I melt everytime I watch Frozen

Here’s a question you may not have asked yourself lately – “What does Bo Giertz’s The Hammer of God and Disney’s Frozen have in common?”  Well lucky for you I’m here to give you the answer!  The thing they have in common is their low view of man [low anthropology].  In other words; the writers of both these works believe that it is hard for mankind to do good to their neighbours and care for themselves and easy for mankind to abuse their neighbours and become trapped in destructive habits which destroy themselves.  I guess you could sum it up in the phrase “I have a low view of Tracey because she is always getting drunk in the weekends” (for example).  The two works also share the opinion that we cannot free ourselves from our broken condition but that we need to be freed by another.  

Bo Giertz takes great pains in his novel to explain to the reader that man’s greatest problem is not that he sins, but that he is a sinner.  We sin because we are sinners.  Giertz’s wise pastors explain that are so broken and marred by Adam’s curse that no amount of beating ourselves up over our sin or trying harder to do better will make any lick of difference to our behaviour.  When we conquer one sin we find 25 more waiting in line to be fought against and we find less and less energy with which to fight; but there is hope for us!  And it comes in the person and work of Jesus Christ alone.  He came into our broken world and did that sacrificial work to free us from our sinful condition.  And He gives us his helper [the Holy Spirit] whose job is to slowly change us, day by day, into creatures who reflect God’s character and original good design for us.

Frozen, likewise follows this same line of thinking about the human condition.  The Queen is cursed with ice powers and her father teaches her that she can change herself by trying harder to be better.  When she escapes from society and is free to practice her gift/curse she feels that she has been freed from the curse and therefore has changed; but when her sister comes to talk to her about the havoc she has left behind and is then injured again by her curse, the queen realises that she was just fooling herself.  The curse goes much deeper than her ability to overcome it with her will; she is trapped.  The most beautiful thing about Frozen is that it superbly shows the queen being freed from the power of the curse by the sacrificial love of another (don’t wanna spoil it too much for ya!!) illustrating well for us our freedom from the curse of sin won by the sacrificial love of Christ for us.

You can read more about this freedom giving sacrificial love in The Hammer of God or the Letter to the Romans.  And if you can't bring yourself to see a kid's movie with Broadway style songs then pop over to Mockingbird and get the lowdown on Frozen.