Having personally known Bruce Gibson for over 10 years, I know he is compassionate, kind, loving & caring. He recently published, “Rediscovering the Good news of the Gospel," after reading it, I feel It would be shameful for anyone in our community to slander Bruce’s reputation and regrettable if church leaders “banned” this book based on its provocative perspective, I want to be considerate with my comments about Bruce’s book because I believe his intentions were wholesome and he’s a man of integrity.
Bruce’s book is worthwhile because there are too many people who are insecure about God’s love and who work hard to earn their salvation, which is basically Bruce’s objective, but secondly, we quickly cut off people who question our views and we have lost the art of dialogue or the ability to embrace people who we think are wrong, therefore are we able to accept believers we disagree with, are we able to refrain from judging them, and can we reexamine our core essentials of the Faith? That is the ultimate value of reading this book because it’s possible to critique a concept without criticizing other Christians, we can disagree about doctrine without demonizing other disciples -- many people are either overconfident or completely insecure in their beliefs, they either choose to avoid differences of opinion based on the fact that they are certain of what they know, or, they are fearful that the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.
Being misguided and mistaken isn’t the equivalent of being malicious or misguiding others, Bruce asserts that the blood shed at Jesus’ death wasn’t for our forgiveness, in the parable of the unforgiving servant, he wasn’t tortured when the King handed him over to the torturers, in fact many of the rudimentary elements of your traditional faith will need to be re-examined. You will find yourself opening your Bible and asking yourself, Why do I think what I think, does sin really separate humanity from God above or doesn’t it, is God motivated to act in human affairs by our prayer requests, is Bruce correct that hell possibly doesn’t exist and atheists who reject God outright are forgiven before they were even born?
In the age of Wikipedia, WebMD, Legalzoom, and the wild wild West of AI, we have severed the strongholds of elites/experts and Bruce readily admits he’s an attorney, not an academically trained theologian -- I would add you don’t have to be trained in New Testament Greek to understand the English translation of the Bible, but you do need an education in Greek if you want to make arguments from the Greek or reference the Greek to argue your case. There are a variety of past tenses, for example, “I bought vodka, I wasn’t planning on drinking it all but once I opened the bottle I drank it all and I got drunk, when I woke up hungover, I felt remorse and now I regret the whole thing.” Greek has the aorist (a simple past action) the imperfect (a continuous past action) and the perfect (a past action with ongoing results) each distinct tense conveys nuances of completed, ongoing, or stative actions in the past; these distinctions are absent in Bruce’s book.
The book is implying inclusivism, that everyone is already forgiven because grace is basically boundless and irresistible, asserting his confidence that even after a person dies they still have hope of a second chance, it’s not simply “Once saved always saved,” instead it’s all saved always saved, Charles Manson, Adolf Hitler, pedophiles, atheists one and all. But being assured of salvation that’s available to all, does this make it automatic to all?
In an effort to demystify God and make Him fully comprehensible, to erase the dreaded question of how could an all-loving God send anyone to hell for all of eternity by reducing God’s love to a one dimensional “either/or” and rejecting the “both/and” elements Bruce unintentionally creates a neolegalism, unconscious that Universalism undermines our free will and binds God contractually to have to forgive, depriving God’s discretion, robbing Him of His prerogatives to do as He pleases, and it erodes the “Lord’s Prayer” since God knows what we need and what others need so don’t ask because if you do ask, you misunderstand God’s heart.
The pain of paradox is front and center here, what do we do when two truths appear to contradict each other and we find it pure emotional torture to acquiesce? For example, how do we reconcile God’s demand for justice with His merciful love? When we are confronted by a doctrine that confuses us, or that makes us uncomfortable, psychologically we create a compromise to ease the tension we can’t resolve internally or intellectually.
Even though I found his perspective unpersuasive and unconvincing, the book was thought provoking and is a compelling case to reexamine the necessity of an ownership of our faith because a complacent faith is a stagnant faith and once every so often it’s beneficial to have your perspectives challenged, something to jar you into questioning what you believe and why. It truly is essential that we return to the Bible and review, periodically, our understanding of primary essential doctrines.
Click here for original article in the Timesnews
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