love – that's what makes him "other" than us. Holiness then becomes a manifestation of his love, not of his justice, not of his dealing with sin.

Wrath is the right response to things that are wrong. Anger is the right response when there is pain and hurt, when children are abused, when people lie to each other, when divorce happens, people taking advantage... to greed, to all of these things, it is the right response. And for God to have that right response against everything that is in his creation that prevents the freedom of the human creation, which is the object of his love, for him to come after that with everything that he's got, [wrath] is appropriate, is right.

My friend Wayne Jacobson has a book called _He Loves Me._ In it he uses the illustration of being a child running into a hornets' nest and screaming running in the direction of his mother, and seeing her coming at him with this look of rage. She wasn't after him. She was after these hornets, how dare they touch her precious little child. But if you look at her face, you'd think he had done something wrong. We have that mentality when we deal with God.

He's angry against everything that hurts us. Jesus showing up at Lazarus' funeral – that intense anger, compassion that comes out even though he is in the midst of raising him from the dead. Death is wrong, you know. The impact of sin is wrong. The wrath of God is an element of his love. You can't divide his wrath from his love, as if he's two separate characters. Everything God does is motivated by love, and everything has a loving purpose.

**JMF:** Scripture speaks of "the enemies of God," and "the wrath of God against his enemies." How does the love of God come into his relationship with his enemies in terms of his wrath?

**WPY** **:** He is constantly saying that we are to love our enemies as well. There is an understanding that we wed ourselves to our own lost-ness, to our own independence. It's like the surgery. There is a process that is very painful for us. God, even, in dealing with the Egyptians, or the wonders of the plagues – that was a very painful process.

There are people who set themselves up in an independence stance and I tell you, you can wed yourself – the people in the New Testament that were most doing that, were the religious people. They were the most lost when Jesus says, "Woe, woe, woe," and he tells them that they are dead men, the inside of them is dead. The "woe" idea is a warning woe. It's saying "whoa!"... almost like a horse. "Stop what you're doing. Don't you understand that this process that you're on, this path that you're choosing – of independence, is going to drive you deeper into the darkness, not into the light that you think?"

One of the other questions that has come up about book is, "Why isn't Lucifer in the book – as one of God's enemies?" I believe in the fallen angels, I believe in the demonic, and I grew up out in the mission field. I know the reality of these things – the spiritual dimension. We don't live in a benign universe as far as the spiritual dimension. I don't believe God has any rivals, I don't believe Lucifer is a rival. I think his power was totally destroyed and now all he has is the ability to lie.

All those things being true, the book was not intended to be another book about Satan. It was intended to say, "This is who God is, and this is the process that we're in – that he comes inside of us to bring us to healing. We don't need the juxtaposition in this book, and like I said, there are plenty of books that deal with that. This was not an attempt for a systematic theology.

**JMF:** When we talk about enemies, Christ died for us while we were yet enemies ourselves.

**WPY** **:** Who among us has not been an enemy?

**JMF:** Right. Then, like you said, we're told to love our enemies. Then we proceed with the idea that God doesn't love his enemies, but he expects us to love our enemies.

**WPY** **:** Suddenly we have this requirement that even God cannot live up to. The reality is, that he does. The reality is, that the creation that he has created, he loves, and human beings as the epitome and apex of what he pursues. We have all been in the position of being his enemy, and in some respects, we still fight him in this process, but there's no shame to it.

**JMF:** That's the beauty... In your book, the most poignant scene, to me, is the judgment scene where everyone stands guilty. It's very beautifully done, and thoroughly scriptural. That's what makes it so beautiful.

**WPY** **:** Part of that was to try to get the reality of this out of the abstract intellectual framework – just like using the loss of a child as the core part of the story. The term _agape_ is used, that God is _agape_ , he's this kind of love that's so different. The only verse that I can think of (and there maybe other ones) where somebody who is apart from God experiences _agape..._ (Normally you cannot be apart from God to express it. But the closest that a human being apart from God can) is reflected in the verse, "If you being evil..." It's talking about your core independence. "If you being evil know how to _agape_ your children..." That's the word that's used.

The closest point that we can come to understanding the way God loves is the way that a parent loves their child, and I tell you there's nothing like that – not if there's any kind of health in your life, there is nothing that comes close to that. That is the kind of way God is, in his very character and nature. That's why I wanted to use the thing that is deepest in us, to raise the deepest kinds of questions, and (for my children) I wanted this to be the conversation around which to develop the conversation, the processing, the ideas, and the relationship with God.

**JMF:** I tend to be that kind of person who when he sees a bandwagon, I say, "The last thing I'm going do is get on it." So, as people kept saying, "You ought to read this book, you ought to read this book," I thought, "I don't read books that 'you gotta read.'" But finally I did read it. I read the first few chapters, and this is where we get into the story of the tragedy and so on, and the very real anger and so on that Mack has.

He enters the shack, and I lost interest after God entered the shack. I thought, "I don't see how he's going get out of this, because I'm on Mack's side here. There won't be a good resolution to this, I don't see how, in fictional form, we're going be able to – [WPY: Find our way out.] – get from here to there, and resolve this anger without it just being facile, just some easy solution – what do we call that, a platitude, sort of thing. [WPY: a cliché.] I eventually got back to it and well, I had to do an interview with the author.

**WPY** **:** That'll get to you every time.

**JMF:** So I better finish the book anyway... That judgment scene, to me, that itself could be a full treatment of the subject, it was just beautifully done.

**WPY** **:** Thank you. That scene has become where the whole book leads to. From there, everything becomes resolution after that. It was to say, "This is the reality of the heart of God in terms of how he relates to us. Let's take it out of intellectual, spiritual, religious kind of terminology and make it real to us.

For Mack to have to struggle with this big question about his own children – that becomes something very real to him, and all of a sudden it puts us into a spot thinking, "Are you telling me that God loves us like that?" We're saying, "He loves you more than that." That is as close as we can get to understanding the intensity of that love – he loves us more than that, and more pure and better than that. I agree, I love that chapter.

**JMF:** Another section that is striking in the book is where Jesus is talking to Mack:

#### "Remember, the people who know me are the ones who are free to live and love without any agenda." And Mack says, "Is that what it means to be a Christian?" "Who said anything about being a Christian? I'm not a Christian," Jesus said. The idea struck Mack as odd and unexpected. "No, I suppose you aren't." Then Jesus says, "Those who love me come from every system that exists. They were Buddhist or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans and many who don't vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions. I have followers who are murderers and many who are self-righteous. Some are bankers and bookies, Americans and Iraqis, Jews and Palestinians. I've no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters of my Papa, into brothers and sisters, into my beloved." "Does that mean," asks Mack, "that all roads will lead to you?" "Not at all," smiled Jesus. "Most roads don't lead anywhere. What it does mean is that I will travel any road to find you."

Some people have taken from that or responded that, "You're saying that being a Christian doesn't matter," they accuse you of universalism, whatever they mean by universalism.

**WPY** **:** Yeah, when somebody asks me if I'm a Christian, I ask them back: "Would you please tell me what one is, and I'll tell you if I'm one of those." If we're on the same page, I don't have any problem identifying myself as a Christian. Unfortunately, in the world today that has become kind of a Ziploc bag, and as soon as you say the "C" word, there's no more communication, no more conversation. What people think in their minds what a Christian is, is not what Scripture reveals as someone who is indwelt by the very character nature of...

**JMF:** It has become a caricature, a pre-conceived idea depending on a person's experience of a Christian or Christianity.

**WPY** **:** Exactly. For example, we think of anybody in the Middle East, as Westerners, we tend to think of them as Muslim. As if they believe all the tenets of Islam, etc.

**JMF:** And they're all the same, and they all fit this particular category that we have them on.

**WPY** **:** Most believers from the Middle East will still tell you they're Muslim, but they're Christian. For us that's a little incongruous. These little boxes, I wanted to get outside. Jesus died, rose again, ascended to the right hand of the Father before the term [Christian] had even been created or coined. It happened probably in Antioch, where it was a derogatory term; they were going, "We like this term." And so for Jesus to identify himself as a Christian is moot. The term didn't exist. That was one piece of it.

Then I wanted to push it even further and say, "It's not the label that you're identified with that is the relationship. A label is a label, and I don't care what label you have, let's talk about what you _mean_ by it. And then we'll see."

I have no problem identifying myself as a Christian, or the validity of being a Christian, or any of those things. But I want some agreement about what we are talking about. What a lot of people think of a Christian, I don't want to be identified with, because there's a bunch of it that is not true, and not right. I want a bridge to be built in a relationship with anybody. I don't want the word "Christian" to become the impediment that stops that relationship from being built. I don't want it to be an impediment between them and the love of Jesus Christ, either.

**JMF:** That has nothing to do with faith in Jesus Christ, or belief in the name of Christ, as some would want to say it.

**WPY** **:** No. If I can say it as clearly as I can, I am convinced that Jesus Christ is THE only way into the embrace of the Father. There is no other name given among men through whom we are saved – he is the sole and only road into the Father's heart – he is the Father's heart who has bridged that gap to us.

That was the last edit we put into the book, because somebody who read a pre-version said, "I love this book, I love everything about it, but I've got a couple of friends who are going think you're a universalist." So that little section where he says, "Do all roads lead to Papa?" Jesus smiles and says, "No, most don't lead anywhere, but I will travel down any road to find you." That was the last edit we made before it went to the printers in the first edition.

I'm grateful for the brother who sent that and said, "What do you think?" Because I wanted it to be clear that we are not talking about... I want the centrality of atonement to be central. This is what God has done to reconcile the world to himself. Now, as ambassadors of Christ, as if you are the very pleading of God, beg, "Be reconciled back to him, because he's reconciled himself to you." That, to me, is the centrality and the significance... the exclusivity – if I can use that term – of the person of God who has come in Christ in the power of the Spirit to make a way for us. I'm not a universalist.

**JMF:** The subject of the Bible comes up in the course of the discussion between the Holy Spirit and Mackenzie, and in one place here, they're out together in a canoe. Just reading from the book:

#### Mack allowed his oar to turn in his hands as he let it play into the water's movements. "It feels like living out of relationship, you know, trusting and talking to you, is a bit more complicated than just following rules." "What rules are those, Mackenzie?" "You know, all the things the Scriptures tell us we should do." "Ok," she said with some hesitation. "And what might those be?" "You know," he answered sarcastically, "about doing good things and avoiding evil, being kind to the poor, reading your Bible, praying, going to church, things like that." "I see, and how is that working for you?" He laughed, "Well, I've never done it very well. I have moments that aren't too bad, but there's always something I'm struggling with or feeling guilty about, I just figured I needed to try harder. But I find it difficult to sustain that motivation, [I think virtually everyone, with any honesty would have to identify with that.] "Mackenzie," she chided, her words flowing with affection, "The Bible doesn't teach you to follow rules, it is a picture of Jesus. While words may tell you what God is like and even what he may want from you, you cannot do any of it on your own. Life and living is in him and in no other. My goodness, you didn't think you could live the righteousness of God on your own, did you?" "Well, I thought so, sorta," he said sheepishly."

You're presenting here the Bible not as the way it's popularly taught – as God's instruction book for mankind. So it is used to rule on behaviors and to judge and to tell everyone what they're doing wrong, and then goes back on the shelf. But the whole idea of Jesus in the Scriptures is often missed.

**WPY** **:** If we are only flesh, if that's what we come to this writing with, then we'll drop back to see it as a behavioral kind of thing without the illumination of the Spirit and the work of the Spirit. Even those words are dead to us. They don't produce life. We are absolutely dependent, even in the words of Scripture, for the presence and life and illumination of the power of the Holy Spirit. All of us are. We know folks who know the words very well but have no life in them.

There's that part of it. Jesus on the Emmaus Road with the disciples: Starting with Moses he showed them himself throughout all of Scripture. It's a story, it's a story of his love, it's a story of his attraction to us.

I love Scripture. We are very blessed in the sense that we have this so available and just at our fingertips. Most of our brothers and sisters throughout history did not. They began with the Holy Spirit. Sometimes I think maybe they have a little bit of an advantage, because we so easily fall back into our intellectuality and don't even know how to hear the voice of the Spirit for ourselves.

Jesus says, "My sheep hear my voice." And there's a lot of us who are going, "Well, but don't we just have to hear it through whatever the leadership is, or whatever the structure is that I'm a part of?", and he is saying, "No." He's saying, "You individually, you hear my voice." I think that's part of what the work of the Spirit is. It's to tune us, to allow us, so that through the purification process, we sense his presence, and we hear him speak to our hearts. That becomes central.

Then Scripture comes, he can illuminate it – but I'm not at all convinced that Scripture is the sole and only place through which God speaks. In my life, it's been through movies even, but also music, creation, relationships, conversation, art, architecture, incredibly beautiful cultural diversity and uniquenesses that happen there. The Spirit is very able to speak through whatever the Spirit has available or what we've given the Spirit to be available.

