This is the Faith Debate, a theological round table gab fest with the Mix Master as the Master of Ceremonies and the notorious Triple B, the Big Bridge Builder. Can we build it? Yes, we can. The Faith Debate is a free-for-all forum where faith community leaders wrestle over the truth. In less than 30 minutes, learn more about what really matters than others learn in a month. Are you ready for a clash of ideas? Are you ready for the sound of freedom? Let's get ready to rumble. Let's get ready to rumble. Ha! Yeah! In this corner, weighing in with a master divinity from Reformed Theological Seminary, the Fate Debate Master of Ceremonies, Troy Skinner. We got a moron here. Is that it? And in this corner, weighing in as a pastor, teacher, and founder of Bridges, connecting needs and resources in the local community. Ooh, mama. The notorious big bridge builder, John Sweiser. Now I'm just getting warmed up. The runaway bestseller, The Shack. has a good setup, it's emotionally tugging, easy to connect with personally, wrestling with questions that we all grapple with, at least sometimes, through the use of a simple plot with simple characters. The author attempts to reveal his answers to compelling and challenging questions. Why is there evil in the world? Where is God when there's tragedy? What is the meaning and purpose to life? And these answers have led some Christians onto a battlefield in a sort of civil war. With the faith debate for a fourth time in a four-part series is the author of The Shack, William Paul Young, known as Paul to his friends. So Jonathan and I will be calling him William for the duration of the recording session. One of four generations of Williams, none of who go by William. Is that right? Okay. Well, we all go by our middle name. Interesting. I noticed that promotionally, you don't even like to spell your first name. It's W-M period. So that has always been the standard abbreviation for William. So, you know, it was put on the first manuscript as a joke for my kids. In fact, the first manuscript, it said The Shack by Mackenzie Allen Phillips with William P. Young. And, you know, because I didn't expect it to be published. So the William part stuck. And I'd have friends call me up and go, hey, Paul, have you read this book by this William Young? I mean, he thinks like you. He's crazy, that guy. Have you read his book? So let me ask, selfishly, I've got a couple of questions. When I first found out that we were going to have an opportunity to have you on the show, there were two questions very related to each other that I wanted to be able to ask you because I haven't seen anybody else interact with these questions. And I was like, ooh, I have a chance to ask him. So there are a couple of famous people in your book that you mention. You mention Bill Moyers, uh... who and for the uninitiated also forgotten who he is a bill moyers uh... uh... is is famous for among other things for being the host of pbs is faith and reason uh... lawyers was an ordained baptist minister and he has since described himself as neither wholly a believer nor wholly a skeptic uh... and yet uh... he's described as a favorite anna and a brilliant man who expresses the truth with unusual with unusual clarity uh... within the pages of the shack so i think it's fair to say that the bill moyers would be a self-professing partial skeptic and yet he's held up in the shack is somebody holding the truth and so i'd like to kind of get your your take on that and my father's gonna have to do with uh... bruce coburn well all that i'm so glad you're gonna break over into that that's a great but uh... and in the book lawyers that simply on the t.v. that uh... that uh... mckenzie's watching when he's after he's hit his head on the on the ice so it's it's not like uh... there's any big deal about bill moyer i just appreciate how hard he works at its craft and how much he he really tried to to get to the core of of something so i just thought i'd throw that in and and i think i was watching bill moyer when i was working on on uh... this section anyway okay well i i will say caught my attention And again, because of the adjectives that were used in the book when he was described as a quote-unquote favorite, a quote-unquote brilliant man, a quote-unquote truth-with-unusual-clarity guy, I was like, Bill Moyers, really? From my Christian perspective, I don't think that he expresses the truth with unusual clarity. So that caught my attention. anyway uh... maybe i've watched him a lot more than you can okay uh... bruce coburn uh... and get again in case you know somebody listening doesn't know who bruce coburn is singer-songwriter and he shows up recurringly in the book either uh... and and maybe more than i even noticed he shows up either by name or by song on at least four pages of the shack and if you're scoring at home i noticed it on pages thirty nine one eighteen one thirty four and one forty four uh... what's the reason for such a prominent role for mister coburn in the book Uh, because he's my favorite artist. Um, I, I love Bruce's work. I think he's one of the best, uh, lyricists on the planet. And, uh, he's definitely one of the best guitarists. Um, but I've, uh, I've followed him since the 1970s. I think 76, I think what might've been his first, first album, he's got 32 albums or something like that. And, uh, it's been very prolific, well-known internationally, much more than, than, uh, in the West. uh... and pretty much every genre music so uh... how well well how familiar are you with his his take on spiritual things You know, I'm