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When Mack finally arrives at the cabin and meets with God, he is subjected to a lengthy theology lesson, wherein all his mistaken assumptions are corrected through the form of conversation and dialogue.  Clearly, the author of The Shack believes that what we believe about God and his ways is tremendously important, and therein he thinks lies the key to sustaining our hope in the midst of life’s tragedies and trials.  If we think right, we will have a proper framework within which to struggle and fight through the disappointments and pains of daily life.  In typical evangelical fashion, an intellectually and emotionally satisfying doctrinal framework is presented as the necessary foundation for sustaining hope in God’s promise.  So God sets about the task of correcting and improving Mack’s naïve theology. 
   And herein lies a fundamental problem with the book.  American, Evangelical religion is notoriously rationalistic and individualist in orientation, and this notion infects the air of The Shack’s struggle with the tension between God and the reality of evil.  Everything begins with the need for accuracy in the human understanding and works out from there.  The essence of faith is taken to be right belief, which is what really is the focus through the whole narrative of The Shack.  By contrast, in Reformed theology the essence of faith is acceptance and trust.  In the words of the Westminster Larger Catechism, justifying faith, “not only assenteth to the truth of the promise of the gospel, but receiveth and resteth upon Christ and his righteousness” (Q. 72).  In other words the essence of faith lies in believing that God’s promise is true, and finding rest in that promise—not in my ability to understand the workings of providence, or how the promise will be brought to fulfillment.  The essence of faith in Reformed thinking is not found in understanding, but acceptance and trust.  This is an absolutely foundational starting point for coming to grips with enigmas and intellectual obstacles in the religious life.

Now one of the realities of Christian experience is that we all continue to sin, we all continue to break God’s Law, in thought, in word, and in deed, on a daily basis.  So what is the answer?  The answer of The Shack is to remove the notion of obligations from Christian discourse entirely, so as not to offend our sensitive consciences.  But we would be better off to allow the Law, precisely through its disclosure of our duties, to serve as a mirror of our own unworthiness, and to stir up in us a complete reliance on the grace of God and the perfect satisfaction of our Mediator as the atonement for our sins.  The Larger Catechism in that same Question 95 goes on to say that one of the chief uses of the moral law is specifically to convince us of our inability to keep it!  Also to convince us of the “sinful pollution” of our nature, hearts, and lives, and to humble us in the sense of our “sin and misery.”  According to our theological tradition, it is healthy for Christians to know that they do not adequately obey, that they are polluted, that they continue to be miserable sinners.  That is, simply, the Christian life.  Read Romans 7:14ff.
   The problem is not with the notion of religious duty and obligations.  We cannot escape them, and should not seek to escape them.  But we do need to be realistic, and one gets the sense that authentic realism with respect to the limitations of our obedience was not something the author of The Shack had a lot of experience of growing up in church.  As if Our Lord Jesus had not instructed us to pray on a daily basis, “forgive us our sins” (Matt. 6:12).  As though St. John had not warned us: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8-9).  The evangelical conversion narrative emphasizes the need for a personal experience of regeneration in a moment of crisis, which then marks the believer’s decisive subjective break with sin (which then gets repeated every time one feels really guilty and needs to rededicate one’s life to God).  This pattern, I am convinced, crushes souls, creates cynicism, and drives people out of our churches when people discover that the lofty claims of personal “victory in Jesus” do not correspond to the realities of the human condition.  Our Reformed theology should remind us that we were dedicated to God by our parents, or Mother Church, at the moment of our baptism, and so we are always dedicated to God, and the objects of his grace, whatever the state of our personal piety.
   And this brings up another problem that The Shack illustrates.  Evangelical religion, in its constant quest for what is new and spontaneous, lacks an appropriate place for ritual in the Christian life.  As Papa puts it, “Nothing is a ritual, Mack. . . . So tonight, we are doing something different” (p. 207).  When the Lord’s Supper is celebrated at the end of the story, we are told that it was done “Without any ritual, without ceremony” (p. 236).  Rituals assume obligations to do certain things, in certain ways.  What you do is important, and how you do it is important.  Therein lies the very essence of a ritual, and the author of The Shack, true to his upbringing, views this as a hindrance to a genuine walk with God.
   When Mack asks Jesus how he can be part of the Church—“This woman that you seem to be so gaga over”—to use Mack’s description (p. 178), Jesus says: “It’s simple, Mack.  It’s all about relationships and simply sharing life. . . . My church is all about people and life is all about relationships.  You can’t build it.  It’s my job and I’m actually pretty good at it” (p. 178).  When Mack says to Jesus, “You’re not too fond of religion and institutions?” Jesus says: “I don’t create institutions; that’s an occupation for those who want to play God.  So no, I’m not too big on religion” (p. 179).  All of this is described as “a breath of fresh air” for Mack.  “Simple.  Not a bunch of exhausting work and long list of demands, and not the sitting in endless meetings staring at the backs of people’s heads, people he really didn’t even know.  Just sharing life” (p. 178).  Mack sounds like a truculent teenager, who is bored by repetitious actions and predictable patterns of behavior.  He sounds in fact like a typical thirty or forty-something evangelical Christian who has grown weary of trying to make church attendance into a spontaneous and ever-new experience.  While the author of The Shack plainly sees forms and rituals as the heart of the problem, I would advocate that it is precisely the abandonment of intelligent forms, the loss of rich patterns, the denigration of rituals that is the source of the modern evangelical’s religious angst and boredom.  How quickly we forget that all the earliest Protestant services, whether Lutheran, Presbyterian or Anglican, were nothing but revisions of the old catholic Mass.
   