**JMF:** And the Scripture provides a rudder, a foundation, a primary means by which God reveals Christ to us. But isn't that something that is often misused in order to maintain some kind of control or to subjugate or to rule over... That isn't the Holy Spirit speaking to us through Scripture, that's us manipulating Scripture for our own ends, our own selfishness.

**WPY** **:** Yeah, it goes back, in part, to not believing that people can grow up to hear the voice of the Spirit for themselves – that we need to interpret that for them so we can maintain control. A lot of people are afraid that if people move into freedom, and freedom is why Christ came – it was for our freedom – that if that happens, people will go do crazy things. There is good evidence that suggests that the amount of coercion and control that's placed on people is the reason why, when the control comes off, they go out and do crazy things. They've just never matured inside of that framework. The work of the Holy Spirit is to move us toward freedom. That is his life in us.

Freedom within the context of our understanding of reality is all based in dependence, not in independence. We are a culture that's full of independence, which makes sense, and the Holy Spirit is constantly driving us toward dependence. That is the only place where we find freedom, because we were designed to live our life in freedom – in dependence – in that union relationship with God.

Scripture is wonderful. It is definitely something through which the frame of our lives are understood. But if I was thrown in a prison, without it, I know the Holy Spirit would be present with me. You have a teacher, you have an anointing on you, and in that sense you don't need a teacher, because the teacher lives inside of you, and in all things will teach you how to abide in him, 1 John.

**JMF:** Sure. And yet there's a submission that we all have to one another, to listen, to test our ideas, and so on, and make sure that we are reflecting the self-sacrificial love of God rather than our own agenda. All that works in community...

**WPY** **:** Exactly, it takes us back to this relational element that exists in the very character, nature of God, that our relationships are just a reflection of that unity and diversity in the community of the Trinity. The beautiful thing is that he invites us into that level of relationship.

I was thinking about Christmas this year, and you have God who is working together for our redemption and they [Father, Son and Spirit] have this circle of relationship and they crack it open and invite a 15-year old little girl into it and they say, "Would it be ok if we did this?" They wait until Mary says, "Be it done unto me." That's the God of the universe who is in relationship with us and submitting the process to us so that we would join in that process with him.

Same in our own hearts, same in the process of our own healing and nowhere does he use shame to try to produce this. He doesn't use law to try to produce it. The beauty of it is, as we become whole, pure in heart, we begin to see God everywhere. We see his activity, he's in the details of our lives, he's in the present with us. Incredible. Is this good news or what?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

back to table of contents

## The Theology of Paul Young's Book _The Shack  
_ An Interview With Dr. C. Baxter Kruger

**JMF:** Welcome to _You're Included_. We're talking with C. Baxter Kruger, founder and director of Perichoresis.org. Dr. Kruger is the author of _The Great Dance – the Christian Vision Revisited_ , and _Across All Worlds – Jesus Inside Our Darkness_. His books and audio lectures are available at _TheGreatDance.org_. More than a year after this interview, _The Shack Revisited: There Is More Going on Here Than You Ever Dared to Dream_ was published in October 2012.

Baxter, thanks for being with us.

**CBK:** Good to see you again, Mike.

**JMF:** Since you've been here last, you've been doing some traveling (among many other things) with Paul Young, author of _The Shack,_ and giving some seminars with him. Could you tell us what's going on?

**CBK:** The first time we met was with the Worldwide Church of God meeting in Virginia two and a half years ago, and we became friends and we started talking. The way we met was through Tim Brassell emailing Paul, and telling Paul that I had written the theology that goes with _The Shack_.

**JMF:** Tim, being one of our pastors.

**CBK:** One of your pastors in Portsmouth, Virginia. Then Paul picked up that phone and calls me. I'm like, "I can't believe you're calling me, I mean everybody in the world wants to talk to you." But we talked and we became soulmates quickly as we realized we were on the same page. Then we started doing some seminars and things like that together, and we did a tour of Australia through our network – Perichoresis network down there, and we've done several seminars together. Recently, I've been asked to do more lectures on the "Theology of _The Shack"_ or things like that. It just sort of evolved and happened, and it's been beautiful. He's a fantastic man. I love to spend time with him.

**JMF:** We've had Paul on our program and talked about _The Shack_ and some of the concepts of God that are so earth-shaking for many people who read it. People either love it, or they hate it. How do you account for that?

**CBK:** I think the scene where Papa comes out and embraces Mackenzie Allen Phillips and the way it's set up, I think that right across the Western world, we all have two different Gods. One is the God of our constructs in our mind, and the other is the God that we know in the depths of our soul. This God here [in the heart] is the Father, Son, and Spirit, and love and grace and goodness. And this God here [in the heart] that we know loves us more than we love our own kids.

But that does not fit the theological constructs that we've been hearing – the doctrine of Atonement fights against this view, this knowing of God. When that scene happens in _The Shack_... Actually, Mackenzie Allen Phillips goes to the shack three times. The first time was to find the remains of his daughter. The second time he goes to meet Papa, but the Western God is what he is thinking was going to happen, and that God never shows up. He ends up shaking his fist in that scene and says, "I hate you and that's it, done, not doing that." That's the whole Western legalistic ogre God who watches us from a distance, more interested in whether we keep rules and relationship, and then he leaves and he rejects that God. "I don't want anything else to do with that."

He walks back to the Jeep and the whole world changes. He goes back and again he raises his fist. It's to knock on the door and he doesn't even get to knock – the door flies open and there's Papa and lifts him off the ground. That scene speaks right here [the heart] to everybody on the planet. They know somewhere in here, that's the truth about God.

But it just goes "bzzzztt!!" to all of our constructs. It creates a crisis. Right there in the opening scene, everybody wants to be there, but people who have a lot invested in this God [in the head] are seriously threatened by the awareness that people have here that this is good, this is beautiful. Who doesn't want to be embraced? The news is – that's the truth, we're all embraced like that. That's the gospel.

**JMF:** This concept of God being the far-away judge, we're uncertain of how he feels about us, where does that come from?

**CBK:** It's the construct of the fallen mind. It's Adam and Eve in the bushes, guilty, ashamed, afraid... and they project that fear and that guilt and that shame onto the Lord's face. They tar the Father's face with the brush of their own anxiety, and they create a mythological deity.

**JMF:** Isn't that pretty much the way all of the... if you go back all through ancient history, that's the idea of religion and the gods, and the gods who are in the elements and the gods in the sky – there's always this sense of... you don't know what they are going to do next. They're like us, they're unpredictable, you've got to urge them or get...

**CBK:** You've got to twist their arms somehow because they're not _for_ you. That's the projection of the fallen mind onto God creating the image... Someone in Australia (I can't remember who it was) said, "God created us in his image and we've been returning the favor ever since." That's the tarring of the Father's face with the brush of our own pain and struggle and anxiety and guilt. The perfect philosophical expression of that is in Greek philosophy, and as it emerges in neoplatonic philosophy, where you have God as the one that's removed – infinitely removed – from the earth, because this is matter, and matter is broken and sinful. This God is removed and isolated, so pure and self-contained and non-relational that this God is beyond being known and can't even feel anything that happens here.

That's the origin of the Western mindset on God. Then you throw into that: legalism, so this distant, removed God is, in his innermost essence, holy in a legally defined way – moral rectitude, purity in that way as opposed to "holy" as a Trinitarian concept, which is about the singularity, beauty and goodness of the relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit. You've got two Gods.

**JMF:** That gives us this idea, this huge gulf between God and us. Then in the evangelism training you are taught, you have to explain to people there's a huge gulf between them and God. ( **CBK:** Yeah, because Jesus hasn't come.) Now you can get him to become this bridge for you "if you say the sinner's prayer with me right now." He will be the bridge and you can get across to God.

**CBK:** To me that's just like pure neoplatonic philosophy coming in, because it denies, in the first instance, it's as if the Incarnation hasn't even happened. One of the ways around that for me is I like to put it this way: The gospel is not the news that you can receive Jesus into your life. The gospel is the news that the Father's Son himself, who's face to face with the Father, who's anointed in the Holy Spirit, became a human being and _he_ has received us into _his_ life.

One is the Greek philosophical construct of separation and somehow, Jesus has done something and there's a bridge and we can get back across because this God is too pure to even look at us.

Whereas the Trinitarian model is the Father, Son, and Spirit share life, and they're passionate about our inclusion and Jesus has come, as the early church teaches – Irenaeus is a great example: "Our beloved Lord Jesus Christ became what we are in order to bring us to be what he is." Athanasius: "The Son of God became the Son of Man to make us sons of God..." because the point is to share that Trinitarian life with us.

In the Greek model, this is bad, Incarnation may be real but not really. In this model of the gospel, the Trinitarian gospel: Jesus becomes not only human, which is unthinkable on that other model – he becomes flesh, he becomes what we are and enters into our brokenness and darkness in order that the life that he shares with his Father and the Holy Spirit, could become as much as ours by way of experience as it is his own.

**JMF:** Isn't that exactly what he says in John when he talks about, "I and the Father are one" and he says, "we are one with each other in him, we're one with him, he's one with the Father, therefore we're one with the Father in him." It's been there all along.

**CBK:** But it doesn't fit the great construct because there's separation, there's distance and un-approachability, and this god is so pure that in no way could he get entangled with humanity and matter – because that's all so broken and so fallen. So even though we hear Incarnation, it just kind of moves out, we don't pay much attention to it. We don't underline those passages. What in the universe could be more shocking and stunning and beautiful than the fact that the Father's Son himself – the one who is face-to-face with the Father, who dwells in his bosom, the one who is anointed with the Holy Spirit himself, becomes a human being to be with us? Is there any news more fantastic than that in the universe?

Why have we not seen it to be the point of emphasis? It's because of the influence of the Greek model. That's beginning to die down, it's beginning to come in conflict... and books like _The Shack_ , without doing any theology, without making any theological statement – that scene, you got two Gods, and that creates a crisis in us, because we know both Gods. Once you see the scene, you think, this has got to be resolved. That's going to be difficult, and that's where the crisis is in the book.

People love it here, but it, "Oh, no, that means... what about all this that I've been taught? What about all this that I thought was 'gospel' – it doesn't fit." I'm not talking about some sort of intuition here, I'm talking about a revelation of the Holy Spirit to us that this is the truth, this is who God is. It's who _you_ are. That's the crisis in the book that it creates in the very beginning. It's a beautiful crisis, liberating crisis.

**JMF:** It also raises the issue of justice and fairness and all this sort of thing, in the sense that this God of the academics that we have – the God on paper that we... with the gulf and all that, and who we have to become atoned for by behaving better after we make our decision and all that. There's a sense that the bad guys need to be punished and cut off from God. But in _The Shack,_ we are talking about a God who is presented in the Gospels who has already forgiven everyone in Christ. It raises this issue of: "How can it be that all the bad people, like in the book, the murderer of Mackenzie's daughter, how can that person be loved by God and be embraced...?"

**CBK:** He and Mackenzie, too, because we don't know exactly what he did to his dad, but it was not good.

**JMF:** Yeah, and so there's a chapter on judgment where there's a seat, and the Holy Spirit comes to talk about that topic with Mackenzie. That gets into this issue and resolves it, and many find that tremendously liberating because it speaks right to the gospel. But there are those... you can go to websites that take great exception, and find that horribly wrong and contrary to anything godly and righteous, because the bad guys seem to be getting away with something.

**CBK:** The first thing I would want to say there, my professor of theology J.B. Torrance, used to say all the time: "Forgiveness is logically prior to repentance and faith." In the modern West, we've packaged it like: forgiveness is possible _if_ these things line up, if you receive, if you pray... To me, forgiveness was instantaneous – Father, Son, and Spirit forgave Adam and Eve and forgave us. It's not a question of their forgiveness, it's a question of how are they going to reach us so that we _know_ we are forgiven and we can begin to have real relationship with them?

The Bible is about how God does the impossible – how the Father, Son, and Spirit reaches us in our blindness, our projections and our darkness. And how far are they willing to go in order to meet us ALL – not just the broken folks. In Jesus, they've come (the Father, Son, and Spirit have come) to meet us. This is what I've been working on a good bit in the last couple of years since we've last talked – in seeing the reconciling work of the Father, Son, and Spirit is the deliberate, willful, submission of Jesus Christ to our bone-headed, wrong-headed religious judgmental darkness. He could obliterate us, he could call the angels, but he doesn't. What he does is he bows to suffer – not from God's wrath, not from his Father's wrath, and not from the Holy Spirit's abandonment. He bows to suffer from _our_ curse, our wrath, our rage and our venting. We made him a scapegoat and we damned him and we did it to him publicly in the most humiliating way possible. And he said, "Okay."

In accepting us as we really are – in our brokenness and in that wrath, he has established a relationship with the human race – all of us, at our very worst. And he brought Papa and the Holy Spirit with him. So it's not a question to me, "Is this person forgiven? Is that person forgiven? What about bad people...?"

What has happened is the entire human race, in its blind rage, has been met by Jesus and Papa and the Holy Spirit, and it's inside and it's seeking to come out. That's forgiveness – he's found a way to reach us. Now, the question is: where are we in our journey – because we're still blind, all of us. We're still broken.

