# Unmasking the Deceit in the Gospel Fiction According to Paul Young with Attendant Ethical Concerns
The following pages summarize the beliefs of various authors who defend a form of universal reconciliation by denying the Biblical view of hell, judgment, the gospel, the role of faith in actualizing reconciliation for anyone, the nature of God, and the meaning of the local church and its mission. In recent years fictional writers expressing these views have become widely read.[1]
Paul Young’s The Shack (both the novel and the film) has out done all other fictions to sell such universalism. His earlier writing in 2004 is simply one of the more extended defenses of universal reconciliation (UR).[2] It provides the background and foundation for what his fiction unfolds. In the following pages I use Young’s 2004 defense to illustrate how detailed and far-reaching the case for UR can be. In refuting the arguments that Young makes I am refuting the arguments of other advocates of UR.
Much of Young’s case for UR rests on a distortion of what Christians believe, on imperfect and incomplete interpretation of the Bible, on appeals to emotion and the senses, and on an incomplete, even false, understanding of early church history. In the following pages I take up the strongest arguments.
Some of what Young has written borders on the slander, blasphemy, of the God of the Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ. Almost all of it is heresy. Christians everywhere should feel angered as they read Young’s reasoning that betrays a demonic spirit. In truth, Paul Young is an anarchist, a terrorist, and demonic in the positions he takes. More about this at the end.
[1] I’m thinking here of Paul Young’s The Shack, Brian McLaren’s The Last Word and the Word After That, and Rob Bell’s Love Wins. I find that these authors express surprisingly similar beliefs.
[2] In his “Universal Reconciliation.” I have known Paul Young for over two decades and have a copy of this 2004 paper which I heard Paul present to a forum we co-founded in the late 1990’s.