My latest Friends Letter, October, 2026

THE TRANSFORMING FIRE OF DIVINE LOVE: MY LONG, SLOW JOURNEY INTO THE LOVE OF GOD. By John Armstrong, foreword by Wes Granberg-Michaelson. Cascade Books, 2025. Pp. xviii + 185. Paper, $27.00.

The Transforming Fire of Divine Love, John Armstrong’s most personal volume to date, is at once a richly textured theological memoir-essay and spiritual autobiography, presented as the culmination of what he calls in the subtitle “my long, slow journey into the love of God.” Writing from an ecumenical spirit, Armstrong poses a disarmingly straightforward question: if 1 John 4:8, […]

Friends Letter

August 2026

Dear Friends –

How do I know the character and purpose of God in my life?

For me the answer to this question has proven to be simple yet profound. Jesus is the perfect expression of God’s thought, character and will. In Jesus Christ alone God expresses himself as “outrageous love” (Greg Boyd). Jesus is for us, never against us. We may be undeserving but we were deeply loved long before we ever realized it. This is what makes the fire of divine love so deeply transforming (cf. The Transforming Fire of Divine Love, 2025).

I am persuaded, almost daily at this point in my life, that most Christians have derived their understanding of God from their private experience. In some cases this is the result of a type of philosophizing that is done without the perspective of the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ as perfect love. Even more prevalent is Plato’s immense influence over personal doctrinal beliefs, often formed without a deep understating of the plot and story of the Bible itself. It never ceases to amaze me how often I have heard popular conservative […]

July, 2026

Dear Friends –

It is clear to even the most ardent fundamentalist that Christ is bound up with human suffering. Yet traditional theism has argued that God is beyond suffering. Thus we have a doctrine called impassibility. In this idea the Father could not have suffered in the dying of Jesus because this would mean God was changing in some way. Change in God was simply not possible. In popular theological expression this is where the “omni” words show up; e.g. omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, etc.

The more I did my research for writing The Transforming Fire of Divine Love (2025) the more I saw how wrong this emphasis on the nature of God had to be. I now believe that the suffering of God is faithful to the Bible and good theology. Theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann added much to my understanding as I came to see the errors of these ideas in theology. I believe God suffers with us in our suffering. I find this liberating and empowering.

I have often thought of Christ’s suffering in our/my sufferings over my latter years. During the recent gathering […]

April, 2026

Dear Friends,

What you and I believe about God has immense impact upon how we live and die. But is there a revealed formula (theology) for how we should understand God? What attributes should we ascribe to God? Is there a theology of God found in ideas like omniscience, omnipresence, or perhaps omnipotence? These words, which appear in the front of almost every theology of God I encountered for decades, are clearly not found in the Bible itself. Yet these word massively color our thoughts about God.

In my tradition we said we believed only what was revealed in the Bible. In fact, we used words like “Bible believing Christian” to define ourselves over against other Christians. But is this enough? The Bible clearly has much to say about who God is: God is holy (Isaiah 6:3); God is light (1 John 1:5); and, God is love (1 John 4:8). Hundreds of biblical texts could be added to these few. I remember hearing people say things like: “If the Bible says it, I believe it and that settles it.” Well, it doesn’t take a degree in theology […]

January 15, 2026

I have mentioned on a number of occasions how I have adjusted my worship life to sync with the liturgical church calendar. This has been a process for me over twenty-five years. I find this approach deeply satisfying. I will give one example here; the liturgy for January 11 had the title: The Baptism of Our Lord. The Gospel reading and preaching text was Matthew 3:13-17.

The prayer before the sermon went as follows:

O God our Father, at the baptism of Jesus you proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit. Make all who are baptized into Christ faithful to their calling to be your daughters and sons, and empower us all with your Spirit, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen

I do not recall praying anything like this in worship in my free-church evangelical background. (There have been friends in this background who have embraced a more liturgical approach.) But hearing the Gospel read, and then praying this particular prayer, brought me into the […]