Faith Foundations Restored
The God We Were Taught
Interview with Will Bourne
The conversation opens in a place many believers recognize before they have words for it: loving Jesus while quietly bracing themselves around God. The language of faith may still be present, yet underneath it can live the expectation that God is volatile, distant, or waiting for failure.
Will Bourne invites the reader to slow down and examine the image of God beneath inherited doctrine. The movement is not away from holiness, judgment, or truth. It is toward the Father Jesus reveals, whose authority can be trusted and whose love does not require fear to make it serious.
What led you to write The God We Were Taught?
I kept encountering people who had not stopped believing in God, but who had learned to brace themselves around Him. They loved Jesus, yet somewhere beneath their faith was the assumption that the Father was harder, angrier, or less approachable. I wanted to take that tension seriously. This book grew from the conviction that many people are not rejecting God. They are struggling with an image of God that does not look like Jesus.
What is the central claim of the book?
The central claim is that Jesus does not protect us from the Father. Jesus reveals the Father. If we have seen Jesus, we have seen what God is like. His mercy is not an exception to God’s character. His patience, authority, holiness, and movement toward the broken are the character of God made visible. That does not make God smaller. It makes our understanding of Him more coherent.
What do you mean when you say some believers learned to fear God while loving Jesus?
Many Christians instinctively experience Jesus as safe and the Father as dangerous. They trust Jesus to calm God down, change His mind, or stand between them and His anger. They may never say it that plainly, but it appears in the way they pray, interpret failure, and respond to suffering. That inner division makes trust almost impossible. Jesus did not come to convince an unwilling Father to love us. He came because the Father already did.
How do you distinguish reverence from fear-based formation?
Reverence recognizes the weight, holiness, and authority of God. Fear-based formation teaches people to expect emotional danger, rejection, humiliation, or abandonment. Reverence can produce wonder, humility, and obedience. Terror produces hiding, performance, and self-protection. They are not the same fruit, and we should not treat them as though they come from the same root.
How should readers approach difficult biblical passages that seem to portray God differently?
First, they should not pretend the difficulty is not there. Honest faith does not require intellectual denial. We read carefully, pay attention to context, recognize the human process through which Scripture was received, and refuse to isolate a passage from the larger witness that culminates in Jesus. The question is not how to make every text easy. The question is how to read every text faithfully as a follower of Christ.
Does the book deny God’s wrath or judgment?
No. It asks us to stop defining wrath and judgment in ways that contradict God’s character. Wrath is not divine loss of control. It is love’s settled opposition to what destroys the beloved. Judgment is not God becoming cruel. It is truth brought into the open, evil confronted, victims vindicated, and creation set right. Love that never opposes destruction is not love. But opposition to destruction is not the same as hatred of people.
What does “justice that restores” mean?
It means justice is concerned with more than inflicting pain on the person who caused harm. Biblical justice tells the truth, protects the vulnerable, confronts wrongdoing, requires accountability, and seeks repair. Restoration is not pretending consequences do not matter. It is refusing to confuse revenge with righteousness. God’s justice aims toward the healing of what sin has damaged.
What changes when someone begins to believe God is trustworthy?
They can become honest. They no longer have to manage God’s mood or protect themselves from Him. Prayer becomes relationship instead of surveillance. Obedience becomes a response to love instead of a strategy for staying safe. Repentance becomes a return, not a public humiliation. Rest becomes possible because identity no longer depends on constant spiritual performance.
How does this volume connect to the books that follow?
Volume I establishes the character of God. Volume II asks what salvation means if God is not the danger Jesus came to rescue us from. Then the series moves through sin, forgiveness, judgment, Scripture, church, kingdom, and the future that forms us. Each volume addresses a familiar doctrine, but the same question remains underneath them all: does this belief look like the God revealed in Jesus?
A Closing Invitation
The invitation is to bring the God we inherited back into the light of Jesus. Let trust grow through truthful attention, honest questions, and a willingness to release images of God that contradict the character Christ reveals. From here, Saved From What? asks what salvation means when the God who saves is truly trustworthy.
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