That's part of what Paul is getting at, is helping people, in that moment realizing, "If you put yourself in the seat of judgment, then you got to make decision about who's going to be forgiven, who's going to be included, who's going to hell, who's going to heaven." When he puts you in that seat, you think we're not... he confronts you in the book with the fact that we love our children better than our theology allows us to let God love us.

A sweeping panoramic from the other side sees the Father, Son, and Spirit coming to build a relationship with us in the midst of our darkness and sin and pain, and they set up shop right there and then seek to help us come to know that. That's what is one of the things that's underneath all the way through the book. People are unprepared for that because they've got a construct – separation, Greek philosophical deity, with Bible verses to "prove" that it's right, separation – Jesus is the bridge, only those people who've walked across that bridge are included and loved and forgiven. If you've got that kind of construct, then what we're talking about here makes no sense. It's like, how can that be, how can God be this good? You can't just say, "God forgives us." No, but you can say to your daughter, "I forgive you, without payment." Do you love your daughter better than the Father loves us?

Are you participating in love in the Father, Son, and Spirit? J.B. used to say that all the time, "God commands us to forgive sin seven times seven times. Are we supposed to be better than the Lord? Or is he not telling us the way he is?"

**JMF:** Colossians points out that "once you were alienated in your minds." Not alienated _from God's side,_ but alienated in _your_ minds. He just got finished in that passage talking about what he's done... reconciling everybody, all things whether things on heaven or things on earth and all that. And then once you're alienated... not alienated, but alienated _in your minds._

**CBK:** That's right. And some translations use the word "separation" there, like in Ephesians 4:17 it says: "Don't be like the pagans, don't walk around in the dark, now you know who God is and who you are, walk in that." Jesus is saying, "I'll meet you in your pain, I'll meet you in your brokenness, I'll meet you in your sin. Walk with me. Just walk with me, trust me a little bit and let's walk together. Let me share my life with you." And you can begin to let go of some things.

I thought Paul [Young] did a great job in that conversation by backing Mackenzie up and said, "Wait a minute, if we cut off this guy, the murderer, then we have to go back – probably cut off his dad, go back, cut off... and then you start cutting people off and squashing them before they are... and there are millions of people here that are never even born.

It puts you in that quandary where you think, wait a minute, God deals with us in our darkness. That's the only group he has got to deal with. He meets us in our pain and he's saying, "Walk with me." He's saying that to the Christian community, too. "Come on, walk with me." The one who walks with me, he says, "I am the light of the entire cosmos. It's who I am, it's who you are in me. Walk with me, and the one who walks with me, this one will never, ever walk in the darkness but shall have the light of life."

These ones don't come to know what this whole thing is about. That's the distinction between the Christian community and the world – or the believing and unbelieving. The Christian community say, "I want to walk with Jesus, I don't know how to do it. I don't know _how_ to continue in your Word. You've got to disciple me. But I know that you've got something here that I want to participate in."

The other part of the world is saying, "No, it's not there." That's where they are in their experience, and the Holy Spirit keeps walking with us. "I'm going to find a way to reveal" – and this I love – the Holy Spirit is determined to find a way to reveal Jesus, not simply to the world, not simply to a person, but to reveal Jesus _in_ them. So they'd encounter Jesus in their own pain and darkness and struggle. And from there, healing and life begins to work its way out.

**JMF:** How do you find the reaction, response... People who come to the seminars that you've held are coming because they're excited about the book, but how do they respond personally when you talk to them?

**CBK:** One of the most beautiful things to watch is when Paul Young tells the story behind the story – which is, to me, way more fascinating and beautiful than the book. People weep and people cry and people feel loved, they feel accepted, they feel moved. There may be a handful of people somewhere in the room who are angry. But by and large, they're being saved from their darkness and confusion and it's like an evangelistic meeting as he shares his life and story.

There's conflict, but what I've experienced is overwhelming love and excitement. People saying, "Yes, yes, yes. This is what I know. Tell me more. Don't stop, don't leave, let's keep talking." Their tears are flowing because they've heard him express the fact that they've been through this horrible sadness, they too have, and they haven't been allowed to talk about this. But this guy is talking about it. He's talking about a God who knows about it.

One of my favorite scenes in the book that I think speaks directly to what you're saying, both in terms of Christ, is saying in terms of response, is the scene where Mackenzie is in the garden with Sarayu, the Holy Spirit, and they're digging stuff up. The garden is Mackenzie's soul and his brokenness. So without theological argument, Paul has set up a scene where the Holy Spirit is now inside Mackenzie's brokenness and darkness because he came with Jesus and Papa. The Holy Spirit is not bothered, not put off, not "I can't look at this," but is able to embrace in freedom Mackenzie at his very worse. And then Papa comes walking the down the path with the sack lunch. It just screams acceptance, and that is something that people feel, and it opens their soul. So much stuff gets to come out and they love it.

When I had the chance to be with him, to see him speak and see him unfold his life's story, it's like an evangelistic meeting. People are being liberated from their darkness and being able to accept themselves and accept others... "This is fantastic, this is the truth, this is the way God really is." Paul Young tells a story which you know the story, your listeners know it from other interviews with him. That sense of acceptance is like whoo, man, tears... Most of the time that I've been able to teach and do seminars and things alongside with that or with that, people are so excited they can hardly sit still. "Just tell me more, tell me more." They've never heard this thing about the Trinity. "Nobody's ever told me about that doctrine. Where did this come from, where is that in the Bible? I believe you, but where is it? Let's look." It's like, you've got to be kidding, that is so unbelievable. You could speak for three days and never move.

**JMF:** Once people get their minds around that, then that's all you see in the Scriptures anymore. Verses and passages that you've read your whole life, all of a sudden you see them in a new light. You see what they're actually saying to you, and it changes everything.

**CBK:** Funny how the Bible changes like that, isn't it? You underline all the wrong verses. You think, "Why did I underline that? I missed this whole section here."

**JMF:** Yeah, that [verse] tells me what that one was saying.

**CBK:** In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was face-to-face with God. And the Word became flesh, meeting us in our crap and darkness, and we saw it and we got to experience its fullness in our darkness. That's the gospel. Right there in the first part of John. Once you see that, it's everywhere in the New Testament.

**JMF:** You're working on a book on the topic of theology of _The Shack_ in which you go into a lot of these things, is that something that we can look forward to fairly soon?

**CBK:** Probably not in a matter of weeks or months, because I'm working on another book, and three-quarters of the way through – this is a novel and it's pretty interesting, pretty racy. I've done lectures on the theology of _The Shack_. I'm getting the recordings from two different places and I'm going to get someone to transcribe that. Then I'll sit down and take the time and work through and add and develop and edit that. But the basic research and ideas of the theology of _The Shack_ that I've been wanting to do are all in place, and I've already sort of done a test drive on it. It's been lecture format and interaction.

I will get all that put together and then hole up somewhere and write it, and of course (just because of my friendship with Paul) I would never want to produce anything that he was not pleased with on one level. Although there are places in the book where he and I disagree about things, they're not major issues. I'm still a theologian, after all. There are some places I want to quibble with him a little bit. But by and large I absolutely love every single thing in the book. I don't like the first four chapters. I mean it's kind of brutal, because you'd smell what's coming and nobody wants to read that scene. But from Papa on, it's just off the charts.

So I want to help people see what's going on, and I also want to help them understand that what's being said here about God – may be new to us, but it's actually the early church's. It's what launched the early church. If it's new to us, we've been lost over here in Augustinian captivity. I read _The Shack_ as Athanasius in the early church shouting across the centuries saying, "Come on back home, boys and girls. This is the way God really is, and you know it!" But be willing to repent, have your mind reconstructed to allow the truth of what's being said here, and the truth of what was said in the early church, come together.

\- many thanks to our volunteer transcriber -

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

back to table of contents

## The Shack Revisited

On this episode of _You're Included:_ Dr. C. Baxter Kruger, theologian and author; with [William] Paul Young, author of _The Shack._ They talk with us about Dr. Kruger's book, _The Shack Revisited,_ and the theology embedded in Young's original narrative.

**JMF:** Baxter and Paul, thanks for being with us again. It's good to see you guys.

**CBK:** It's good to be back.

**JMF:** We want to talk about your book this time: _The Shack Revisited_. This is an endeavor that you guys have been working on in tandem. Paul's got the foreword here, and Baxter's been doing theology that supports _The Shack._ Can you tell us how you got into this, what happened, how it came to be, and where you are with it?

**CBK:** The short version is that Paul and I had become great friends over the last several years and went to several conferences and things like that together, and then I started getting ready to do things like "Theology of _The Shack"_ at conferences. We bumped into each other in Toronto at a conference and ended up having an afternoon to spend together, so I showed him some scribbled notes that I had, and he said, "Maybe you would write that into a book, and we'll see." So I went basically off the grid for eight months.

I wanted to show how the core vision of _The Shack,_ which is done in drama in a very right-brained way, is the early church and is the main line coming all the way through. There's a number of reasons for that. One is that when I read _The Shack,_ I'm thinking I'm reading Athanasius, I'm reading J.B. Torrance, I'm reading George McDonald. This is so beautiful, and it's in a form that people can understand.

But I felt that there were many people who said, "Okay, somebody grab me by the hand and help me go to the next step. Help me see this. Is this biblical, is this work historically accurate? What is going on here?" So I'm trying to unpack all the nuances that are embedded into the narrative of _The Shack._

**WPY:** For some people, their heart just leaped, and they were touched deeply by _The Shack._ Baxter comes along and says, "I want to encourage and affirm that this is not new theology. This is something that is actually traditional." And then for those whose paradigms were tampered by _The Shack,_ who were a little upset, this is to come along and say, "You need to think about these questions, because this is why you're bothered." Those are some of the implications of doing a book like this. I'm very excited. Baxter writes in a very accessible way. It's not a high-brow theological treatise, but it's very supported, for those who like that sort of thing, and yet it's very much a story itself, very accessible.

**JMF:** Let's talk about some of the things you said in here, and let's get into it a little bit. Let me read this...and then a section from _The Shack,_ and then if I could get both of you to comment:

#### "This is one of the many reasons that the Trinity is so critical. For if God were alone and solitary from eternity, then there is nothing for God to love until he creates. So the solitary God can only _become_ a lover, for he is not one by nature. And this love can only be a love that grows out of his alone-ness and self-interest. And it's more than possible that whatever it was that caused the single-person God to create and become a lover could change, and the solitary God could then go back to his essential non-loving nature. The love of this God is caused by something outside of his being, and is this not what we all fear? That something outside of the being of God causes him to love us? That his love is conditioned by something other than his nature, and thus that we're the ones who must get it right, trip the love wire, make God's love happen, and keep it happening? No wonder we're so exhausted and unhappy."

And then the quotation from _The Shack_. Mackenzie is talking to Jesus:

#### "'Why do you love us humans? I suppose I...' As he spoke he realized he hadn't formed his question very well. 'I guess what I want to ask is why do you love me when I have nothing to offer you?' 'If you think about it, Mac,' Jesus answered, 'it should be very freeing to know that you can offer us nothing. At least not anything that can add or take away from who we are. That should alleviate any pressure to perform.'" (From page 202).

Let's talk about that. It's very common to think of God (I still do it...) as a solitary figure sitting up in heaven somewhere on a throne. He's probably got a white beard, and he's very wise and kind and loving most of the time... I hope he is, and I hope he listens when I'm begging him to help me get a home run or something like that.

**WPY:** Like Gandolf with an attitude.

**JMF:** Yeah, there we are.

**WPY:** That's why I went such a different direction in the story. That's why Papa is about as far away from Gandolf with an attitude as...

**JMF:** Or Santa Claus.

**WPY:** Or Santa Claus who's got a list and is checking it twice...and look out, because he's coming to town.

**JMF:** Right. A very unfortunate song that does great disservice to Santa Claus...

**WPY:** Part of this, as you were reading it, struck me again that if perfect love casts out fear and if God is perfect love, what kind of image of God do we have... [ **JMF:** Why are we afraid?] where we have fear and love co-mingled in the relationship? If perfect love casts out fear, and I look to the God that I fear (in that negative phobia kind of sense where I'm afraid in the worst kind of way, judgment and even worse than that, disappointment. I'm afraid that I'm a disappointment. The things that I would fear most in my relationship with my own father, for example.)

If that's supposed to be the source of my freedom and the source of where I have to go to get away from that fear, and yet it is the source of that fear, I'm stuck. I have a major problem here, and I don't know where to go. Where do I turn to in terms of trying to deal with that?

**JMF:** Fear God and keep his commandments. That's what we hear preached.

**CBK:** Well, revere and...

**WPY:** Reverence.

**CBK:** Reverence and awe. You can be awed by God's beauty and goodness and glory.

**JMF:** So "fear" is an unfortunate translation.

**CBK:** It is a translation. This paragraph that you read puts its finger on what I would reckon (I think Paul would agree) is the number one human and pastoral issue we have. It's that Does God really love me? If God is not eternally Father, Son, and Spirit...if there is a G-O-D, a single person behind that, that when one day he decided we were going to have community, then the God behind the Father, Son, and Spirit is the will of God. A single-person God is not other-centered, not approachable, not interested in fellowship, it does not love out of its nature.

