The Gospel according to Bruce

Liberal Christianity has its cultural representatives in today's media. These representatives are interesting from an atheological point of view because they highlight the hidden assumptions, premises and biases of whoever puts them out, and by extension, liberal Christianity in general.

The movie Bruce Almighty is one such example. By putting God's power as integral part of its premise, it displays its own unique brand of popular theology. In this case, it's a weird and twisted theology which displays the irrationality of liberal Christianity in its modern forms.

Bruce Almighty is the story of Bruce Nolan, a field reporter who is having a bad time. He is overlooked for promotion to desk anchor, and his otherwise perfectly trained dog takes bad peeing habits. Apparently this is enough to cause him to rail against God.

Bruce: Is it my hair? My teeth not white enough? Or is it like the great falls, the rock foundation of my LIFE, is ERODING BENEATH ME? ERODING. EEEERODING.

At this point we quickly degenerate into pseudo-atheistic rhetoric, that is to say, a Christian Hollywood writer's idea of what an atheist is like: a person who raises his fists to the sky and rails against God and all the bad things he does.

Bruce: God is just a mean kid with a magnifying glass. And I'm the ant. He could fix my life in five minutes if he wanted to, but he'd rather tear off my feelers and watch me squirm.

This is pretty uncontroversial. If God is all-powerful, then he can fix anything he wants. He would be to us as a human is to an ant. But as we will see, the theology of Bruce Almighty rejects the idea that God is all-powerful. In fact, that is the center of its theology.

Of course, his girlfriend, Grace (what originality), is the "moral compass" of the family, and a good, praying, ideal of the liberal Christian. She's almost Jesus herself. Tempted by another man, she rejects it. Her prayer at the end of the movie redeems Bruce. But her words, in this instance, cannot convince him.

Grace: You know that everything happens for a reason.
Bruce: See, that I don't need. That is a cliché. That is not helpful to me. "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"... I have no bird, I have no bush. God has taken my bird and my bush.

Here, Grace inadvertently contradicts the theology of Bruce Almighty. If God existed, it would be perfectly true that "everything happens for a reason." God would have infinite powers, and thus would organize the universe according to his desires. And Bruce's reply is all the more powerful because of that. Yes, it happens for a reason: God has taken away from me what I wanted. If God exists, there is no escaping that conclusion.

This leads us to the crux of the matter, God's powers. God meets Bruce and gives him "all his powers" for a week while he takes a "break." We can observe the extent of those powers from what God says and what Bruce can and cannot do. The liberal theology, and the liberal theodicy which I will also examine, consists of the following :

1. God is a very limited being - the equivalent of, say, Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. He can only do simple miracles.
2. God is not immaterial, all-powerful, all-knowing or all-benevolent.
3. God's job is to clean up other people's messes. He is a cosmic janitor.
4. God cannot prevent evil because it is too difficult for him. I call this the "sob story" theodicy.

The limits of God's power is shown in Bruce's frustrations in his attempts to do what he wants. In fact, not only do Bruce's actions demonstrate that God's powers are limited, but God admits himself that he is not all-powerful.

Bruce: How do you make someone love you without changing free will?
God: Welcome to my world.

What kind of a sorry excuse is that? If God was all-powerful, he could make people love him very easily. He could induce these feelings of love in every single person in the world, without touching their free will at all. He could manifest himself to us so that we could all believe. He could make the truth of his existence available to all, even without manifesting himself or inducing feelings in people. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, he knows what it would take for us to love him, and he can do it. Otherwise God is a limited being. God cannot do what he wants.

Bruce has been given all of God's power. What does he do? Parlor tricks. He pulls down the moon close to the Earth, killing millions in the process, quite appropriately as he took his powers from a god of genocide and mass murder. He causes people to win the lottery. He makes monkeys fly out of someone's butt. He parts his tomato soup like Moses.

On and on, just one violent and stupid parlor trick after another. In this, Bruce shows himself to be very much like the God of the Bible. No substance, all parlor tricks.

Bruce's inability to do what he wants demonstrates how limited God's powers are. Here are two examples :

* If Bruce was all-knowing, he would have known instantly, when he pulled that moon down, that millions of innocents would be killed. And yet he didn't figure this out. So either he is not all-knowing, or he is not all-benevolent.

Either way, he committed mass murder so that he could have a better-looking sky to kiss his girlfriend to. Just as God wiping out the Earth and all its inhabitants because he's pissed off and wants to start over again, this demonstrates at least callousness on a cosmic scale.

* Bruce, through answering people's prayers, causes a million people to win the lottery, but all they win is 17$ each.

Grace: Debbie won the lottery.
Bruce: Really?
Grace: Yeah, well, she and about 400,000 other people so she only won 17 bucks.

