Independence from God Theme Analysis

The Shack tells the story of Mackenzie Allen “Mack” Phillips, who, after his daughter Missy is brutally murdered on a family camping trip, bitterly turns away from God. Everything changes when Mack eventually returns to the shack where his daughter was killed and finds himself face to face with three surprising manifestations of the Christian Trinity: God is a black woman named Papa, the Holy Spirit is an Asian woman named Sarayu, and Jesus is a Middle-Eastern carpenter in keeping with biblical tradition. Together, Sarayu, Papa, and Jesus teach Mack that one of the core reasons he cannot trust God or understand His ways is because all of humanity has chosen independence from God. This choice, the novel argues—to center their own judgments and rules instead of trusting in God’s—has come at a great cost to human beings: they can no longer see the purpose behind anything they perceive as bad or evil, and, it follows, can no longer trust that God is able to create purpose from everything.

In the novel, God has given human beings the choice of whether or not to trust his love because love of God is only meaningful if it comes freely. Evil and suffering, Papa tells Mack, exist specifically because of this independence—they arise when humans actively choose to turn away from God’s plan. For example, Papa didn’t cause Missy to die—that was a choice her killer made. Papa has helped Mack to learn much as a result of Missy’s death, but Papa explains that just because she is able to create purpose out of tragedy does not mean that she causes or wants these things to happen.

Sophia, a manifestation of God’s wisdom, then challenges Mack’s judgment of evil by asking how far back the punishment of Missy’s killer should go: should it extend to the killer’s father, and his father before him, all the way back to Adam and even back to God? It follows that judgments of evil are actually judgments of God for creating and not intervening in human life. Furthermore, Sarayu, Papa, and Jesus teach Mack that the judgments he has used to determine good and evil in his own life are predicated on subjective beliefs. Making these judgments is just another way of choosing independence from God, the novel argues, because it puts humans in a position of authority over one another—an authority that should be reserved for God.

The human ideas of rights, laws, and even the rules of the scripture are all human-created and human-enforced laws created in response to evil, which nonetheless divide people and keep them from trusting judgment to God alone. Judgments make people feel superior and justified in violence towards others. Relying on these rules, then, allows humans to judge and punish one another with impunity. Mack, for example, determines right and wrong based on his own internal value system and how things affect him personally. In this way, humans who try to judge right and wrong for themselves instead of leaving that judgment to God make themselves arbiters of good and evil.

Ultimately The Shack argues that because people must be able to freely choose to love God, they also have the option to commit evil acts. It is important to recognize, however, that such acts are not part of God’s plan. And although humans may create rules and exact judgment to cope with such evil, these are simply another way of declaring dangerous independence from God. This sense of independence keeps humans from trusting that God is present in dark times and will find a sense of purpose in tragedies, even those he does not cause. God, ironically, has given people the choice for independence so that they may actively choose to put their entire faith in God.