**JMF:** And it doesn't need.

**CBK:** It does not create out of other-centeredness. This is one of the reasons the Trinity is so critical, because the Father, Son, and Spirit, as Athanasius said, "The Holy Trinity is no created thing. God has always been Father, Son, and Spirit." The only way they know to be is as Father, Son, and Spirit. That's who they are, that's who God is in that communion of love. That's the way they relate to everything in their creation.

The reason God loves us is not because his blood sugar happened to be up one day and he decided to create the universe. The reason he loves us is because that's what the Father, Son, and Spirit do. I can count on that. That doesn't mean I can go do anything I want, and there are consequences for that. But one thing I know is that no matter what happens in life, I am loved forever. Loved forever means that he, the Father, Son, and Spirit, are loving me constantly to set me free to live in that love.

That's something you can hold onto, because what I hear being preached all the time is this model where God is essentially your Judge, and can become your Father _if_ you repent and believe. It's the windshield wiper thing to me.

I remember the first time I was consciously aware of repenting and believing. Two years later, I had another experience. Three years later, I had another experience. So how much did I really repent and believe, and who in the equation of the Christian church can really raise their hand and say, "I have never graduated from 'Lord I believe, help my unbelief.'" That means that God's being is sitting there flipping back and forth between being our judge and being our father.

What the early church understood was that fatherhood is first and eternal, and out of that relationship we are created and we love. That's what we believe, that's what we count on, that's what we struggle to understand. And that's his nature. God's love for me is not depending upon me getting something right. I can't change it! I'm not so powerful as to tamper with the being of the Father, Son, and Spirit. They love. That's good news. Now let's walk together in that.

**WPY:** That's great news. Another piece of this is that to the degree that fear exists in my life (because if perfect love casts out fear, and the one who fears is not perfected in love – that's not a value statement, it's just an observation)...if that's true, then the degree that there's fear in my life, to that degree I don't understand the love of God for me. Because you either have one or the other. That helps me, because then I can recognize I've got something wrong in my paradigm about the character and nature of God.

We live in an uncertain world, as everybody knows. There's a lot of things that we just can't count on. Where are we going to plant our feet? It's got to be in the certainty of the character of God. But if we're caught in betwixt two temperaments (where love is a temperament and justice is a temperament or judging is a temperament and it's based on my performance), I'm sorry, I'm too broken and my history is too shattered to compete in the environment of performance. It's not going to happen.

**CBK:** Even if you weren't broken, even if you were good, you still couldn't trust it, because you've got this whole dimension of judgment that's not integrated... Of course the Father's going to judge us. Because he loves us, he will judge us to the roots of our souls, and separate all darkness from us so we get to live in the place where there's only light. Of course he will judge. He's not going to let any of us off the hook with anything, because he loves us, because it's his character to love us. That's just the most liberating and freeing thing to me. I'm glad you pointed that out. That's the very center of the book...

**JMF:** Aren't we afraid not to be afraid? We don't want to be afraid... You can read _The Shack_ , you can read a book like this that gets into the theology that is behind and under and through _The Shack_ about who God is for us, but you're afraid to not be afraid.

**WPY:** We think intimacy is devalued if we're not afraid, which is crazy. In our relationships, in a healthy relationship between a mother and a daughter and a mother and a son or a father and a daughter, intimacy creates a great degree of respect. And we have a paradigm that says intimacy is an eradication of respect.

**CBK:** Familiarity breeds contempt.

**WPY:** Right. My point, and I think Baxter would agree, is that intimacy creates a higher degree of respect, because you get to know the person deeper and deeper, and you have an expanded view of what that is, and love surrounds that.

**JMF:** You're not taking sin seriously, or you're just kidding yourself.

**CBK:** What you're actually taking seriously is the beauty of the love of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The question is: is there anything in this universe better, more beautiful, more life-giving, more blessed, than the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit? Is there anything? From where we're sitting, this seems like a lot of options. But from where the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are sitting, that's the best thing ever.

How long is it going to take us to work through all the things that we think we've got to do before we come to see that [the love of the Father, Son and Spirit] is what I want, I want to be in the middle of that? The Christian community is trying to find a way to keep these people on these paths by using fear, and they're not able to move. They're just living in fear, they're not getting to know that they're loved.

The Father, Son, and Spirit are prepared and have run a huge risk in creating human beings and giving us freedom. But they know something. They know that they're not going to find anything in the cosmos that is anywhere close to the love and the life that they share together that we're included in. How long is it going to take us [to realize that]?

Is the point here that the Christian church is to have everybody so afraid we just do right all the time? That's like having a child that you're raising and you want them to be free, but at ten years old they get frozen into doing right so they never get to grow up and they never get to experience love in the house. Is that what the Father, Son, and Spirit...is that what this creation is about?

They want us to come to the place where we look at them and say, "I'm in, my whole heart. I want to be a part of this. This is the best thing." That's what Jesus said to Peter, and Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, what are we going to do? We've got the best thing there is." [cf. John 6:68]

**WPY:** What is it about us that is so twisted up that we need an angry, vengeful, vindictive God?

**JMF:** We want people we don't like...

**WPY:** To suffer the consequences.

**CBK:** Somebody's going to have to pay.

**WPY:** In _The Shack_ , Papa doesn't let Mackenzie off on anything. But Papa doesn't walk around with a big stick with a nail on it to prove a point. It's love that pushes Mackenzie into dealing with these things. The kindness of God leads us to repentance, right? And we think it's the anger, the fury, or whatever.

It's not that God is not angry or furious against everything that is damaging his creation, including the things that are damaging me, his child. We're for that. The more we see of the goodness of God, the more we're for him burning out of my life everything that keeps me from being free and causes me to damage relationships and my family and on and on. That just goes. We want to be judged in that sense, because we trust his goodness in that judgment, not in some behind-the-scenes vindictiveness where behind the love of God there is really another agenda, or the Father has a different agenda.

People say silly things, like the intimacy that exists between Papa and Mackenzie, as if that's an affront to the character of God. That's what they got mad at Jesus for – his intimacy with the Father. What we don't understand is, we got included into that intimacy. That's the whole point – everything is by, for, through, and in Jesus, and we exist in that relationship with the Father because we're carried in him. We're created in him.

Then Jesus is talking about God as _Abba_ when the entire Old Testament never even conceived of the idea of intimacy, and yet here's Jesus talking in the most familial, deepest kind of senses that we understand as human beings in relationship to our kids, but we couldn't understand that in relationship to God. Jesus models that right smack in front of us, and it is such an affront that he ends up getting killed for it.

**JMF:** If you go on Youtube and look for "God loves everyone," there are a number of voices that absolutely are furious about the idea of anyone saying such a thing. [They say] What a damnable lie that is.

**CBK:** That God loves everyone.

**JMF:** They go to the passage that says, "Esau I hated, Jacob I loved." If God hates Esau, then he hates someone, then he doesn't love everyone, and so therefore you better straighten up and live right because God does not love everybody, it's a damnable lie that he loves everyone.

**CBK:** Are they afraid that someone is going to show up at the gates of heaven and be accepted in who's not supposed to be there?

**JMF:** Certainly not Esau.

**WPY:** People who bring up that story obviously don't understand their scripture very well, because you go back to the Old Testament story, and there was a blessing on both those boys from the beginning. Yes, Esau and Jacob, there was a distinction in terms of the redemptive plan, and that's what that term [hate] is. It's not a psychological hate that's here – it's a separation saying the plan includes this boy, but not this boy. Read this story: there is total reconciliation between Jacob and Esau inside the love of the father in that story. There's a lot more going on with that story than we see at first glance.

That's part of the question. Mackenzie faces it in the judgment scene, where he is sitting in the seat of judgment, where he is to judge God and the entire human race. He realizes that is exactly what he's done. He's billed the character and nature of God that is not love, and therefore not trustworthy and not good, and then everything else flows from that. If we believe in a God who is that over-distant Omni-being, then we will read the Jacob-Esau section of Romans (or wherever) through that lens. It's a paradigm. You're going to hear the kind of God that you believe in. The sad thing is that people...

**JMF:** And you're going to pull that verse right out of its context in order to prove your point.

**WPY:** And people become "there you go"...people become like the God they believe in.

**CBK:** [after putting on odd eyeglasses] You look very different to me right now, Mike.

**JMF:** So do you.

**CBK:** Yeah? Now [he takes them off]...

**JMF:** Now you look like Baxter.

**WPY:** We see through the lens of our own paradigms and we become like the God that we worship.

**CBK:** Athanasius says that "the God of all is good and supremely noble by nature, therefore he is the love of the human race." That's what the early church came to see. I don't think we can overestimate the goodness of God and the love of God.

Some people hear me say that and say I'm just saying everybody can do whatever they want to do. I'm saying that he is so good and he loves us so much he is going to bring us to the place to where we want to participate in this life with all our hearts, and that we're not going to need barbed wire in heaven, because we will hate everything that is dark and is hurtful to us and to others. We only want to be sharing in that life. That's a very different thing than "we're going to go to heaven because we don't want to go to hell," and we're actually hoping that we can be in heaven, but not ever have to run into the God that we fear.

**JMF:** And also the people that we don't like.

**WPY:** A lot of times when people bring up the issue of "you're being soft on sin," they often have an attraction to sin that they're trying to avoid. We don't want that attraction in our lives at all. We're not being soft on sin at all. We're not saying, "I'm just going to do anything because it doesn't matter." It all matters. We're saying, "It matters because these things are devastating in our lives."

**CBK:** Here's the dynamic. We are included in this circle of other-centered life and love. That's who we are, that's our nature. We're free to do whatever we want, but when we violate that way of being, it hurts like hell. There's no escape from it. You're free to go live in any darkness you want, but it hurts like hell, because this is who we are. There's an education process so we can come to see that.

**JMF:** It's a journey, isn't it?

**CBK:** It is a journey.

**JMF:** You're on a journey toward Christ...

**CBK:** An incremental process.

**JMF:**...and that journey can have some pretty bad places in it if you want to make some bad choices. There are consequences.

**WPY:** And sometimes not choices you make for yourself.

**JMF:** Often you cause things on other people that they didn't make for themselves.

**WPY:** That's part of why we're so opposed to the darkness and we're opposed to the sin, because we've seen what it's done to the people we cared for and we loved. The darkness that I hold onto, I don't just keep to myself.

**CBK:** That's a great point. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, we share it with others.

**JMF:** One other portion of the book I wanted to get to before we finished is "The Wonderful Exchange." It's a quote from the apostle Paul at the beginning, "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, yet though he was rich, but for your sake he became poor that you, through his poverty, might become rich." You go on to expound on this concept of the wonderful exchange that Mackenzie learns about.

**CBK:** In that chapter, what I'm trying to show is that one of the themes in _The Shack_ is that what Mackenzie is getting in this relationship is not simply forgiveness. He's getting to share in all that the Father, Son, and Spirit have together. That's the ancient gospel. I quoted Paul first, and Irenaeus there: "Our Lord who became what we are to bring us to be what he is."

We're so locked in the West to the guilt-and-sin thing that we don't see much more than forgiveness going on in Jesus and the cross. Irenaeus, the ancient father, said, "Our Lord Jesus became what we are in order to bring us to be what he is" in his relation with the Father... Calvin, the same way, I quote Calvin on that, he's beautiful. And then J.B. Torrance, he says, "The incarnation, the prime purpose of the coming of Jesus in the love of God is to bring us to be included in this communion that we may participate in the Trinitarian life of God."

What is given to us in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus is not simply forgiveness. Jesus reaches in and takes our darkness and our hell and takes it into himself so that he can pitch his tent, as it were, in the midst of our darkness and pain, so everything that he is in his experience with the Father and the Holy Spirit and as Lord of Creation then becomes ours. That's the point: we're going to be brought to participate in Jesus' relation with his Father, and in his anointing in the Holy Spirit, and in his relationship with everything in the entire cosmos.

**WPY:** Because he remains the creator.

**CBK:** That's because of who he is, and he's bringing us to do that.

**JMF:** And he remains one of us.

**WPY:** Yeah. Part of this exchange is that not only have we been included into this life (Whether we know it or not, or even want it or not at this point, we've been included. That was the plan and purpose of adoption from before the foundation of the world.)...not only has that happened, but in exchange, also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (John 14, 15, 16, 17) come and climb inside of our shacks, the places of our darkness, and meet us, regardless of whether we've yet repented or not. There is a process in which God is working in the heart of every human being to restore them to the desire that he has for them, which is everything that they were intended to be.

**CBK:** There's a whole atonement theory of theology wound up in _The Shack_ , and this is part of what I'm talking about with "The Wonderful Exchange" is the way that Papa and Jesus and Sarayu get inside of Mackenzie's shack, which is his soul, which in particular is the brokenness. They're there before he even knows them or who they are. The Father, Son, and Spirit have pitched their tent inside human darkness, and sin, and treachery, and betrayal. And they got there by Jesus submitting himself to suffer from us.

