Re: The Shack, your words describe my thoughts/feelings reading that book too. My mom, my husband, several friends loved it. Gave me the heebie jeebies of being ~off~. But your description fits more precisely.
Theology can be simple and complex. But on the key elements of what's necessary to form and maintain a relationship with GOD, the New Testament is plenty clear.
The Sermon on The Mount has a lot of clarity that most Christians fail to rise to the measure of. Acts 2 has a lot of clarity that a lot of Christians fail to rise to the measure of. I COR 12-14 have a lot of clarity that a lot of Christians fail to rise to the measure of.
And, different groups of Christians can argue about the details in those passages several hundred more years--all the while failing to even sincerely attempt to walk out their Salvation in the terms of those verses with fear and trembling.
NEVERTHELESS, the enemy is the author of confusion. And satan's stooges have for at least 100-150 years in the modern era been deliberately seeding into various "Christian" groups and seeding into various Biblical translations--error along with half-truths and too often brazen lies.
It's a brazen UNBiblical lie that all roads lead to God and Heaven. Christ made that very clear when HE SAID--NO MAN reaches the Father except through me {Christ}. Guess what--THE SHACK will likely be incinerated in the fiery truth of Christ's WORDS--particularly for even a hint that any other route is pretty good, OK.
At first, I thought the 'God as Aunt Jemima' metaphor was clever and sort of offered some good insights about God's capacity and priority in loving His human creation. Yet, after the whole of the book, I thought the cost of wading through all the error bones I had to spit out was just not worth the meager fare of somewhat useful insights.
And I thought that for the young Christians, the poorly studied or educated Christians, the curious about Christianity--the book was likely to be a disaster to their theological understanding of truth.
And, I figured that the more mature and Spirit-filled Christians would likely already have whatever meager helpful insights the book offered about the Love of God.
I was somewhat guardedly willing to allow that an occasional person might be edified--after all--Holy Spirit can use anything for God's purposes. I just felt that the book as a whole was too much of a hazard to encourage anyone to read it for truth about God or Christianity.
“Gave me the heebie jeebies of being ~off~.”
That is the feeling I got from reading. I also agree with JockoManning. I know it really affected many people. If it can be read as purely feel good fiction fine. But it shouldn’t inform us over the inspired Word of God.