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"The Shack" Author Interview

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“The Shack” is the talk of the evangelical Christian community right now. Originally self-published by the author and intended solely as a gift for his six children, the fictional account of a troubled man’s meeting with God in an abandoned shack in the Oregon wilderness is now number 8 at Amazon and just today hit number one on The New York Times paperback trade fiction list.

But does the diaglogue between “God” and the lead character “Mack” subtlely introduce theological error regarding the authority of Scripture, the nature of the Trinity, the dual nature of Jesus Christ as God/Man, the exclusivity of Jesus Christ as the only Savior, the wrath of God against sin – especially in terms of what Jesus actually accomplished on the cross, and Eastern/New Age Mysticism? Wayne Jacobsen, a collaborator on the book along with the author, William Paul Young, has responded to these allegations in a recent post at his Lifestream blog.

William Paul Young, the author of The Shack, will be my guest for the full first hour of The Paul Edwards Program on Monday, June 2.

Ben Stein’s on the money

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If you filled up you gas tank in the last four days, the tally just might be enough to convince you that Ben Stein is on to something when he says it’s time for a radical rethinking of our habits as they relate to energy (specifically oil) consumption:

Gasoline is unimaginably important in our lives in the United States. Without gas in virtually limitless supply, and at prices we could afford, American life would change. We could no longer afford to live so far from one another and from our jobs. We could no longer afford to cruise in cars incomparably larger than those of our counterparts in Europe and Asia. In a way, we would stop being America as we know it.

Maybe this would be a good thing. After all, do we really need to have a 6,000-pound S.U.V. take a 100-pound high school student across town to buy a Diet Coke? Do we really need cars so big that they have flat-screen televisions for the children in the back? Do we really need to pour so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? And it’s certainly not great to belch out immense quanta of carbon monoxide, a deadly poison.

Stein’s New York Times piece offers some compelling advice for dealing with the gas crunch. Read it.

Edward Tingley on the fraud of atheistic skepticism

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Philosophy professor Edward Tingley on how agnostics and atheists are not true skeptics:

All of the people who say that they are “atheists through skepticism, because they see no evidence that God exists,” are patently unthinking people, since by virtue of turning skeptic, no one has ever done anything–employed any logic, gathered any evidence, found any way forward–to reach a conclusion about whether God exists. So these atheists have not reached a conclusion; they have made a commitment.

What the scientific skeptic ought to say is this: “Having examined the hard evidence, we declare that route to be exhausted. The only kind of evidence for God’s existence that counts will have to be of some other kind–if there is any other kind.”

That would be reasonable. And it would be a fine thing for a skeptic to doubt that there is any evidence besides the standard, demonstrable kind–and there are skeptics who do so. But all those who, just because they doubt it, run home with the question answered are frauds like their agnostic brethren if they still call themselves scientists.

HT: Joe Carter: The Evangelical Oupost