part of the reason, because I put him in the book, that he ended up being contacted by a publisher and saying, would you write a spiritual memoir? And he said, what is that? And they said, exactly. We don't know either, but we think you're the person that should do it. So he did. He wrote one. And so it has a lot in there about his own spiritual journey. And I'm quite familiar with it. It's called Rumors of Glory, by the way. And so I know that he's a person who loves Jesus. I know that he struggled with the politics of the world and the social injustice in the world. And I know that he grappled with all kinds of different ideologies at different times, and was really honest about that journey, and has, you know, I know he plays for a worship band at a church in San Francisco, an evangelical church, so, you know. Okay. Yeah, I don't know where he is right now. I do know that there's an interview out there a rather lengthy interview with Bruce Coburn that he conducted a year before your book came out. Back in 2006 he did an interview, and during he says things like, I flirted with Buddhism, I sort of moved into the occult, studied the tarot, I tried for a minute or two to be a fundamentalist Christian, and since then I've fallen under the influence of Sufi writers, of Hindu teachings through yoga studies and various other things. and the search continues. And then he talks about other sorts of New Age stuff, and paganism, and I mean, he's, at least in the interview, he presents a pretty outside the mainstream, quote-unquote, Christian view, if he was even trying to advocate for one at the time. So it was interesting that that interview, you know, came out, was conducted right before the book came out, and I was wondering if there was a connection there or not. But it sounds like maybe there wasn't a direct connection. i've never heard the interview so that and i didn't use any of that but i can tell you about the music and i can tell you about the palms uh... just riddled with redemption and gospel and and uh... and the fact that he he's done searching in all these different directions uh... he's just you know he's a searcher he's honest about it i know where he is now and uh... but i don't i don't have any problem uh... having quoted in in the book in fact in the movie where opera singing Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Neil Young. She was supposed to be singing a Coburn song, but right after that, she asked McKenzie, so how'd you sleep? And he said, fine. And because he'd had nightmares all night long, and you know, he's doing the thing where he's not being a truth teller. And she says, you know, dreams are important. Sometimes they're a way of opening up the window, letting the bad air out. That's a Coburn line. So there's a lot of pieces of of Coburn's history and his music that I definitely relate to. I could almost write my autobiographical story using Coburn songs as far as just headlines and, you know, Dialogue with the Devil, He Came from the Mountain, which is all about the incarnation, on and on and on. There's just hundreds of songs. And before we dive into real meaty stuff again, one more selfish question. There's some interesting names of places and the cat. I'm just wondering if there's anything into it. There's a cat named Judas. The characters travel through Hell's Canyon, Snake River, Seven Devils Lookout. They go through the town of Lostine. Is there any hidden meaning in any of that or is that just something that my hyper-analytical mind picked up on? These are all places in Oregon. I know they're real places, but you could have set the story in different places. I don't know. It just seems there were so many of those kinds of names for places. Isn't that funny? I never even noticed. They used real places that we went camping at. So we camped in the Wallowas, and all of that is up in the eastern Oregon part. There's probably a whole bunch more like that, too. okay well now that i'm into more serious matter jonathan touched on it towards the end of last week's show and sold quite a pickup there he's talking about the idea of uh... whether or not the the godhead the the father son holy spirit you actually talk about a little bit to can be separated or not separated in this sort of thing uh... one of the most popular critiques of the shack uh... is the critique that it advances modalism that uh... that and and part of the argument for that is the papa uh... says that uh... she uh... at that point papa's a she later in the book papa is is a he but uh... papa she was uh... you know on the cross with jesus i don't know if the book does but on the movie you can if you pay close attention you can see scars on the on the on the hands or wrists of the Holy Spirit character, Sarah Yu. So, it sounds like you're saying that all three members of the Godhead are on the cross. Is that your position? And if so, how is that not some sort of patrapassionism, Sibelianism, modalism, like all of these heretical kind of terms that get thrown at the book? How are those critiques not accurate? I'm sure you're assuming that all your listeners understand these terms. Well, I figure in your answer, you're going to help them to understand what they mean. Modalism is that God operates in three modes. Like, I'm a dad, and I'm a brother, and I'm a husband. But I'm just one person. So modalism would state that you can never have different persons in the same event, situation, or time. Which, anybody that reads the shack would say, That's just an absurd accusation, because obviously there is an interaction