Now all of this makes good sense, and can be rationally defended within the framework of some theological systems.  But it certainly cannot be reconciled with the Reformed tradition.  The Westminster Confession makes it clear that the underlying logic behind the divine providence is the directing of the world’s contingencies “to the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy” (5.1).  In other words, God directs our world in such a way as to magnify his various attributes.  The world is governed for his sake and good pleasure, not primarily for our benefit.  Our Confession describes God as the “first cause” of all events that come to pass, causing them to occur “immutably and infallibly” in relation to his foreknowledge and decree (5.2).  We read that God’s governing providence “extendeth itself even to the first fall, and all other sins of angels and men, and that not by a bare permission, but such as hath joined with it a most wise and powerful bounding, and otherwise ordering and governing of them, in a manifold dispensation, to his own holy ends” (5.4).  Which is to say that God not only permits bad things to happen, he decrees and purposes them for his own secret reasons.  As chapter 3 on God’s Eternal Decree puts it: “God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass” (3.1).  This includes the election of those who are to be saved “for the manifestation of his glory” (3.3), “without any foresight of faith or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in the creature, as conditions or causes moving him thereunto” (3.5).  As for the rest of mankind: “God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of his own will, whereby he extendeth or withholdeth mercy as he pleaseth, for the glory of his sovereign power over his creatures, to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of the glory of his justice” (3.7).
   The Shack depicts a universe in which the primary reality is the independence of our free will, which God insists on respecting.  God allows us to make our choices, and does the best he can to bring good out of the disasters we cause.  If God did not allow us to exercise such independence, the universe would not be a meaningful arena of the divine-human encounter, the dance of our dynamic relationship.  The Reformed tradition has a very different outlook.  God is the architect of all things.  His eternal decree embraces the bliss of heaven, the terrors of hell, and all the human choices in between.  His providence governs every detail from the least to the greatest.  He does not merely permit sins and disasters, he ordains them for his own holy ends, often hidden and obscure to mere creatures such as us.  The God of the Reformed faith is a God to be shouted at when bad things happen, for the psalmists and prophets understood full well the full range of the divine power and providence.  God did not simply watch Jerusalem burn to the ground, the women ravaged, the infants slaughtered, and then bring good out of evil.  He planned it, and used the Babylonians as his tool of punishment.  God did not simply watch Satan torment Job and kill his family—he told Satan to go ahead and do it, as a test of Job’s faithfulness.  God did not simply allow Jesus to die on the cross, innocent of all wrong-doing, terrified and discouraged at his fate—he planned that sacrifice as the atonement for our sins.
   Ultimately, when bad things happen, when our loved ones perish, when we are stricken with illness, when our wealth and our friends run away, we have two choices to make.  We can attempt to preserve God from our resentment by shielding him of all involvement in the workings of evil in our world, imagining that God simply honors our choices and works with and around them.  Or we can shout at God, cry to God, blame God, and then close our mouths and confess that his ways are not our ways, and the mysteries of his providence are beyond our understanding, choosing despite appearances to believe that all wrongs will be rectified with the dawn of a new world.  The former path is the path of The Shack and the evangelical world, and it is full of logic and persuasive power.  The latter path is the path of the Bible and the Reformed tradition, and it has the distinct advantage of being true. It requires us to suspend our finite judgments until the secrets of God’s will and purposes are disclosed in heaven, and the arrival of the day when, as St. Paul puts it, we will at last “know fully, as we have been fully known.”


That's it.

He didn't really defend this proposition he threw in at the end, did he?

You don't need to defend that statement at a Christian college that follows the Reformed theology.  There is assumed agreement.

Colin, you should add Dr. Paul Owen as author.