Article Sidebar
Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
God, the Christ and the spirit in William P. Young’s bestseller The shack seen from from a Pauline and Johannine perspective
Abstract
consists mainly of two sections. The fi rst section considers the issue of reviewers of The shack often assessing its religious legitimacy and the value of its message by means of critically questioning
its adherence to texts in the Christian Bible. The second section focuses on the accusation that, dogmatically seen, The shack’s narrative point of view is heresy, especially because of its nonstandard
view of Christian dogma with regard to God Triune. The aim of the article is to argue that a great deal of commonality exists between the author of The shack and both Pauline and Johannine mysticism. With regard to their God talk, the author and these biblical writers express more of a
present immanent communion with the transcendental God than an expectancy of authenticity that still lies in the future and exists outside humankind’s immanent time and space. It is as if they draw the end time into the sphere of the here and now by passionately talking about communion with God as a process of the future, inhaled by the present. By doing so, the God-threesome meet wounded humankind in a ‘shack’, not in the ‘church’ as such or ‘Scripture’ as such as if God could be placed in a box.