So once again Bruce, imbued with God's powers, was really really stupid. He doesn't even have the excuse of being evil this time, since he truly was attempting to answer people's prayers. So Bruce really doesn't understand that, in order for people to become richer, you need to create more resources, so that money becomes more valuable. Instead of solving poverty by creating those resources, Bruce thinks like a really stupid human. So he cannot be all-knowing.

When Bruce commits these mistakes, he cannot go back in time to correct them. It seems that God's powers are very much bound by natural law and time. Neither God nor Bruce as shown to transcend anything: there is no evidence that God is anything but a material being.

Bruce: Okay, prayer beads, 'God, please give me a sign.'
[Truck with Danger signs passes him]

This is all God can do. Make a truck pass by. He cannot communicate with humans, except by choosing Bruce for special treatment.

Which brings us to the "sob story" theodicy. Obviously the makers of Bruce Almighty thought this was a profound addition to the Problem of Evil. This theodicy can be expressed in the following way:

1. Human and natural evil exists. But...
2. God can't do anything about it. All he can do is clean-up jobs. To eradicate evil, you need to do it yourself.
3. Therefore God is not contradicted by human and natural evil.

If God has infinite powers, then he can eradicate evil. But if he is a callous, weak, ignorant being, like the God portrayed in Bruce Almighty, then he is incapable of eradicating evil.

This is a logical answer to the Problem of Evil, in fact the only possible answer. But this has the fatal flaw of destroying the monotheistic conceptions of the god-concept. If God is a material, limited, weak being, how is he God? How is he any different from a powerful alien? And why would one worship such a being? These question are the death knell of liberal Christianity. Of course, since they are Christians because of their slavish adherence to the anti-man morality of the Bible, not because of God-belief, they would simply shrug these questions off.

Bruce: How do you make someone love you without changing free will?
God: Welcome to my world.

God cannot make people love him.

Bruce: Feed the hungry, and give peace on all mankind. Is that good?
God: Yes... If you're Miss America.

God doesn't think feeding the hungry and world peace is good.

God: People want me to do everything for them. What they don't realize is that they have the power. You want to see a miracle? Be the miracle.

God admits that he is relying on humans to do what he is supposed to do.

Bruce: What if I need you? What if I have questions?
God: That's your problem, Bruce. That's everybody's problem. You keep looking up.

God admits he cannot solve people's problems or he does not want to help people with his infinite power and wisdom.

In all these cases the "sob story" theodicy is apparent. A sob story is something one tells others in order to appear burdened and in need of sympathy. This is what God does in these cases. He is telling Bruce that his job is so hard that he needs to rely on humans to do things for him. He is also saying that he cannot do some things, although he would like to do so.

To see how ridiculous this is, imagine Bill Gates complaining that he doesn't have enough money to buy a toaster and that he is very disappointed about that fact. This "sob story" is completely ridiculous. If God is all-powerful, then he has no hardships. Anything he wants, is. To claim that God is experiencing hardship is either a lie or an admission of limits.

In essence, it brushes away the enormous evil in this world as an abstract issue which is beyond God's capacities. Even though God's power can move the Moon, part seas, and make people win lotteries, it cannot produce food, or give people knowledge. The "sob story" theodicy is a sad excuse for a transcendent God, but a nice, convenient rationalization for Christians to shrug at the incalculable amount of suffering in the world.

In the end of Bruce Almighty, we learn that God was really testing Bruce (nice how we cannot test God, but he can test us). He was supposed to learn unselfishness and humility.

God: Grace. You want her back?
Bruce: No. I want her to be happy, no matter what that means. I want her to find someone who will treat her with all the love she deserved from me. I want her to meet someone who will see her always as I do now, through Your eyes.
God: Now THAT'S a prayer.

Redemption accomplished, cue the swelling symphonic music, and finally a crappy movie ends.

* Apparently, a being with God's powers can learn things. Therefore God is not all-knowing. Why else would Bruce need to be "tested", if he already knew the minute he had God's powers?

* God's words here are prideful. He wants Bruce to pray like he wants. He wants Bruce to see things like he does.
And of course, why does God even want prayer, if not for vanity? If he was all-knowing, he would already know what Bruce thinks and feels. If he was all-knowing, he would know everything about our thoughts. So either prayer exists to humiliate ourselves and make God prideful, or God is not all-knowing.

It's also interesting that nowhere in Bruce Almighty is the afterlife even mentioned. Looks even more materialist to me. It looks like, in the Gospel according to Bruce, God is little more than a cosmic janitor who works by coincidences and parlor tricks.

The movie is peppered with nice Christian hatred and intolerence, like insulting Ghandi, a man who alone has done more for this world than a great majority of all the Christians who ever lived. But then again, what do you expect from Christians? Just another "sob story".

What is your opinion on the subject? If you have questions you'd like to see featured here, email me. Don't hesitate to post on the message board - go back to the main page and scroll below the articles list, or if no thread on the subject you want is available yet, see the link below called "Start a discussion on this article". Happy thinking !