In October of 2026, William Paul Young’s new book, Return to the Shack, will be released, published by an imprint of Hatchette (one of the largest publishers in the world). Already, on Amazon, the book is listed as a “#1 New Release.” And is it any wonder of its predictory success? It was nearly 20 years ago (2007) when Young’s first book, The Shack, was released. That book became a New York Times best seller and has sold over 25 million copies,1 remaining a top-selling book today. No doubt, Return to the Shack will be able to ride on the coat tails of The Shack’s success.
While the audiences of The Shack have not just been within the perimeters of the Christian church, untold numbers of Christians and church goers read the book, often at the encouragement of popular Christian figures who promoted it. Some of these were Eugene Peterson (The Message author); popular Calvary Chapel speaker the late Gayle Erwin; CBN; TBN; the Gaithers; Michael W. Smith; and Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven magazine (to name just a few). With a wide array of endorsements like that and an undiscerning church, it’s no wonder it became a mega seller. It would be years after the release of The Shack before criticism and warning of the book had any real effect. Unfortunately, the damage of such a heretical book had already been done. The question now is, will the church fail again to recognize and identify the unbiblical and spiritually dangerous guidance of William Paul Young’s “Shack theology” as his newest Shack book hits the market?
In 2008, less than a year after The Shack was released, former New Age follower, Warren B. Smith, began a series of articles on The Shack (which eventually became two Lighthouse Trails booklets). In one article Smith wrote (titled The Shack and Its New Age Leaven – God IN Everything?), he details how The Shack promotes the New Age view that God is “in” everyone:
This book ostensibly attempts to deal with the deeply sensitive issues surrounding the murder of a young child. Because of the author’s intensely personal story line, most readers become engaged with the book on a deep emotional level. However, the author’s use of poetic license to convey his highly subjective, and often unbiblical, spiritual views becomes increasingly problematic as the story line develops. This is most apparent when he uses the person of “Jesus” to suddenly introduce the foundational teaching of the New Spirituality/New World Religion—God is “in” everything. Using the New Age term “ground of being” to describe “God,” the “Jesus” of The Shack states, “God, who is the ground of all being, dwells in, around, and through all things.”2
This false teaching about a “God” who “dwells in, around, and through all things” is the kind of New Age leaven that left unchallenged could leaven the church into the New Age/New Spirituality of the proposed New World Religion. And while many people have expressed a great deal of emotional attachment to The Shack and its characters—this leaven alone contaminates the whole book.3
Clearly, the “Jesus” of The Shack is not Jesus Christ of the Bible.
Defenders of The Shack began saying that The Shack is just a novel and has nothing to do with theology or doctrine so it shouldn’t really be judged as such. However, William Paul Young’s own words on that lay the matter to rest. He stated, “Please don’t misunderstand me; The Shack is theology. But it is theology wrapped in story.”4
In a second booklet Warren Smith wrote on The Shack (Shack Theology: Universalism, TBN, Oprah, and the New Age), Smith describes how William Paul Young wrote the foreword to a 2012 book by C. Baxter Kruger titled The Shack Revisited. In that foreword, Young states: “If you want to understand better the perspectives and theology that frame The Shack, this book [Kruger’s] is for you. Baxter has taken on the incredible task of exploring the nature and character of the God who met me in my own shack.”5 In The Shack Revisited, Kruger (and Young by proxy) promotes a New Age view of what he calls a “trinitarian life” theology that is based on “oneness” (a New Age view that states that God and all humanity and all creation are one with each other (in other words, there is no separation between them).
