The Transforming Fire of Divine Love

Summary: "...the truth that God is love lies at the heart of all divine revelation."

I am often reluctant to write about books where I know the authors. It is not because the books are not good, they often are very good. But sometimes it hard to separate the book from the larger lifework of the person that you know outside of just the book.

I didn't meet John Armstrong until about 15 years ago. We had lots of mutual friends because we were both in the Chicago area and were connected to Wheaton College. But it wasn't until I moved to suburban Atlanta that we actually met during an ecumenical meeting here that John hosted and then another conference on friendship in Chicago. We have kept in connect and I try to participate as much as possible in The Initiative, an ecumenical group that grew out of John's earlier work.

I think in many ways The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is a natural outgrowth of John Armstrong's story and his focus on Missional-Ecumenism. Part of what John Armstrong is doing in the The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is narrating his story of how his interaction with both God and other christians moved him from a more closed faith to a more open faith that both recognizes the contributions of other streams of Christianity and recognizes the importance of cooperation and understanding between those steams to become the whole Church.

The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is not a memoir, but he does use his story to illustrate his point. I read Byron Borger's review in his column at Hearts and Minds books and I think that Borger gets it right that The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is interested in not just whether God is love is a true statement, but what we do with the reality of God's love in understanding our theology and our view of the transformation of the Christian's life. I also agree with Borger's point that part of the value of Armstrong's book is that it introduces the reader to the breadth of Christian theology. This is quite quote from Borger:

Love is the key, and he uses everyone from the most dense Orthodox thinkers to dear Max Lucado to sophisticated solid writers like Fleming Rutledge to flesh this out, to underscore its centrality to our faith. He draws on so many great writers that this book actually serves as an introduction to some of the finest thinkers in church history — from the ancient fathers to Kallistos Ware to Frederick Buechner to Karl Rahner to Brad Jersak.

(I have picked up three books that were mentioned or cited so far.)

The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is going to be best for someone that has some background in theology. Not necessarily degrees, but someone who has done some reading in theology. It is not a hard book as much as it is a book that takes seriously theology, not because he sees Christianity as an intellectual exercise, but because Armstrong is grappling with the ways that we have used theology to avoid the call to love.

I think the discussion of God's love and sacrifice is helpful because it raises the problem of starting with the greek philosophical concept of perfection as being unchangeable and "without passions."

Following the greatest Greek philosophers—Aristotle, the Stoics and even the Epicureans—it was argued that “God was without passions.” Tertullian even said, “The Father is incapable of suffering in company with another.” Centuries later Anselm wrote: “Without doubt the divine nature is impassible.” Thomas Aquinas said God cannot “repent, nor be angry or sorrowful, since all these denote passion and defect.” (Note the consistent proximity of emotion with defect.) Shortly after the Protestant Reformation the idea of divine impassibility was confessed in catechisms and confessions. The Westminster Confession (1647), to cite one example, states: “There is but one living and true God, infinite in being and perfection, a most pure Spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions." (p105)

As he develops this case that this historic framing of perfection as being without emotion or unchanging has impacted the way that we understand God's love, he takes seriously the history of that understanding and the ways that our modern understanding critique the older Greek view of perfection.

On the way to exploring how John Armstrong's understanding of God's love has changed over time he there are sections on thinking about God's love in scripture, in creation, through the problem of evil, through the incarnation, the trinity, and other areas. I think that most discussions of God's love end up either with an abstract theological discussion or they end up with a discussion of mysticism or the mystics, or they end up with some type of discussion of the Church as an expression of of God's love for us.

Because of Armstrong's long history of ecumenism and his other books, I am not surprised by some of the ways he talks about the church or mysticism as modes of connection to God. This is a theological book that is trying to make the case that theology is only useful to the extent that it helps us to relationally connect with God. I am going to end with two brief quotes that reflect the point of the book.

Balthasar constantly argued that Christians often treat God’s love as a truth but only in an abstract sense. (As you’ve seen this is what I did for several decades.) Balthasar reasons that for many of us love is not a truth that we allow to impact our daily lives. This is the very thesis of my book. We must allow God’s love to radically impact our lives every day, all the time. (p185)

and

The unnamed author of the classic The Cloud of Unknowing put this well. God can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. (p247)

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-transforming-fi...