Jesus says, "I'm going to let you make me the scapegoat, and you're going to pour your wrath out on me." It's not the Father's wrath being poured out on Jesus – it's our wrath. It's our rage, it's our curse. We damned him, we beat him, we crucified him, and we mocked him. And he said, "I'm going to take this, because as you do this to me and as I accept this, I am entering into a relationship with you in the very pit of our darkness and confusion and brokenness. I'm bringing my Father, and I'm bringing the Holy Spirit with me. We're not going away, because you can't kill me again."

**WPY:** This idea of this distant God, it's not a new thing. Isaiah writes about the atonement: "We (human beings) esteemed him (Jesus) stricken by God." That's how we looked at it. We think of God in such a light that we esteemed Jesus stricken by God.

**CBK:** "Consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself." [Heb. 12:3] Focus on what he endured in order to meet us. So he who is rich becomes poor, that he may meet us in our poverty with his wealth. The redeeming genius of the Father, Son, and Spirit is they're going to establish the new covenant with Israel and with the human race, and here's how. They're going to establish it by taking our worst treachery, by allowing us to betray them and murder them. They're going to pitch the tent of the new covenant relationship in the tent of our betrayal. If that's not genius... That's the secret, that's the mystery, that's been done, that's real, we're all included, we're already in the journey of understanding, and we've got a long way to go yet.

**JMF:** In _The Shack_ , Jesus says to Mackenzie, "We want you to join us in our circle of fellowship. I don't want slaves to do my will, I want brothers and sisters who want to share life with me."

**CBK:** Yeah. They don't want Christian robots who are doing everything right but have no heart. Jesus wants Mackenzie on the dock, but Mackenzie's crying to him, "Jesus, I feel lost." That's what he really feels. "I feel lost." Jesus holds his hand and says, "I know how you feel, Mackenzie, but I'm with you, and I'm not lost. I'm sorry you feel that way, but hear me, you're not lost, because I have a hold of you."

When Mackenzie begins to hear that in his pain, he's beginning to discover who had met him in his hell. That's a relationship of acceptance and love that can rekindle a man's dignity and life and give him some hope that he's a part of something way bigger than just him or just his religious obedience.

**WPY:** It's a beautiful thing.

**JMF:** Thanks for coming.

**CBK:** What a great day.

**JMF:** And great conversations.

**WPY:** I'm again honored. Thank you.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

back to table of contents

## New Relationship With God

**J. Michael Feazell:** Great to have you guys with us.

**William Paul Young:** It's an honor to be here.

**C. Baxter Kruger:** Good to be back, Mike.

**JMF:** You've been traveling together in Australia and other places, talking about _The Shack,_ talking about your personal story, Paul, and talking about the theology of _The Shack,_ Baxter. After you tell your story, people line up. Baxter, you mentioned long lines of people who want to talk. What's on their mind? What is it that you said that has touched them, and what is it they want to talk about?

**WPY:** It's not just the lines. I've received more than 100,000 emails from all over the world. A few years ago, I was shipping out soldering tips and cleaning toilets. People ask me what I do now, and I tell them I get to hang around burning bushes all day. It's because I get invited into people's stories. There's so much that unites us, that religion has divided us over, and one of them is authenticity – what people hear in my story, because I'm no different than anybody else.

I've got great sadness in my history. I had a very difficult relationship with my father. I have sexual abuse in my history, not from family but from the tribe that I grew up in. I went to boarding school when I was six, and abuse took place there. All those things tend to destroy the house on the inside, the shack. It's a shack, not a really habitable place.

That becomes the place where you hide all your addictions and you store your secrets, and it's the place of shame. You don't want anything to do with it. You hate yourself. You hate this place, which is your own soul. Then religion comes along and tells you that God also hates it, and God wants a nice building. You don't know what to do with the shack, so you build a façade outside – a little quarter-inch piece of plywood you can paint, as fast as you can pick up people's expectations, and you begin to perform. Religion is about performance.

I can't tell you how many times I've rededicated my life to the Lord, and prayed all night, and fasted, and on and on the list goes. I'm trying to earn my way into the affection and approval of God. Because God was largely like my dad, someone whose acceptance I couldn't ever quite win, and whose approval I never won.

It took me 50 years to wipe the face of my father completely off the face of God. It was a process that went into the inside world of the façade I had created, the façade that I presented to everybody, known as the spiritual man. The person who "had it together" was the façade, and God doesn't love the façade. He loves the shack, which I didn't know. I thought he hated it. I hated it. It seemed like my dad hated it. Why would I ever think that he would love that?

I performed well. It wasn't until my façade came crashing down, and that's what I talked about, in part – this struggle, and the damage that the religious paradigm of performance (of trying to please God) brought into my life.

To find out it's not about pleasing God, it's about learning to trust God, that's like, "that can't be right." That would mean that God would have to be of such a character that I could actually trust God. Let's go back to pleasing God, because then that's about me, and how good I'm performing. Every religion is about pleasing God – it's just the rules are different, or the criteria are different. But as soon as you have it, you know how to compare your criteria against somebody else's and how good your performance is, and how you can be self-righteous because you're better than somebody.

You get a false sense of value, and a false sense of worth and significance, and all these things that you think are righteous and biblical. You say, "Yeah, I trust God." Yeah, because religion taught me to use that language. Do I really trust him? No. Just let the economy go sideways and I'll start screaming. Because, fundamentally, I don't trust anybody.

McKenzie, in the book, spends a weekend in the shack, which is the dismantling of his entire existence and the reforming of it within the truth. That weekend represents eleven years for me. When I talk to people, a lot of us grew up in the religious community. We didn't even know that people could come to healing. Because anytime their crap showed up, we kicked them out – which meant the rest of us didn't want to be transparent and honest about our stuff. We got this performance orientation. We're hidden. We're not authentic.

When I talk, people hear a couple things. God loves the shack. A lot of people don't know that. He crawled inside of it. He's there already, knowing everything there is to know about me. Authenticity, this drive I have to be real, is there, because that's the way I was created to be, and healing is possible. The healing of the soul, the shack, rather than this performance.

God doesn't care about the performance, and the façade has to come crashing down at some point, so that real healing comes to me. But we will hold on to that façade because that's what we've been told that real righteousness, real spirituality, is. It's a lie, but it's all based on the fact that you don't believe God is good. I didn't, but I knew the language. I can _tell_ you that I did believe that God is good. But I didn't even know that I didn't trust anybody else except myself. That's because I had no reason to know it.

When people come and they talk, they tell me their stories. They tell me how the book ( _The Shack_ ) has landed in the middle of their great sadnesses of one sort or another. They tell me about their histories and their abuse and the fact that maybe this is the first time that they have hope. Some of them tell me they're terrified, that if they take some little incremental steps of trust, that the God that I'm telling them about may not turn out to be the one that's really there.

Why should they take that risk? Faith is about that risk. It's about beginning to believe in the certainty of his character, to believe that God is love, that there is no deeper reality than the character and nature of God, of love and relationship. And that God, by nature, is not able to act in any other way than the deepest way that we would sense love is.

That's the way I love my kids. That's the touch point for me. As a father, I would die for my kids. If God isn't at least that good, then what kind of a God do we have? A lot of times, we think we know how to love our kids better than God knows how to love his. I mean, he's asking us to forgive in a way that _he_ can't forgive.

That either means that I'm wrong, or the character of God is wrong, so why then should I trust him? The question goes back to, Who is this God? He is, in essence, good and loving all the time. That means that judgment and wrath and all these words, hell and all this stuff, have got to be understood within this commitment to his goodness and love. Everything else is defined out of that, not from us out here.

**CBK:** Goodness and love is why the doctrine of the Trinity is so important. If you've got a single isolated deity from all eternity, then that deity is alone, and is self-centered, because there's no "other" to be centered on. It's unapproachable. It's impersonal. It's not good, because _good_ is a relational word. It cannot be love, because there's no other object to be loved, unless it loves itself, and that's self-centered love, a long way from _agape._ One of the reasons that the Trinity is so important is that it grounds the relation out – it says that the core of God's being from all eternity, his fellowship, his other-centeredness, his approachability, his communion, is giving and self-sacrifice before the other.

What is so foundational when it comes to trust (I'm not an expert on it, but I see it and I'm beginning to feel it) is that I can begin to trust the Father, Son and Spirit because the only way they know how to be is the way they have been toward one another from all eternity. That's the way they relate to me. If the Holy Spirit has doubts about the Father's heart, if the Father has doubts about Jesus or the Holy Spirit, then that introduces some kind of reason for me to not trust them.

But when you see that the way the Father-Son-Spirit love one another, as is portrayed for us in the New Testament (the Father loves the Son, Jesus says that it shows in all things that he is doing, and the Son can do nothing except what he sees the Father doing), this is other-centered, and it's beautiful and good. That's the way they relate to all of us.

Now we have a basis, within the being of God, of knowing that he's trustworthy and good, and is just towards us. The God of all is good – Athanasius said he is "supremely noble by nature," because that's the way God is. When Athanasius says that, he's not talking about a solitary isolated person – he's talking about the Trinity.

The God of all is good and supremely noble by nature. Therefore, this God is the lover of the human race. That's the only way we'll ever have trust. If somebody's introducing doubt into that (which is what we do 24-7 many times in the Christian church and in the way we practice the gospel), you can't trust that God.

When I get the chance to travel with Paul, I'm watching the people. They're feeling, "You mean I may not be totally disgusting to God? He may like me? And stuff comes up and I cannot talk to him." Then they begin to have that meeting and hope that "maybe I can be loved like McKenzie was loved. Maybe I can be included like Paul is included." It's evangelistic. It is beautiful.

**WPY:** Before there's any time and space and matter, what is there? What is there before time and space and matter, is what all time and space and matter is inside of. So what do you find before time and space and matter? You have a relationship of other-centered love, that's all you have. That's everything, and everything that is created is created inside of that and an expression of that. God hasn't changed. We are not powerful enough as human beings to change the nature of God. Religion tells us we are. Religion says that we can make God not like us, we can make God hate us, we can do all kinds of things and then change the nature of the way God relates to us.

**CBK:** It's windshield-wiper theology. It's just that we have the power. God's our judge, he's our Father, he's our judge, he's our Father. Back and forth. If the windshield wiper is going, you can't have any peace. What I say is: God is our Father, therefore he will judge us to the core of our being, because he loves us so much.

One of [George] MacDonald's great lines is, "He's not about to allow us into heaven with a little bit of Satan in our pocket." That is not for his benefit, but because it keeps us from being able to be free to have the run of the house. It keeps us from being able to be free to know him and to live towards one another in and out of that love. It's all rooted in that very simple thing about the goodness of God and the love, and whether the Trinity is the eternal truth of God's being. That's where we went off in Western theology: we split the being of God away from the Trinity – that's another subject.

**WPY:** A lot of times, we will define our religious language not based in this relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but based in the projection of our own pain. For example, we'll take a word like _holiness,_ which is an important word, and we'll define it in respect to sin. That's our fundamental definition. Guess what? God was holy before there was any sin. So holiness has to be defined in a way that has nothing to do with sin, because God was holy before there was any sin. But again, we want to define our terms over here, in the midst of our pain, our loss, our great sadness.

Baxter and Athanasius and Irenaeus and MacDonald are saying, "This is where the action is. We have to begin here." The first part of our systematic theology is to say, "What is the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit?"

Jesus says, "Nobody knows the Father." He says that right before he says, "So come to me, all of you who are weary and heavy-laden." We were talking about the impact of religion and how it generally drives us into the ground. The basis of Jesus saying that, is that you don't know the Father, but if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. You've seen me playing with the kids; you've seen the Father. You've seen me with the woman at the well, or the woman caught in adultery.

**CBK:** Or seen me, outstretched arms, being crucified and beaten by the human race. You're looking at the Father. That's his character, exactly pictured for us in Jesus.

**JMF:** He said, "And this is eternal life, that you may know the Father, and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent. Having to do with knowing, is the definition of eternal life.

**CBK:** When you know that you are that loved, by that Father, it baptizes your soul with what the New Testament calls _parrēsia_ – unearthly assurance, freedom, boldness, confidence. When that is going on inside of our soul, real healing, we can be honest and we can be real with our Father in heaven. Real healing begins to happen. That gives us, maybe for the first time, freedom from our self-centeredness long enough to begin to notice people around us. We notice that other people around us don't necessarily know anything about it.

To know the Father is to be put to peace, and to be put to peace in our inner world means that striving and churning (as Papa talks to McKenzie about it) begins to go away, which means that I now can begin to notice others, and I'm free to give myself to their benefit, which creates fellowship. That's life. Eternal life is the life that the Father, Son and Spirit live together. It's God's life. It's other-centered. As we know the Father, then it works its way through us in community, in relationships.

