"The Shack" Movie: 5 Biblical and Theological Reasons William Paul Young is right and two thousand years of orthodoxy is wrong; Part 4

March 3rd, my wife and I went to see "The Shack." It was indeed the best movie I have ever seen. It dealt with the MOST difficult subject that can ever be tackled; where is God in the midst of horrible evil. I am not a movie critic. I am an "amateur theologian" who has spent thirty years examining the gospel and theological views. I have therefore come up with five reasons that "The Shack" is biblical and theologically correct, while all of evangelical and orthodox Christianity is terribly wrong.

The Five Reasons:

1. God has always wanted to have a personal relationship with humanity from the beginning forward.
2. God created humanity the way it is, and in spite of that declared that it was "very good."
3. Jesus overthrew the legal-constitutional focus of scripture in favor of seeing it as the redemptive narrative.
4. God's ultimate purpose in creation was redemption.
5. Humanities pathology results from mortality, and the ability to judge what is right and wrong

Reason Three: Jesus overthrew the legal-constitutional focus of scripture in favor of seeing it as the redemptive narrative.

This is the most important point. Reason 3, makes it possible to see that William Paul Young has a much better understanding of the gospel than most. Jesus had two important focal messages with respect to the scripture. 1) It was completely about Him and redemption. 2) He redefined the phrase word of God from Torah, (first five books of the Old Testament,) to gospel (the message of redemption) and to Himself as the living gospel or the gospel made flesh. In so doing, for the New Covenant age, he made the focus change from a legal-constitutional reading for the Old Covenant, to a SOLELY redemptive reading for the New Covenant. I have proven this over and over in many of the other blog posts. I will not elaborate here for the sake of brevity. If you want to see the proof of this claim, simply go to the search function on the blog and type in "word of God" or "redemptive narrative."

First, let me establish once, and for all that God's purpose in creation was redemption. Ephesians 1:4-8 NKJV  "just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love,  (5)  having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will,  (6)  to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.  (7)  In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace  (8)  which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence," This is the proof text for the correctness of Wm Paul Young's theology. 

Look at the underlined passages. The first one before the foundation of the world tells us that things mentioned in the passage predate creation. Paul is saying that God had purposed redemption before he created anything. The second underlined passage, to the praise of the glory of His grace tells us the why. Finally, He made the grace abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence. This was because he knew that grace would lead us to loving him, and loving him would lead to obedience. So first and foremost, the grace stance that Young portrays in his book and in the Movie is very biblical indeed.  It is Pauline to use a pun.

Further under the new covenant, it is peace with the Father, Romans 5:1, that prepares the saint to have a supernatural change of heart that is the direct result of the gospel of grace. I realize that in tackling reason 3 I have also touched on reason four but as I wrote earlier in the last post, these reasons overlap and cannot be properly handled without mentioning them time and again.

The bottom line is this, when one uses the presupposition of redemption in forming the hermeneutic, there is a big shift in the message and focus of scripture. Jesus said that the entire scripture was to point to Him for redemptive purposes. This is stated clearly in John 5:39-40 and Luke 24:27; 43-45. Young's emphasis of grace beyond judgment fits in very well. Finally, even the Apostle James tells us that mercy triumphs over judgment.

It baffles me why theologians that name the name of Jesus Christ reject his teaching on scripture interpretation. They insist on returning to a legal constitutional reading, and thereby make the redemptive reading, an ineffective step child.