The Shack Revisited by William Paul Young
Week 12: Chapter 11 — The Shack, the Cross, and the Question of Evil
Read Chapter 11 of The Shack Revisited. Primary Bible passages: Romans 8:18-25; Revelation 21:1-5.
Previewing Week 12 of The Shack Revisited
Read 3 of 7 discussion questions below. Unlock the complete 14-week guide when you’re ready.
This may be the hardest chapter in the book — Kruger addresses the question The Shack poses most painfully: how can a God of love permit a child to be murdered? He does not offer easy answers, but he does offer something more durable: a vision of the cross as God's definitive response to evil.
Discussion Questions
7 questions1.Kruger does not try to make the problem of evil disappear — he acknowledges it as the central question The Shack raises. What is his primary response to the question of how a loving God can permit horrific suffering? Does his answer satisfy you, partially satisfy you, or leave you wanting more?
2.Kruger argues that the cross is not God's punishment of Jesus in our place (in any simplistic sense) but God's entry into the darkest possible human experience — godforsakenness itself — in order to redeem it from within. How does that reading of the cross connect to Mack's experience in the shack?
a.Does this reading of the atonement feel richer, thinner, or simply different from what you have heard before?
b.What would it mean to know that God has been inside every experience of abandonment and suffering — not as an observer but as a participant?
3.One of the most powerful scenes in The Shack is when Papa shows Mack the wounds still on her wrists — the Father bearing the marks of the cross alongside the Son. Kruger unpacks this carefully. What is Young and Kruger trying to say about the Father's relationship to the suffering of the cross? Is this theologically defensible?