**WPY:** That only makes sense, because the healthier you become as a human being, the more other-centered you become – the better father you become, the better spouse you become, the better wife you become. In terms of other-centeredness, if God was this lone solitary being who then defines the universe based on that aloneness, then the healthier you got, the more self-centered you'd become, because that would be the character and nature of God.

**CBK:** Which seems to be what some people are trying to say – for God to be self-centered.

**JMF:** If he does some of the things that people say he does, he would have to be awfully self-centered, wouldn't he?

**WPY:** Yeah, and he would be acting out of _need_ of some sort. We're saying that everything that God would _need_ is inside the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He is totally fulfilled within himself, and now creates in order to share that life and include us in that life.

**CBK:** [C.S.] Lewis is saying that in this circle there's no emptiness, but a plentiousness, that creates us for one reason, and that is to lavish us with love so that we could share in that life. There's no list-keeping to see if we make the cut so we can get into this place called heaven. The Trinitarian life is being shared with us so that we can share in it. It's for our benefit, that's the way God loves us.

**WPY:** That goes to what Baxter says all the time. This is not about asking Jesus to come into our life. It's about Jesus including us into his – his life of the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A lot of times we believe in a distant God, and so everything becomes transactional. It's about us asking this God to come into our lives and then proving by our righteousness that he can stay there – rather than understanding (as the Holy Spirit opens our eyes) what Father, Son and Holy Spirit have already included us into.

**CBK:** That means that the question of the Christian life is, "Who is this Jesus who has included me? What is his life about, and how do I go about participating in being a part of his? I'm included in that family. What are the dynamics? How does this work? Somebody show me." Jesus says, "I'll show you. Here's how it works: Abide in my love. Let me love you."

**JMF:** Trust. He speaks of trust, belief, constantly. We want to say that he speaks of obedience, or law keeping, but in fact he talks about "Believe me, trust me. Trust the Father who sent me." He uses that kind of language constantly.

**WPY:** A surprising chapter where trust comes up over and over is Psalm 22, which starts off with, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" You read that psalm and it says, "trust, trust, trust." At one point it says, "Because I know you will not turn your face from me." We've come up with a theology where you can't trust God, he's turned his face, he can't look on sin. He's gone somewhere and he's abandoned his son. Like every father would abandon his son. Come on. I'm a father. There's no way.

**JMF:** He's so righteous [in that erroneous view] that he abandons.

**CBK:** Unlike his own Son, because his Son doesn't abandon us...

**JMF:** There's something wrong with our definition of righteousness.

**CBK:** [In that view], there's a split between the character of the Father and the Son, because the Father can't even look at us. He's disgusted. Jesus can not only look at us – he can enter our world and become one of us. The apostle Paul says, "He who knew no sin became sin." [2 Corinthians 5:21] You have two fundamentally different kind of characters in the Father and the Son, and who knows what the Holy Spirit's doing in there – torn between two lovers or something? Where does the Holy Spirit come down on this? The Father can't look at us; Jesus enters into our world. So where does the Holy Spirit fit into that?

**JMF:** Shuttle diplomacy.

**CBK:** Back to the windshield wiper. I'm with Jesus today, but I'm going back over.

**WPY:** To even make matters worse, ultimately then, Jesus becomes the one who protects us from the Father.

**JMF:** Shields us from the angry Father.

**CBK:** That's like living in a house where the father's a drunk. The boy wakes up in the morning and doesn't know which dad's coming out the door. The mother's standing there on the side thinking, am I going to have to defend my son, or is this going to be a good day? That doesn't create relationships...

**JMF:** Or the older sibling protecting the younger.

**CBK:** It's remarkably sad in a sick framework. That doesn't mean everybody's propagating this idea is therefore nuts, that's not the point – we're part of a family conversation. But we've been brought in this family conversation to a place where we can see this is sad and broken and sick, and we don't have to hand it over to the next generation. That's not disparaging to our fathers in the faith, or our modern brothers and sisters in the faith – this is just saying we don't have to pass along the family dysfunction this time. We can stop this here and move forward.

You never have trust if that trust is not rooted in the character of God. When you've got the being of God ripped apart at that moment in two different characters, and a third character that's kind of in-between, there's nothing there to trust.

Hell

**JMF:** Recently, the two of you gave an interview about the nature of hell. Can you talk about...

**CBK:** With John McMurray – the three of us. The documentary called _Hellbound?_ They've been interviewing a lot of folks.

**JMF:** Who's doing it?

**WPY:** There's a group of 20s-30s out of Vancouver, British Columbia. It's funded by a B.C. guy. He felt like we need to get all the different looks at this on the table. A lot of people within the religious community, the Christian community, think that there's just one view, which is Dante's _Inferno_ – or as you called it, the giant rotisserie. That's infernalism, that's the view that is the traditional view, which it's not, but it's the one that most of us are familiar with. So they're trying to ask the question, "What's this conversation about? What does it need to be about, and what frames this conversation?"

**CBK:** Where we started, and this is really beautiful, is that in any given part of theology, but especially when you're talking about judgment, suffering and hell, the real question is: What is the nature of the character of God? For me, I think Athanasius in early church answered that the nature and character of God is Father-Son-Spirit relationship, and the purpose of this God in creating is to include us in that life. Now that we've been included in it through Jesus, the Holy Spirit's task is to bring us to the place where there's no darkness in us, where we want to participate in that life with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.

To bring us to that place is what judgment is. It's the grace of God saying, "I will divide here. I will penetrate down into the core of your being and help begin to divide out the darkness and the sin and the evil (because that's not going to be able to participate) from the real Baxter, or the real Mike or the real Paul." That's the way I would pull it through. I would see hell as a fiery metaphor for the purification, whatever form that may take.

I think that not everybody gets the same kind of fire. There's some real differences. People who gave themselves to participate in Jesus their whole lives, and are not in a different place [24:35, undecipherable], they've been giving themselves, they've been working through this, they've been in the process of judgment and liberation all along. People who have resisted it their whole lives, maybe a couple million people winning in the process, there's a lot of refinement and transformation that has to happen for that. But we're not in a position to call those shots. Jesus is in charge of that.

**WPY:** It's like the concept of wrath. You can put it inside the G-O-D model, of the distant omni-being God.

**JMF:** And by G-O-D, you mean the traditional understanding of God?

**CBK:** No, no, no.

**WPY:** Not the traditional – it's the modern understanding of God.

**CBK:** It's the faceless, nameless, omni-being who watches us from the infinite distance of a disapproving heart.

**JMF:** And that's how people traditionally tend to look at God.

**CBK:** That's not how they saw him in the early church.

**JMF:** Yes.

**WPY:** We would say, the early church people were traditional.

**JMF:** So we're talking about definitions of "traditional." Traditionalists...

**CBK:** And traditionalism. Traditionalism is the...

**JMF:** The popular view.

**WPY:** The current popular view in Western culture [ **CBK:** In North America.] is G-O-D. If you have that, then you've got the distant God who needs to be appeased, which sounds like the Old Testament Baal or anybody else.

**JMF:** Or the volcano.

**WPY:** Or the volcano god or whoever that has to be appeased, and so he is going to have this sense of separation.

When you deal with wrath, is that God acting in retribution? But if you put wrath inside of this relationship of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, does God do anything that is not motivated by love? Anything? The answer is no, because love is the nature of God's being. Love, light, spirit. Everything God does is motivated by love, which would include wrath. Now you have the wrath of God couched in an absolutely different framework.

I have a friend whose oldest son was a methamphetamine addict. My friend would have died for him. In loving his son, if he had the power, he'd have gone after every piece of that addiction that was damaging, hurting and keeping his son from being free, keeping his son from experiencing life, keeping his son from being authentic. If you were a father, you would go after that. You would want to be this fire that would burn out every piece of that. I believe that that is the fire of God's love, that wrath is an expression of love, not this retribution, this distant volcano god that requires certain sacrifices in order to be appeased.

**CBK:** This is a quote from George MacDonald again – it figures into the basic perspective Paul and I are talking about. He says "Therefore [given who God really is, and the character of God as Father, Son and Spirit and their love for us, therefore, because that's who they are], all that is not beautiful in the beloved [that's us – we are the beloved], all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed."

That destruction is not the destruction of our being – it's the destruction of the darkness in which we're participating in, and it's not fun. It's not fun now, and it's not fun for however long it has to happen. All that is not of love, all that is not of love's kind, all that comes between us (that is, the Father's heart in us) has to be removed. That to me is what judgment is. It's redemptive.

**WPY:** If you know God loves you.... If I know that, I will run and say, "Please, do what you need to do to get the crap out of me. Because I don't want it. I don't want how I hurt people because of it. I don't want what it does to me. I don't like what it does to this world. So please, do what you need to do, because I want to be free. I want to be whole." I'm saying, "Come on."

**CBK:** The Lord will never be satisfied with anything less than that from us. He's not satisfied by legal satisfaction of some law. He is satisfied by having us full participants because we are sons and daughters of God. We must become that in our experience, and that's what he's talking about.

**JMF:** It's something like going to the physician for cancer, isn't it, a little bit? Let's pretend you're going to the best cancer physician in the world. You want to get rid of the cancer. You want to be free of it.

**CBK:** Because you know it's going to kill you, and you're not going to get to participate in life anymore if this is not excised and discerned – the fundamental meaning of judgment is to discern, to see into, to divide.

**JMF:** The process may be difficult.

**WPY:** It can be hell.

**JMF:** But it's better than the end product. Of course, it's a physical analogy.

**CBK:** You have two different doctrines of God at work there. In one, there is this idea that God has to have someone hurt. Someone has to pay.

**JMF:** A blood sacrifice.

**CBK:** A blood sacrifice. That to me is just paganism. What our Father is after is how in the world we're going to reach them. How in the world we are going to reach Mike, and how we are going to reach people who are so broken and so damaged and so hurt, they think we're like that? In order to bring them to be able to enjoy life in our house, how are we going to do this? There's a lot of tenderness in the Holy Spirit's work with people.

That's why I said there's differences. I don't think everybody needs to be hit in the head with a 2x4 board. Some people just need to be held for about 15 years and know "it's okay, this is good, I can trust this," to come through their pain into liberation. It's always about coming to see the Father's heart. He loves us forever.

When we finally get to there, we will not need laws, we will not need barbed-wire fences (my friend Ken Courtney says), because we will love anything that is alien to the life and other-centered care of the Father, Son and Spirit. We would do anything for one another to better their lives. It's so much more than fulfilling a law. It's actually sharing in the life of the Father, Son and Spirit. But we're so blind and so broken, we don't even know how to discern life from death, light from darkness, heaven and hell, right now. We keep reaching, and we've got to be educated, properly understood educated, and brought to the place to where we can discern those things and learn them.

The Holy Spirit's not going to violate our personhood and just flip a switch and say, "That's it. Now you got enlightenment." One of the things I love about _The Shack_ is that there must be ten or fifteen places where he makes the point, "without violating your will, without violating your will," because God wants us in our hearts. If he'd just wave the wand, then we'd cease to be real people. We'd be "computers with Jesus software," and that's not why he created us.

**WPY:** No. It's not a relationship.

**CBK:** There's a huge patience of God in this. I love this part of _The Shack_ , as this figures into the discussion: when Papa's talking about not ever being disappointed. Who in the world doesn't think they're a disappointment to God? But Papa's saying, "Well, it's going to take you 175 times, or events or situations or traumas or things, before you're finally going to begin to see who I am. So I'm not disappointed on the first two. We've only got this much more to go."

Paul and I were talking about this on the plane, about our children, and what father is not thrilled the first time their child stands up to try to walk, even when they fall? They fall and that's number one, so you're not disappointed that they fail. You're thrilled that they took the step. What father's ever going to be content to leave it there, until they can run?

That disappointed sense comes from that value with that judge that's watching, keeping the list and said "oops, cross off, sorry." They created us out of nothing. They formed us out of the dirt in the ground, and their goal is to bring us to be at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, anointed with the Holy Spirit. You don't think the Father, Son, and Spirit know that we're going to botch this up in the long run? They see the larger picture. I think that's beautiful. I love that. That's one of my favorite things in this chapter. Three different times he brings that up – once with each of the three persons in the Trinity. It's beautiful.

**JMF:** Baxter, you've done some work on a book, _The Shack Revisited,_ which is in the final manuscript form. We need to get together and talk about that and we can do theology.

**CBK:** Love to. You got three days?

**JMF:** Let's get together and do that.

**CBK:** That'd be great. Fantastic.

**JMF:** Thanks for being here.

**WPY:** Great to be here.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

back to table of contents

## The Trinity and Evangelism

**JMF:** This time we want to talk about something a little bit different. Evangelism is the big word in Western Christianity. Everything revolves around evangelism and what are you doing to share the gospel. It's like the eleventh commandment in the Old Testament and it's the...

**WPY:** It's the fundraising arm of religious Christianity.

**CBK:** I grew up in the Presbyterian church. I didn't know what evangelism was until I went to seminary.

**JMF:** We want to share the gospel, but how is that done? How does Trinitarian theology affect evangelism? What are the implications? What is the impact? How are we to see evangelism and think about it? Let's talk about that.