of relationship between three persons, and that denies modalism. So I just don't even begin to understand the accusation of modalism at all. But when they're presented all as hanging on the cross, I mean, that's inaccurate, isn't it? Let's go back to that. And that's from the early Church. I didn't pull that out of nowhere. Some of the earliest icons we have, the Father and the Spirit, are nailed to the cross behind Jesus. And the reason for that is that, partly out of a passage in Isaiah, and partly because you can't have one member of the Trinity have an experience that the other persons of the Trinity do not encounter also. And so it's not saying that the Father is crucified for our sins. Jesus is the Incarnate Man, capital M, human being, but the Father and the Spirit are in Him, and so experience that. That's all that that is trying to say. The passage in Isaiah is, and unfortunately we have somewhat of a negative translation of it, and that is, and He, the Father, laid on Him, Jesus, the iniquity of us all. But the Greek, I mean, the Hebrew uses the term paga, P-A-G-A, and it means to encounter. And some of the translations do that justice. They say that it was in Jesus that the Father and the Spirit were able to encounter the iniquity of us all. And that was the question. How did... That's the early church question. How did Jesus encounter, or how did the Father and the Spirit encounter our iniquity except in the person of Jesus, in the Incarnation? And therefore, you know, there was never any separation between the persons of the Trinity with regard to the crucifixion. Let me ask you, from page 99, the character Papa says, which is representing the Father of the Trinity, says, when we spoke ourselves into human existence as the Son of God, we became fully human. Who's the we? Isn't it the Holy Spirit, the Father, and the Son? Absolutely, because you can't have the decision made arbitrarily by one apart from the others. So, is your theological view that the Father and the Holy Spirit also became fully human, that they also became flesh and blood? They experienced humanity in Christ. So, while not being, see, the thing about perichoresis, which is the early Church word for the Trinity, how they relate to one another, it is the mutual interpenetration or union of one with the other without the loss of personhood. So the Father and the Spirit are able to enter into our experience in Christ, who becomes fully human, but is still fully God. Fully God. And so, again, there's no separation. It's not trying to create some understanding of the Trinity that is not acceptable to the early Church in terms of orthodoxy. It's just saying that you cannot have the experience of one of the persons of the Trinity without it also being the experience of the others. now i've selfishly grab the first half of this final show and so i'm probably in fairness need to let jonathan jump in and and ask at least one or two questions that might be on his his mind and heart by the way uh... let me just say before we we did appear up the air something at the end of the show and i didn't get a chance that i so appreciate the invitation and i thought appreciate jonathan uh... kindness to be out we have we are coming from different paradigms, no doubt. I do not hold to penal substitutionary atonement theory and some of the other things that I know that are dear to him, but I so distinctly appreciate the openness and the kindness of this conversation. I just wanted to mention that in passing. Okay. Do you want to take the mic, John? I'm not ready yet. Okay. Well, then I'm going to ask one more question, and then, by the way, I'll reset real quickly. This is the Faith Debate on 930 WFMD with William Paul Young as our guest on the Faith Debate. He's the author of The Shack. Perhaps you've heard of the book, seen the movie. Jonathan Switzer on the show. I am Troy Skinner. On page 145, the Jesus character says, quote, Papa is as much submitted to me as I to him or Sarai to me, and I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing all these names exactly right, so forgive me if I'm not, or Papa to her. In fact, we are submitted to you in the same way, is talking to the character Mac. Now, the main character Mac asks, how can that be? Why would the God of the universe want to be submitted to me? Now, that sounds like a good question, isn't it? So, how do you, Paul, answer that? Because I don't think you really exactly answered in the shack. To me, that's an easy one. And that is, you know, how many times has God come to you and said, hey, you do such a bad job of making choices that I'm just going to do it. You know, this is a God who constantly works with what we bring to the table. And the crucifixion, the cross, is exactly, probably the prime example You know, God doesn't build crosses. Human beings create torture devices, execution devices. And so how does God destroy it? By submitting to it. This is a God who submits by nature. And that, again, is early Church. The Father submitting to the Son, submitting to the Spirit. It's the great dance of perichoresis, this relationship between three persons who are absolutely one. And so the cross, then, becomes this monumental example of a God who submits by nature, and by that submission not only destroyed the power of that cross and destroyed death itself, but is able to transform this torture device that we brought to the table into an icon and a monument of grace. God is not going to say, submit one to another, when it's not already true about the nature and character of God within the