Fate, Free Will, and The Adjustment Bureau
“You don’t have free will. You have the illusion of free will.”
Or at least that’s the premise of The Adjustment Bureau
The question is, how would we know?
I feel like I have free will, I can try to argue that the direction of my life is not fated by a man (or angels) behind the curtain, but would I really be able to tell?
I wonder if that has anything to do with how heated discussions over our free will and God’s sovereignty often become. The idea that our fate is not our own is quite distressing.
After all, when we act or pray we naturally hope that something might change. We cry out to the divine, hoping that we might change our fate, or the fates of others. Yet sometimes we ask if we are crying out in futility.
The common suggestion that God is outside of time, sovereignly directing every life, every beautiful gift, and every horrific tragedy, all according to a master plan – this raises all sorts of questions. But one the most haunting questions is this. Can we change our fate, or is free will just an illusion?
Alright, so we watched this movie this weekend. While an interesting concept, I think the film betrays the poverty of our culture’s collective theological imagination (as if we needed another illustration). We are left with the impression of a radically voluntarist God who comes up with multiple plans and changes God’s mind on a whim in response to human free will. What would have been great, i.e., more theologically accurate, and more entertaining (!) would have been a portrayal of human freedom and divine freedom in perfect concert, arriving at a result that was completely free, but also occurred as the harmonious outworking of a single, infinitely complex (i.e., no ripples), wise, and loving plan. Also much harder to write than a gnostic comedy.
The gnostic error in this film (and everywhere else) is to pit human freedom and divine freedom as a binary (equal) opposition. There is dramatic tension in the theodrama, to be sure, but we are talking about two very different kinds of freedom.
I agree, that would have been a much better film, presuming we would be able to pull it off it a way which didn’t seem forced or sentimentalist (and I wouldn’t hold out much hope for that).
While I think you are spot on that it’s a mistake to create a binary between human and divine freedom, it is rare to hear a coherent answer which does justice to both. Often emphasizing human freedom ends up with a God like “the Chairman”, while a popular-level Reformed theology of God’s sovereignty says it leaves room for both but speaks in ways which not-so-subtly suggest human freedom is a sort of playacting.
In some ways, I see praying as simply a humbling of oneself to an outside (and inside), more powerful force. Whether or not we can change our fate perhaps isn’t as important as acknowledging that we do not know what the future holds and we are therefore trusting God to deal with whatever our concerns are. I see praying as a metaphorical ‘bending of the knee’ – a gesture that accepts God’s will instead of our own. Other than that, it’s all over my head!