**WPY:** It's a great question. Go ahead, Baxter.

**CBK:** You start off with the Father, Son, and Spirit—you have relationship, and they love one another in complete other-oneness. Their dream for us is to draw us into their relationship so that it can become as much ours as it is theirs. So the message of the gospel, the good news, is that you're included. That's what we're supposed to share with people. The best way to share it with them is to let the Father, Son, and Spirit share it with us, which is as persons in relationship. So in terms of having a program where we're trying to knock on doors or we're doing different things, to me it's about...

This city here [Los Angeles] is about 20 million people who are included in the life of Jesus. They probably have not much of a clue about that. The way we do that is one person at a time in relationship, getting to know people, inviting them over, talking with them. Underneath that is a freeing aspect for a normal Christian person: the more they grow in the knowledge and understanding and intimacy that we're loved and that we're cared for, then the more free and natural it is to share. You have more confidence because this is good – "this has really helped my life. I want you to see this. How can I come alongside and share this with you?" Sometimes it's information, sometimes it may just be befriending them.

**WPY:** Don't you think a lot of times evangelism is a segment of spirituality in terms of how it's presented? The idea of evangelism is to get somebody from point A to point somewhere else.

**CBK:** From outside to inside.

**WPY:** From the outside to the inside, across the line, across the bridge, whatever. That's not what you're talking about at all.

**CBK:** Jesus has crossed the line and crossed the bridge and found the human race, and that's what true. He's called us as Christians to go and share that with the world so they can know that they're included, too. Then we can walk together and begin to figure out what this life means. How do we live this way? How do we participate in the Trinitarian life?

At this point in history, I think the most important part in the discussion of evangelism is not the method, but the message. The message that I'm hearing [from others] is that there's this huge chasm between God and us, and that there's all these different ways that we can get across over to God, and once we get across that big chasm (in Jesus by faith or penitence, maybe by baptism or by sacraments), there are all these different things we've got to do. Once we cross that, _then_ we're loved, then we're accepted, then we're reconciled, then we're saved, then we're sanctified, then I'll be adopted.

I'm saying the message to be proclaimed is that yes, there is a huge chasm. Adam and Eve, in their disobedience, plunged into the darkness, there was a huge chasm. But then there's this thing called the Incarnation, where the Father and Son came across the chasm to find us in the far country, put us on his shoulders, and brought us back to his Father. _That's_ when we were loved and saved and reconciled. But we're still in the dark and have no clue as to who we are, living out of our darkness, and it's fear, and insecurity, and pain, and meaninglessness.

We belong to the Father, Son, and Spirit. I package it this way sometimes just to make the point very stark in contrast to what I have heard all my life on radio and television. The gospel is not the news that we can receive Jesus into our lives. The gospel is the news that _Jesus has received us into his life._ He has made us part of his world, part of his relationship with the Father, the Holy Spirit, and his relationship with all creation. That's the good news.

We've got to get the message worked out, and I think the Holy Spirit is doing that right now. The last 30 years it's been like turning up the heat on this, and it's beautiful. People are beginning to wrestle with it. "You're telling me that that guy sitting on the park bench is included?" That's exactly what I'm telling you. He wouldn't have been able to come inside of God's creation apart from being included. Does he know that? Heck no, he doesn't know it, and because he doesn't know, he's scared to death. He doesn't know where his next meal is going to come from. He doesn't know what to do with his life, he's so precarious. He's frozen in fear.

When we see that, we can begin to feel with him who he is because of who Jesus is. That may mean befriending him. It may mean giving him a place to live, it may mean helping him out, or it may just mean sharing one word with him in that particular moment. I don't want to formulate the thing so that we've got this one package where we more or less go and puke on everybody with it whether they want to hear it or not; it's much more relational.

**WPY:** You're saying that there's no part of life that is not evangelism in that sense. We embody the good news, because when we are participating in the truth and the love and the grace that we already have come to know, even though we're not fully there yet, we're in process ourselves. Love becomes the centerpiece of this – the way that we love one another and the way that we love others, the way we love our enemies.

**CBK:** The sacred-secular dichotomy has to be dismantled in this, too, because if you throw your lot in 100 percent with the Father, Son, and Spirit and you surrender wholly to them, they're going to do a whole lot more for you than make you simply an evangelist. You're going to be a good human being. You're going to be a bass fisherman, and maybe you make lures. You're going to be into everything that they're into, and they're into everything in this cosmos.

The sacred-secular dichotomy goes away, so that the more we throw ourselves in with the Father, Son, and Spirit, the more their light begins to flow through us in an infinite variety of ways, and it may well be through joining a lure-making association that you meet three or four guys and you end up having a beer with them and talking, and they start sharing their lives with you right there. You begin to talk to them about what your experience has been and what's given you hope, and why you enjoy things like fishing. Their lives may begin to be revolutionized simply by discussion about fishing that's not rooted in the sacred- secular dichotomy, and not rooted in the "over God" who has got us afraid and trying to make us religious androids.

**JMF:** I've seen these kits where you'll go through the videotape and the lessons and all about relational evangelism, and it talks about how to go out and make friends with people. From the outset, the only reason you're making friends with these people when you've targeted them is because they need the gospel, so I'm going to befriend them so that I can keep working with them until the right point comes where I can present the gospel. To me that's artificial – at least this is how it strikes me. It's an artificial friendship, that you're making only because you think I need to get the gospel to them, therefore I'll make friends with them in order to get the opportunity to give them the gospel.

**CBK:** "Let's fake the relationship so I can maybe get Jesus to do something."

**JMF:** Exactly.

**WPY:** How many of us have been involved with somebody inviting us over to their house so that they can really tell us what the agenda is?

**JMF:** Exactly.

**CBK:** It's not fundraising this time – it's evangelism this time.

**JMF:** You're a project. It's like you're an insurance salesman. In order to survive and make enough money to get by, you always have to think of everybody as a potential sale. You always have that in the back of your mind.

**CBK:** Once you sell the insurance to them, that's the end of it. [But] the goal of evangelism is discipleship and inclusion in the community.

**JMF:** If people matter, if they are real and they matter, and having right relationships is the goal of life, then, as you were saying, Paul, everything is evangelism in that sense.

**WPY:** Absolutely.

**JMF:** Our very definition of evangelism...the end is the relationship. It's okay to have friends for the sake of friendships. It's okay to be friendly and be friends, because people matter. They're worth being friends with.

**WPY:** For their sake.

**JMF:** Peter said, "Be ready always to give an answer for the hope that lies within you."

**CBK:** That's when somebody asks you about the hope that lies in you.

**JMF:** Exactly. Live such a life so that people might even ask...

**CBK:** How often does that happen?

**JMF:** Do we have to make every friendship for the sake of...as though this person is going to go to hell if we don't get them saved? We've got to find a sneaky way to get the gospel. Can we trust God to be who he is for them and enjoy them as a person without having this constant thing in the back of my mind... "when can I work in the gospel? How am I going to work in..." Aren't we being Christ to them in the friendship itself?

**CBK:** That is the point. We are train stops in people's lives. With family, the train stops more often than not. We're free to love them and to be there for them. Jesus is the evangelist, and the Holy Spirit is the redeeming genius. We're called into what _they_ are doing. They are the ones that are burdened for the whole world to come to see the truth. Not us. They're using us to be part of that process in people's lives. We get to be free to love a person for their sake.

I don't need to have a fully worked out agenda for the man on the park bench. I'm free to care for him in this moment. If it goes somewhere else, then I'll follow and see where it goes. But it's a good thing to care for someone...so, okay, this man needs food. That's fantastic! Help him get food. It may be that the Lord wants me to do something a little bit more. I don't know! But the gift itself is for him. It's for his blessing, his benefit. The Holy Spirit can interpret that.

**JMF:** As we live out of other-centeredness, outside of ourselves (which we do maybe two or three seconds every day). During those two or three seconds when we're thinking in a non-self-centered way and Christ is living in us, isn't that the way we are? In other words, it's natural to care about somebody and to help where you can and be present for someone in their need as we're able.

**WPY:** Because of our union with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are by nature lovers of people. I think that's what is true about us. We just don't know it. And as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. If you think you're not, then you're going to function like you're not.

A lot of times our struggle with the methodologies of evangelism is because they're not natural to our nature, which is to love. How many classes did you take on being a father and loving your child, and making sure that the methodology was right? It's not that we don't get help along the way, but there is something that that child brings to us by virtue of who we are now. I am a father, they are my child. I do grow in that, but there's not a methodology about it that makes me more valuable to that son or daughter.

I love the idea that there is a God who has climbed into our inabilities and joined us in that with all of their ability to be present, to be kind. You look at the fruit of the Spirit; it's a description of God. It's not commodities that God has that he dispenses when you ask for them or need them. This is God. This is the fruit of the Spirit, and the Spirit is of the same nature and character as the Father and the Son – kindness, gentleness, you know? When have those things been a part of a methodology of evangelism?

**CBK:** Everybody wants to be known, and everybody wants to be cared for. When you know and care for someone, you're going to have conversations with them. When Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf coast and just ripped our coast completely apart, we were all watching on TV in Jackson until our electricity went off. I remember driving to the Coliseum in Jackson, Mississippi... I don't know what I was doing, but I was driving by the Coliseum the day before Katrina hit. This is some 180 miles from the coast. There were 200 cherry picker trucks lined up in the parking lot from all over the country. People had taken their vacation time, the companies were donating the trucks, they were lined up two days before Katrina hit. The minute the storm was over, those guys were going straight down Route 49 to our coast.

I was having a conversation during that same period about someone who was asking me what I thought about the emerging church. That was the same thing to me, when you said "what about evangelism." I want to know, where does the origin for that kind of concern and that kind of camaraderie brotherhood come from? That's not evil. That's not coming from the devil. There are some people who drove as far as Oregon and some probably from Canada. Now our guys have done the same thing for them – it's part of a tradition to help each other...

So you want to talk about evangelism, you want to talk about the emerging church? The first thing we need to do is to begin to identify the Jesus who is already everywhere anyway and already at work. Because I want to talk to those men, and I want to say thank you, as a son of Mississippi, thank you for taking your vacation time, thank your families for helping us out. Then I want to say to them, that's beautiful, that's sacrificial, that's other-centered. That sounds just like the Father, Son, and Spirit.

I want to approach those guys in that honor and dignity. That opens up an entirely new world as opposed to "Okay, we've got 200 guys, they're not going to be in Mississippi again, let's go blitzkrieg and make sure that they pray a prayer so that they can get out of where they are into Jesus, and at least now they're saved when they go home." Who's the joke on there? Who is blind there? What is really happening? We've got all these discussions about the emerging church, but if that's not the emerging church, I don't want to be a part of one.

**WPY:** You end up treating people like targets. You lose the value of their humanity.

**JMF:** Exactly.

**WPY:** How many funeral services have you been to – and unfortunately I've been to one recently for a young man who was my youngest son's best friend, who was killed in a dirt bike accident just a couple weeks ago and who was a member of our family. We grieve him deeply. But well-meaning brothers and sisters in our family conversation, they want to use that time to evangelize people because they know that people's hearts are sensitive. I'm thinking because their hearts are sensitive I want to treat them with a greater degree of respect and kindness than they've ever known. To turn this event into a marketing opportunity, into a commercial, I think is devastating and short-sighted.

Let's enter into each other's pain and sorrow. The young people, the generation that's coming up, that was in the middle of this loss, they showed up in a way that a lot of the adults didn't know how to, because they knew about the value of being in the middle of it with each other. That became why people would ask the question, "How come this is different? What is this about the celebration of someone's life? What is this hope that is not just so bent by grief?"

Then it becomes a part of the expression of our lives together, because we actually value those people because we know the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all over them to begin with, and values them. Evangelism is no longer a methodology or a part of our spirituality or anything like that. It becomes an expression. We get to treat people like we know they matter, because of the way we've been treated because we found out we mattered. Tell the story of the seminary student and the farmer. I think that has total application to the conversation at this point.

**CBK:** This happened to me years ago. I was going to speak somewhere in the Midwest. I remember that it was really, really flat. A seminary student picked me up at the airport, and we get into the car, and we go into the university, and there are farmers everywhere. I said, "What are you going to do, are you a junior or a senior?"

He said, "I'm a senior."

I said, "What are you going to do when you graduate?"

He says, "I'm going to go to seminary."

So I said, "Are you going to be a missionary or a pastor?"

He said, "No, not a missionary, I'll probably be a pastor."

Just about that time a huge John Deere tractor made a turn in the field right by the road and went back out. I said, "Well, you see this man on the tractor. Have you ever thought about how Jesus relates to him in his farming? He spends 60 or 70 hours a week on the tractor, so the whole family network is all about farming."

He said, "I never thought about that." I will never forget the look on his face, because he looked at me like I had that third eye going, "Where did you come from? What kind of question is that?"

I said, "This is an important question. More than likely you're going to have a whole church full of farmers and their families who give their entire lives to farming. So the important question is how does Jesus relate to the farmer?"

