The Shack and a New Cosmology
The Cosmos is Made of Light and Darkness
On Wednesday, July 2008 a post, in the blog Herescope, connected the God Elousia in The Shack to the archetypal Black Madonna that is found around the globe. The post references an article by Matthew Fox: The Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of Our Times or How the Black Madonna Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Century.
In his article, Fox describes the Madonna as being an archetype who calls the world to the creation of a new cosmology. William P. Young’s black, female, Godhead seems to share the need to reinvent cosmology.
A New Cosmology
According to Merriam-Webster, cosmology is a “a: a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of the universe [and] b: a theory or doctrine describing the natural order of the universe.” When Calvinism entered the scene, cosmology almost disappeared as a branch of study. Fox claims that the world is about to enter a new cosmology “Because she is dark and leads us into the dark, the Black Madonna is also cosmic…She yanks us out of our anthropocentrism and back into a state of honoring all our relations. She ushers in an era of cosmology, of our relationship to the whole (“kosmos” means whole in Greek) instead of just parts, be they nation parts or ethnic parts or religious parts or private parts.”
A Cosmology of Relationships
Perhaps the reason that Protestants pulled away from cosmology is because they recognized the inherent danger of cosmology. When one starts to look at relationships as the whole without looking at fundamental scriptures, it is easy to slip into the belief that because God created everyone, everyone will be saved. And if God created the universe, then surely all of it is good. Merriam Webster writes of universalism “a: a theological doctrine that all human beings will eventually be saved b: the principles and practices of a liberal Christian denomination founded in the 18th century originally to uphold belief in universal salvation and now united with Unitarianism.”
One of the aspects of the Trinity that Young correctly recognized and highlighted was the relational aspect of the Trinity. However, Young goes past the relationship between the members of the Trinity and past the relationship of Christ and the church to a relationship, which appears to be based in universalism when he has Jesus say “Those who love me come from every system that exists.
They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans and many who don’t vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions. I have followers who were murderers and many who were self-righteous…I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters of my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, into my Beloved.” (184)
A Relationship Based in Light
Fox implies that darkness is a manifestation of cosmology because the cosmos is dark, which is contradictory to his suggestion that cosmos is about the whole because the cosmos isn’t just darkness, it is light too.
Fox also suggests that Black Madonna’s ability to lead us into that darkness is a better cosmology than any that Protestant cosmology could view. The mistakes that Protestant’s might have made in their approach to a universe created by God are human mistakes and not God’s mistakes since God is infallible.
God created the ‘whole’ universe and formed it out of darkness and caused the Holy Spirit to give it light. God is a cosmic God and a God of cosmology as can be seen in Genesis 1:2-4 “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
The first challenge that Fox describes and which seems to be embraced by Young is that of a call to darkness. In his second challenge Fox introduces the idea of a new cosmology, Fox points towards a relational and universal cosmology. While Young doesn’t perfectly agree with Fox, it is still apparent that his view strays in the direction of a cosmology that has a universal appeal.
Young, William P. The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity. Windblown Media. 2007.
Read more about William P. Young and The Shack at Suite101.
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