"Preach the Word,

“It’s the feel-good novel about faith that millions of people love. And its warm and fuzzy depiction of God the Father is cherished by millions of Evangelical Christians who’ve embraced it as though it were gospel. This mass adoration has helped seemingly cement William Paul Young’s The Shack to the stratosphere of numerous best-sellers list--where it's remained for more than 100 weeks--a claim no other book can make. Yet it is infused with counterfeit Christianity, says author James De Young in his new book, Burning Down ‘The Shack’: How the 'Christian' Bestseller is Deceiving Millions, and its depiction of God the Father as an African woman who bore the scars of Calvary with Jesus Christ is just one example of its many dangerous deceptions.

De Young isn’t only a New Testament Language and Literature professor at Western Seminary in Portland, Ore., he’s also a former longtime colleague of Paul Young, and was his Portland-area neighbor when Young wrote The Shack. ... While writing The Shack, Young, a victim of child molestation, had recently embraced ‘universal reconciliation’-- belief identified as far back as the sixth century as heresy--which emphasizes that Jesus’ loving nature renders him incapable of eternally damning people. ... [De Young warns that the errors in The Shack] ‘strike a dagger into the heart of the gospel.’ ... ‘When I carefully read The Shack in January 2008, I was dismayed to find universalism still embedded, deeply and subtly, in it,’ De Young recalls.