He said, "I just don't know, I never thought about it."

I said, "When you get home tonight and you get ready to eat your supper, what do you do before you take your first bite?"

He said, "I thank the Lord for the food."

I said, "Why are you thanking the Lord for the food that the farmer grew?"

He said, "You're not saying I'm not supposed to thank the Lord?"

I said, "No, thank the Lord. What I'm trying to help you see is that your prayer already knows how Jesus relates to the farmer; you just don't have a theology that will allow you to see that your prayer already knows."

He says, "I think I'm getting it..."

I said, "In thanking God for the farmer, thanking God for the food that the farmer grew, you're saying the farmer is participating in a provision that's coming from the Father, Son, and Spirit to you. You are recognizing in your prayer that that man is included as a participant. But you don't have a theology that will allow you to approach him in that way."

Now to take that story and extend it to this conversation, he's going to go knock on his door and pretend that he's outside and trying to get him to jump through the hoops to get inside. Once he gets inside, because of the sacred-secular dichotomy, he's going to try to get him to be less of a farmer and more of a Christian who is doing these things over in the "sacred" world.

No wonder nobody wants to be in the middle of that. We don't even see who the farmer really is. We can't treat him with the proper dignity or his family. If we did, he'd probably knock the door down to come learn more about this, because nobody else is telling me a thing about that. Everybody else is treating me like I'm just a farmer. These are huge questions beyond that practical level. When we see who people really are and whose lives they've been included in and what life is coming out of them, or trying to, we begin to relate to them in that and with the light of Jesus. People want to know about that. The farmer wants to know.

I talk to Marines. I've had a chance to speak to Marines at one of the bases in the United States. We had a long discussion, and I said to them, "Before we get into a long discussion about this, I want to say one thing to you. You are concerned to protect, and you have a passion in your soul to protect and to create space for freedom for life. That comes from the Father, Son, and Spirit. I'm talking about the burden that you bear in your soul. What motivates you to work and to protect and to brave the seas and go into situations where you're being moved by a love for freedom and life? I want you to know: that has its origin in the Father, Son, and Spirit."

I'm sitting in the room with the Marines, telling the story, and they're all crying. Not all of them, most of them (big guys), because they know I've spoken to what's motivating their being. Now I'm trying to help them see who that is. You don't think they want to be in the conversation? That Sunday night they bring their wives and little boys to the church to have a conversation.

**WPY:** How different is that from me having a methodology of evangelism that's fundamentally, for a lot of us, motivated by guilt, fear that we're not going to be doing something [i.e., evangelism] that God required of us, guilt that we'd end up with somebody's blood on our hands because we didn't [evangelize], and then we treat everybody like a target – not because they're human beings who matter, but because we're still trying to deal with our criteria of what it means to be successful spiritually, and it's motivated by all the wrong things.

**JMF:** You can take that and make it artificial, if you turn it into a "here's what you say." It needs to be real in order for it to...

**CBK:** This is where it forces us to be real, because what we're really doing in evangelism is we're saying, hey, come walk with us. We believe Jesus is leading us in life, so come walk with us and do this with us. We don't have it all worked out. It is what we do, see? Come walk with us.

If that's not what we're saying in the pulpit, preaching, teaching – evangelism is "come walk with us" – what are we saying? Come jump through a hoop and get through something? We're trying to walk with Jesus and understand him, broken as we are and blind as we are. We're trying to participate in that life. Come join us, come walk with us. We see it in you. We want to help, we want to encourage you. We're going to encourage you in broken ways. Just walk with us.

That's what Jesus says: "Come, walk with me. Follow me." The disciples and John the Baptist come up behind him and say, "Rabbi, where are you staying?" He turns and says, "You want to know where I'm dwelling?" (That's the word used, I don't know why they translate "staying.") Jesus says, "You want to know where I'm staying? Where I dwell? Walk with me and you will see."

Evangelism, in its true sense, is nothing more than an invitation to come share life. This is it, come share life with us. Walk together. That is so much different, it is so very different than approaching a person [with the attitude of] "you are outside; I have to manipulate you to get you to jump through the hoops." (I was taught they were going to change in two years, but I don't know that right now.) You've got to say it this way and jump through these hoops. I've got to figure out a way to get you to do that when you don't want to do that, and I don't even really want to do it, because I know you and we play golf together. But now I've got to treat you like we're not friends and I've got to get you to do this...

It's very artificial. But it comes down to, are we inviting people to walk with us in our lives?

**WPY:** The struggle that's involved is conversation, period. As soon as you start to talk about evangelism, you almost always have to go to methodology. As soon as you do that, it's no longer dynamic and organic and relational. It's no longer me in the midst of my world loving the people who are in it and allowing that love to generate whatever the conversations are. For a lot of believers, they don't even know who they are here. Therefore, having a methodology becomes the in-between step, to thinking that the methodology defines what a believer is supposed to do, right? Until they know that they're loved, this is not going to be a dynamic and organic and relational thing, either. It's like saying, well, now our new method of evangelism is to love somebody.

**JMF:** Exactly. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had this great quote where he said, "Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross. He waited until one of them turned to him."

**CBK:** He knew that he was going to meet them on the other side in just a few minutes.

**JMF:** Meet both of them in just a few minutes.

**CBK:** They're both going to die. What's the other thief going to meet on the other side?

**JMF:** It's a lesson for us.

**CBK:** I've got several stories. I wish we had time to tell, maybe another time, but one I was in, I think I was in Kona... Some of the people I was teaching had done an evangelism class or something like that. The guy that was teaching, if I remember correctly, was from California, maybe Southern California. He had told them, "Here's what I want you to do." Or she had, "I want you to get together in groups of three and I want you to pray and ask the Lord, 'What do you want us to do?' Just pray. Lord, show us." If he doesn't say anything, just get back together and pray. There's no pressure, do whatever.

In this one story that I heard, they got together and prayed, and they said one of them saw a girl standing behind a counter with a blue shirt on, another one said her name was Sarah, and that was about it. The other one said something about finances, the finances are going to be okay. That's all they knew. They didn't even know where she was or anything. So they decided to go for a coffee down in the town, and they were walking around in the shops or whatever and there's a girl standing behind the counter with a blue shirt on with her nametag of Sarah.

They're like, wow...they were tripped out a little bit. (I'm sure I'm getting some of this story wrong, because it's been awhile, but the heart of it was there.) They walked over, and they said, "Are you Sarah?" She said, "Yes." They said, "We were praying for you this morning, and the Lord told us to tell you that your finances are going to be okay." That's all they said. I don't even know what happened next.

But I know if that happened to me, I would want to know, okay, are you all going to be praying again tomorrow? I've got a whole checkbook here. That drew her into their shared life. That's what evangelism is. It's not making somebody jump through a hoop; it's helping them be drawn into this life with us when we ourselves are struggling to live. That's very much more relational and dynamic. It means it can have faces...it's an infinite variety of ways it can happen in any given day. If we're walking with Jesus and we're saying we want to participate, then we're just drawing people into that.

**WPY:** The greatest evangelist ever was Jesus. He says, "I don't do anything but what I see the Father do," and sometimes that means walking away and sometimes that means saying, "What do I have to do with you? I came for Israel." Sometimes it means saying a word. It happens within the context of real life.

**JMF:** And the real life that comes to you... **t** he people you cross paths with.

**WPY:** Absolutely. It is a part of our relationships. It's like, "okay, so now we've got to come up with small groups of relationships in order to validate the idea of relationships, right?"

You know what? We're in them. Just look around in your life. They're all over. Love the people who are in your world. Allow the questions and everything to come up in the context of that. Know who you are inside of our relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and express that life. Let the Holy Spirit enter this adventure and allow you to participate with what Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are trying to do in their love for the people that you love because they care about the things you care about.

**JMF:** Well, thanks again for being here.

**CBK:** Good to be back, good to see you.

**WPY:** Always a pleasure.

back to table of contents

## About the Publisher...

Grace Communion International is a Christian denomination with about 50,000 members, worshiping in about 900 congregations in almost 100 nations and territories. We began in 1934 and our main office is in North Carolina. In the United States, we are members of the National Association of Evangelicals and similar organizations in other nations. We welcome you to visit our website at www.gci.org.

If you want to know more about the gospel of Jesus Christ, we offer help. First, we offer weekly worship services in hundreds of congregations worldwide. Perhaps you'd like to visit us. A typical worship service includes songs of praise, a message based on the Bible, and opportunity to meet people who have found Jesus Christ to be the answer to their spiritual quest. We try to be friendly, but without putting you on the spot. We do not expect visitors to give offerings—there's no obligation. You are a guest.

To find a congregation, write to one of our offices, phone us or visit our website. If we do not have a congregation near you, we encourage you to find another Christian church that teaches the gospel of grace.

We also offer personal counsel. If you have questions about the Bible, salvation or Christian living, we are happy to talk. If you want to discuss faith, baptism or other matters, a pastor near you can discuss these on the phone or set up an appointment for a longer discussion. We are convinced that Jesus offers what people need most, and we are happy to share the good news of what he has done for all humanity. We like to help people find new life in Christ, and to grow in that life. Come and see why we believe it's the best news there could be!

Our work is funded by members of the church who donate part of their income to support the gospel. Jesus told his disciples to share the good news, and that is what we strive to do in our literature, in our worship services, and in our day-to-day lives.

If this e-book has helped you and you want to pay some expenses, all donations are gratefully welcomed, and in several nations, are tax-deductible. If you can't afford to give anything, don't worry about it. It is our gift to you. To make a donation online, go to www.gci.org/participate/donate.

Thank you for letting us share what we value most — Jesus Christ. The good news is too good to keep it to ourselves.

See our website for hundreds of articles, locations of our churches, addresses in various nations, audio and video messages, and much more.

Grace Communion International  
3129 Whitehall Park Dr.

Charlotte, NC 28273-3335

1-800-423-4444

www.gci.org

### You're Included...

We talk with leading Trinitarian theologians about the good news that God loves you, wants you, and includes you in Jesus Christ. Most programs are about 28 minutes long. Our guests have included:

Ray Anderson, Fuller Theological Seminary

Douglas A. Campbell, Duke Divinity School

Elmer Colyer, U. of Dubuque Theological Seminary

Gordon Fee, Regent College

Trevor Hart, University of St. Andrews

George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary

Jeff McSwain, Reality Ministries

Paul Louis Metzger, Multnomah University

Paul Molnar, St. John's University

Cherith Fee Nordling, Antioch Leadership Network

Andrew Root, Luther Seminary

Alan Torrance, University of St. Andrews

Robert T. Walker, Edinburgh University

N.T. Wright, University of St. Andrews

William P. Young, author of _The Shack_

Programs are available free for viewing and downloading at www.youreincluded.org.

### Speaking of Life...

Dr. Joseph Tkach, president of Grace Communion International, comments each week, giving a biblical perspective on how we live in the light of God's love. Most programs are about three minutes long – available in video, audio, and text. Go to www.speakingoflife.org.

back to table of contents

##

Grace Communion Seminary

Ministry based on the life and love of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

Grace Communion Seminary serves the needs of people engaged in Christian service who want to grow deeper in relationship with our Triune God and to be able to more effectively serve in the church.

Why study at Grace Communion Seminary?

 Worship: to love God with all your mind.

 Service: to help others apply truth to life.

 Practical: a balanced range of useful topics for ministry.

 Trinitarian theology: a survey of theology with the merits of a Trinitarian perspective. We begin with the question, "Who is God?" Then, "Who are we in relationship to God?" In this context, "How then do we serve?"

 Part-time study: designed to help people who are already serving in local congregations. There is no need to leave your current ministry. Full-time students are also welcome.

 Flexibility: your choice of master's level continuing education courses or pursuit of a degree: Master of Pastoral Studies or Master of Theological Studies.

 Affordable, accredited study: Everything can be done online.

For more information, go to www.gcs.edu. Grace Communion Seminary is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission, www.deac.org. The Accrediting Commission is listed by the U.S. Department of Education as a nationally recognized accrediting agency.

back to table of contents

## Ambassador College of Christian Ministry

Want to better understand God's Word? Want to know the Triune God more deeply? Want to share more joyously in the life of the Father, Son and Spirit? Want to be better equipped to serve others?

Among the many resources that Grace Communion International offers are the training and learning opportunities provided by ACCM. This quality, well-structured Christian Ministry curriculum has the advantage of being very practical and flexible. Students may study at their own pace, without having to leave home to undertake full-time study.

This denominationally recognized program is available for both credit and audit study. At minimum cost, this online Diploma program will help students gain important insights and training in effective ministry service. Students will also enjoy a rich resource for personal study that will enhance their understanding and relationship with the Triune God.

Diploma of Christian Ministry classes provide an excellent introductory course for new and lay pastors. Pastor General Dr. Joseph Tkach said, "We believe we have achieved the goal of designing Christian ministry training that is practical, accessible, interesting, and doctrinally and theologically mature and sound. This program provides an ideal foundation for effective Christian ministry."

For more information, go to www.ambascol.org

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

back to table of contents

