Guilt-edged pages?

While ploughing my way through The Shack¹ recently (and it was a matter of ploughing my way!), a thought occurred to me about the dynamic at work in our culture and in our sinful hearts—the dynamic that generates books like this one and makes them such big sellers.

What I have in mind is the impatience that our generation of Christians has with the idea that the principle, foundational, authoritative way in which God speaks to us and in which we meet the Lord Jesus is in the pages of Scripture. When I read the narrator of The Shack disparaging the idea of “God … in a book … with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges?” (p. 66) and the character representing the Holy Spirit promising instead that “you will learn to hear my thoughts in yours” (p. 195), I’m not hearing a radical new idea; I’m hearing one of the great clichés of my generation. Echoes come to mind of last season’s Christian blockbuster Captivating, with its disparaging dismissal of “that infamous icon, ‘The Proverbs 31 Woman’”, who is blamed for “sanctify[ing] the shame most women live under … that sense that you are a failure as a woman” (p. 6) and its advice that the way to hear God speak is to go to a quiet place, put on some headphones and listen to a song from The Phantom of the Opera and then “write down what you hear God say in the depths of your heart” (p. 126).

There’s a way of expressing this sort of thing that can sound so innocent—like the godly longing of every Christian for “a closer walk with God”, like the panting of the deer in Psalm 42, like the longing of the pure in heart to see God face to face. But there is all the difference in the world between the godly longing for closer communion with the true God and the consumerist demand for a private, lightweight, convenient god we can ‘listen to’ on our own terms—like an iPod nano.

It’s no accident that the spirituality of The Shack and Captivating offers, at the heart of their appeal, an escape from the ‘guilt-edged pages’ of the Bible and the ‘sanctified shame’ of the Proverbs 31 woman. But by bypassing or minimizing the guilt-inducing, shame-evoking realities of the Bible, the spirituality of books like these ends up bypassing or minimizing realities that lie at the heart of the glory of the cross, and at the heart of real Christian faith, hope and joy.

David Wells expresses it perfectly:

The assumption that we have direct access to the sacred through the self rests on a pagan assumption: that the Creator and the creation are related to one another pantheistically. God, it is assumed, is found within the self. He is naturally discovered in the depths of our being. This speaks to both our understanding of sin—that no rupture has taken place—and to our thoughts about creation, that he who makes and that which is made are the two parts of one reality … Down this road there is supposedly access, but there is in fact no reconciliation. There is no reconciliation because there has been no estrangement. The glory of Christian faith is the grace that has bridged the chasm sin has created, the heights and depths of God’s saving love expressed in the person of Christ. This new spirituality claims access but has none of the grace and power of the gospel. (The Courage to be Protestant, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2008, p. 169).

When we decide that we are going to go looking for God inside the self, we should not be surprised if we end up finding a reassuringly self-shaped god. But when we go searching in Scripture for the true God, the God we find (or rather, the God we are found by) comes to us in a revelation infinitely more guilt-inducing, but also infinitely more gracious and glorious.

¹ For more on The Shack, see Paul Grimmond’s excellent article in this month’s Briefing and Tim Challies’ comprehensive review which seeks to respond biblically to its errors.