The Adjustment Bureau

There is a large part of American Christianity that forms most of their ideas upon the importance of "free will". God gave it to you and now He is bound not to violate it, thus your final destiny is your own damned or blessed fault. You choose, God honors.

Having my faith built upon the minority report of man's basic brokeness and inability we were taught to see God's choice preceding our choice of following Him.

Both systems can be harmonized with the idea that people respond to that which they want and love, and tend to run from that which causes pain and fear. Its hardwired into our human condition. So the Gospel declares and demonstrates the love of God while we are in that fearful condition and draws us into trust and relationship, which transforms us into loving and trustworthy folks.

God must then love us enough to sort of interfere with our self destructive paths and sort of violate our free will because it does not freely move in the direction of that which it believes to be fearful, rightly or wrongly. This seems to be part of our gospel proclamation that has fallen on hard times. We seem to be warning people of the wrath of God instead of telling them that God is in harmony with His own son in pardoning and welcoming us home, not a sin counter, but a love who draws a world of lost sinners to Himself.

We will be exploring that theme with a Monday movie, because the "angels" or agents in the movie The Adjustment Bureau do not know why they are charged with changing the will of the primary characters. They thus make outside agency seem cruel, which in the gospel in it anything but cruel.