Home » Mind & Soul » Atheism » The Gospel according to Bruce

The Gospel according to Bruce

© Francois Tremblay

Before I begin, I'd like to apologize for the length of this article. Since there are many quotes from the movie, it is not as long as it looks.

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.