Restless Wanderings

Over the weekend, Bruce Gerencser shut down his popular blog Restless Wanderings.  Bruce has battled health problems including multiple sclerosis and fibromyalgia for several months (maybe years).  Although he loves to write and interact, the pain of simply typing on a keyboard became too much.

For most of his adult life, Bruce worked as a fundamentalist Baptist preacher.  He believed the King James Version was God’s Perfect Inerrant Word.  In the later years of his ministry he subscribed to an intensely conservative version of Calvinist theology.  He gave over his professional life to preaching and evangelizing, and took his family along for the ride.   He founded and pastored several churches, including some with very large memberships.  There’s no doubt Bruce was a true believer.

But somewhere along the way Bruce did something he wasn’t supposed to do.  He picked up a book about the Bible. It wasn’t a book that reenforced the hopelessly absurd world of creationist, fundamentalist Christianity, but a book that explained the Bible’s textual and literary history.  And then he read another book, and another, and another.  Eventually Bruce reached  a conclusion that destroyed the basis for his fundamentalist faith: the Bible is not God’s Perfect Inerrant Word.  Instead, it’s a collection of books written by sincere men who believed they had encountered the Divine, men who would be fascinated and confused by modern fundamentalist doctrine, men who had unknowingly contributed to a library of profoundly influential writings, but writings that were nonetheless flawed.

And so Bruce became an agnostic.  He was sympathetic to Univeralism, but traditional Christianity had gone out the window with the inerrant Bible.  My God, he even joined the Democratic Party!  Friends and family (not immediate family) shunned him, and accused him of being under some kind of Satanic spell.  His real sin was reading too many books.  But his wife and children loved him, and Bruce had too much support, intelligence, curiosity, and experience to keep his mouth shut.

Through his blogs, first Bruce Doppings then Restless Wanderings, Bruce waged a relentless attack on the insanity of fundamentalist thinking.  He also wrote deeply moving posts about his personal struggles and his past.  His writing inspired untold numbers to stare fundamentalism in the face and no longer be afraid of it.  And although his posts were models of careful, rational thought, they were never cold.  There was an infectious warmth in the way Bruce approached people through his writing, probably a residual effect of his days as a minister.  He made readers feel like old friends.  And he practiced what he preached: he accepted people as they were, religious or not.

Bruce would laugh at the idea that God had used years of hardship to produce something good in the end.  Yet it’s difficult to ignore the enormous impact he had on so many lives through the Internet, an impact made possible because of his extensive experience in fundamentalism.  I do not know if Bruce will appear again on the Internet.   He values his family above all else, and he wants to enjoy his life.  So his decision to stop blogging, facebooking, emailing, etc. is reasonably selfish, and I support him.  But I hope to hear from him again, and I hope his circumstances change in the right way to allow him to start blogging again.  There’s a sinful world that would do well to listen to him.