very being of God, in terms of this triune relationship. Sure, but to assume that a hierarchy is automatically like antithetical to mutual submission, again, feels to me like we're reading too much. We have a category problem, right? So Jesus is the head of the church, you know, just as, you know, as he submits to his Father, right? And so... Jonathan, you're going to have to speak up because I'm losing about 45% of what you're saying. Yeah, so just making the point that Christ is the head of the church, just as the Father is the head of Christ, right, that there's headship issues that don't violate mutual submission, that mutual submission is not somehow hindered by hierarchy is something that we seem to see all through scripture that, again, to say that the hierarchy is somehow antithetical to that seems to take it just too far. I'm going to... See, I look at the passage like the 1 Corinthians 11 passage that you were just using, and I don't see that as hierarchy. I see it as what's called a Hebrew ring syllogism. It's where Christ is the beginning and Christ is the end, and it creates a ring. It creates a circle. Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of the woman, and God is the head of Christ, and it's done that way. Later in that passage, he's going to say, however, in the Lord, Neither is the woman independent of the man, nor the man independent of the woman, for as the woman originates from the man, so the man also has his birth through the woman, or originates from her, and all things originate from God. So to me, the context of a passage like that is not to create a sense of hierarchy at all. It's to talk about origin and source. And yet, the language that is used in there is the language of headship, of roles that are to be played. And for that matter, 1 Corinthians 15, it says that Christ will turn all things back over to the Father. You know, just a sense of primacy and respect. You know, I would use all that language. But at the heart of it is still aspects of hierarchy that are redeemed and so likely very different from how we interact with them now. And yet, they're still hierarchy. There's still things there that we need not be afraid of just because they've been abused by other people in the church. And this is probably I have a similar concern that I have about the use of the word religion. You said religion is something that is a modern or a more recent phenomenon, which is very interesting to me. It's a human creation. It doesn't originate in God. God's never been religious. Sure, though all of the law was given by God, right? And so whatever system, you know, that God created there, you know, we call that a religious system. And certainly the Egyptians had their own religious system. One, you know, the Israeli system, the Jewish system being a a system given by God, and the other system being a system that is man-made. Same thing, you know, in the New Testament that the body of Christ, elders, deacons, all of these kinds of things, like that's God's idea. That's, you know, Paul and the apostles setting up structures inside of congregations that have organizational benefit to the body of Christ that are part and parcel that would be religion that is not man-made, but that certainly man engages in. And so, to write those things off Similar to hierarchy seems to me like we're going too far like we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater just because there's hypocritical Hierarchies out there that are given to tyranny just because there's hypocritical religious systems Doesn't mean that the Bible doesn't give to us from God very effective Systems, you know that that if we can catch what the Bible is teaching us are full of life and full of love and grace that are very meaningful. And I would say that the systems, say, of the Old Covenant and all that, were accommodations to human brokenness. You know, the invitation to the tribe of Israel is to come up onto the mountain and have a face-to-face relationship. And they're the ones that put out a priesthood, and then God accommodates to it, just like He accommodates to a king. It was never intended to be a king, other than that relationship with God at the center. And so, to me, I see these things as, again, the accommodation of a God who submits to what we bring to the table, and then finds a way to climb in it and do good things. You know, missions can be destructive, or missions can be beneficial. but it doesn't justify the structure itself. Same with politics. You know, political systems can do good things, and obviously missionaries did many good things, but they also did a whole bunch of not-so-good things. It's because we brought it to the table, and it's the redeeming genius of God to climb into the systems that we bring to the table and to make good out of things that that we participate in. I don't think it's saying that, okay, so God is a religious being and that's why we have religion. I think we are religious beings. That's why we needed a sacrifice. and the prophets tell us that God hated sacrifice and intended to put an end to sacrifice. Well, that's going to put a wrap on the fourth and final part of our series here. Thank you so much, William Paul Young. Good job. He is the author of The Shack. I'm Troy Skinner. We've been joined, of course, by Jonathan Schweitzer on the show again. We could do another four shows, another four shows, another four shows. I don't think we'll ever quite exhaust this 100%. But thanks so much. Find us online, WFMD.com. Until next week, 167 1⁄2 hours from right now. God bless.