Warren Smith’s booklet clearly unveiled the New Age “theology” of The Shack and its author—a theology that includes universalism and what New Agers call “the lie of separation.” In Smith’s booklet, Oneness vs. Separation Heresy “Now” in the Church, he states:
On the March 12, 2017 episode 5 of Trinity Broadcast Network’s long running Restoring The Shack television series, Shack author Wm. Paul Young stated that it is a “lie” to believe that God is “separate” from His creation.6 Invoking a vision that was reputedly given by “God” to friend and fellow author C. Baxter Kruger, Young described this alleged lie as the “lie of separation.” But as a former New Ager, I recognized what Young was calling the “lie of separation” was in and of itself a lie. What he was teaching had nothing to do with biblical Christianity and everything to do with the deceptive anti-christ teachings of the New Age/New Spirituality/New Worldview. What Young was attempting to convey to countless TBN viewers was the same thing I had been taught when I was a part of the New Age movement—that there is “no separation” between God and creation because God is “in” everyone and everything. But God is not “in” everyone and everything.7
As I came out of the New Age and saw through this pervasive God-“in”-everything deception, I came to understand how our Spiritual Adversary had turned the Bible’s 2 Corinthians 6:17 instruction to “Be ye separate” into a lie that turns the whole notion of biblical separation upside down. Now, years later, taking the word “separation” and using it in a wholly unscriptural context, false teachers like Wm. Paul Young are bringing this New Age “lie of separation” into the church.8
It is vitally important to understand the concept of “oneness” (i.e., “the lie of separation” or what some call “nonduality”) because this concept is at the heart of the New Age/New Spirituality, and it greatly diminishes the view of God being greater and set apart from man. It means that there is no good and evil, no right or wrong, and no separation between God and man—thus, all is one, all is God (which is why New Ager Neale Donald Walsch said that even Hitler will go to Heaven9).
Contrary to what New Agers and mystics teach, there is separation, and the Bible teaches it: there are the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the tares, the saved and the unsaved, truth and error, darkness and light, and righteousness and unrighteousness. New Age thinkers would reject this because they believe all is God. Researcher and author Ray Yungen stated, “It is important to understand that Satan is not simply trying to draw people to the dark side of a good versus evil conflict. Actually, he is trying to eradicate the gap between himself and God, between good and evil, altogether. When we understand this approach, it helps us see why the Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton said everyone is already united with God or why Jack Canfield (of Chicken Soup for the Soul) said he felt God flowing through all things. All means all—nothing left out. Such reasoning implies that God is sharing His glory with all creation; since Satan is part of creation, then he too shares in this glory, and thus is ‘like the most High.’”10
The fact is, much of today’s church has become so intermingled with the New Age that it’s like the frog in the pot of nearly boiling water who doesn’t even realize it. And we can thank books like Celebration of Discipline,The Shack, Jesus Calling, Purpose Driven Life, John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way, and multitudes of others for helping to bring a destructive deception into the lives of millions.
So again, the question is, will the church fail once more to recognize and identify the unbiblical and spiritually dangerous guidance of William Paul Young’s “Shack theology”?
Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. (Romans 1:25)
Note: If you have not read Warren B. Smith’s booklets on The Shack, we urge you to do so. All Lighthouse Trails booklets are available to order or free to read on this site. Please prepare yourself to give ready answers to those you know who are heading or already into the unbiblical New Age Shack theology.
William Paul Young in the foreword to C. Baxter Kruger’s book, The Shack Revisited (New York, NY: Faith Words, Hachette Book Group, 2012), p. xi.
Ibid., p. ix.
. Restoring the Shack television series, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), episodes that were originally broadcast in 2017. Originally at https://www.tbn.org/programs/restoring-shack, but TBN removed the link and now sells it in DVD format.(For an archive link, see: https://web.archive.org/web/20170603105236/https://www.tbn.org/programs/restoring-shack).
Ray Yungen, A Time of Departing (Eureka, MT: Lighthouse Trails Publishing, 2nd edition, 2006), p. 108. The Merton quote referred to is taken from Brennan Manning’s Signature of Jesus (p.211) citing William Shannon’s biography on Merton, Silence on Fire (p. 22). The Canfield quote referred to is from Canfield’s book, Dare to Win (p. 195).
