John’s October Friends Letter

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, 16 declares that “God is love,” what does it mean to believe in this truth, and more importantly, how can believers experience God’s love as a healing stream flowing in and through their inner being? The book’s main argument is that God’s love is not merely one divine attribute among many but the very being of God; this truth reshapes every locus of divine revelation—creation, Trinity, Christology, atonement, sanctification, and eschatology—and most importantly, transforms the inner being of believers who share in the divine love experienced through union with Christ. Armstrong, an ordained Reformed Church in America minister whose ecumenical formation now includes Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholic spirituality, and the English mystics, develops his claim across fifteen chapters organized around Scripture’s recurring metaphor of “fire.”

The first motif is “God-Love” (Lubich’s Dio-Amore), a hyphenated term Armstrong adopts to signal that deity and charity are inseparable. The second is the “transforming fire” of the title—drawn from Hebrews 12:29, the burning bush, and Pentecost—which images divine love as both welcoming and purifying, leading not merely to moral improvement but to the Spirit’s work of deification (theosis). Through grace, believers become partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4) and what God is: love. A third motif is the cataphatic/apophatic balance Armstrong commends from the East: confession and silence, defining and unknowing, must coexist if love is to be honored as both nameable and inexhaustible. The author successfully retrieves voices that Reformed and broadly evangelical readers seldom encounter together: Maximus the Confessor, Gregory Palamas, Kallistos Ware, and David Bentley Hart appear alongside Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jürgen Moltmann, Brennan Manning, and Julian of Norwich. This ecumenical breadth, drawing resources from various traditions into conversation around God-Love, is the book’s most generative contribution—particularly the chapters on creation as the overflow of triune love, the critique of Hellenistic divine impassibility (compassion freely embraced rather than passion suffered), and the recovery of perichoresis as the ontological ground for “God is love”. Pastorally, the closing chapters on Abba-intimacy, the four “misconceptions” of God, and the experiential spirituality of the English mystics offer a luminous itinerary from theology to prayer and worship.

One of the book’s boldest highlights is Armstrong’s critique of penal substitutionary atonement as the dominant—and, in his view, disfiguring—Western account, especially within his own Reformed tradition (13). Armstrong argues that the cross reveals, rather than placates, the Father’s love, overcoming sin, death, and the devil, opening the way to Christ’s resurrection and believers’ deification. Armstrong rightly resists a transactional caricature in which the Father punishes the Son, and his preference for “satisfaction of God’s truth” and Christus Victor is theologically defensible. Yet the judicial aspect of Christ’s death remains scripturally evident and cannot be dismissed, since it grounds believers’ justified standing from which they abide in the Trinity’s perichoretic love and participate in God. A similar caution applies to his hope for apokatastasis: while Julian’s “all shall be well” is thoughtfully retrieved, the Johannine and Apocalypse’s judgment language warrants more direct treatment if final reconciliation is to be commended as a legitimate Christian hope. More extensive exegetical engagement, though not the author’s primary aim, would make Armstrong’s already compelling constructive proposals more persuasive to the Reformed and evangelical readers he hopes to reach.

Despite these minor concerns, The Transforming Fire of Divine Love is a biblically grounded, warm, ecumenically generous, and pastorally serious book. Though aimed not at academics but serious readers who reflect on God and His everlasting love, it is written in accessible prose with an ample bibliography. It will serve undergraduates, seminarians, clergy and ordinary believers seeking an introduction to East–West and broader cross-traditional dialogue around divine love and offer researchers a valuable case study of late-career Reformed retrieval of truths within the whole Christian church, especially Orthodox and Christian mystical traditions. Its most enduring gift may be its insistence that doctrine and devotion are one act—the soul’s response to a fire that warms before it burns and transforms all those it touches.

Brian Siu Kit Chiu
Logos Evangelical Seminary

With love for you, my friends,

News and Prayer Requests

1. I have finally begun my attempt to write a memoir of my journey in ecumenism that is shaped by friendship. While I have still not done a lot of writing I believe I have at least begun.
2. My daughter and her boys moved into a home only 0.3 miles from our house. This has proven to be a great gift. I once again have a quiet space and the boys have their own rooms and a large back yard. Someone asked me if this was a “bitter-sweet” scenario. I said, “Not at all. It is a ‘sweet-sweet’ one.” Give thanks.
3. I continue to spend fun time with my twins. Below is a photo taken last week after a soccer match. I cherish this photo.
4. The mission of The Initiative continues to give me lasting joy. Pray for Scott Brill and the council of leaders.

Recent Reading

1. Make Your Home in This Luminous Darkness (2026), James K. A. Smith. I mentioned this book last month and finished it on September 1st. It is my favorite theology book of 2026.
2. The Cloud of Unknowing (ed., 2009), Carmen Acevedo Butcher (translator). I attempted to read this Medieval classic in the past but this translation finally helped me profit immensely from the book. It is not an easy read unless you’ve learned the practice of contemplation. It has helped me “see” God in “the darkness,” as James K.A. Smith explains so well.
3. Pillar: How Muslim Friends Led Me Closer to Jesus (2021), Rachel Pieh Jones. Rachel moved to a Muslim country to do Christian relief work with her husband and family. She beautifully tells how her actual experience in a Muslim country changed her theologically and spiritually. It is a simple read but a great place to start if you are willing to rethink a great deal of what you’ve falsely assumed about Islam.
4. Everyone Belongs to God: Discovering the Hidden Christ (2005), Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt. In 2014 I met the Bruderhoff Community in New York. I was impressed with their communal way of working and sharing. I began to read more by those who were influenced by their way of life going back to 19th century Germany. This book provides some ways we can understand how Christ can be seen in people who do not yet name him Lord.
5. Separation of Church and Hate (2025), John Fugelsang. A solid critique of evangelical misunderstanding of the teaching and practice of Jesus. Sadly, books of this sort are needed in our time.
6. Imperium (2006) and Conspirata (2010), Robert Harris. Two novels, in a three-volume treatment of Roman history, situated in the last half century B.C. The emphasis is on the lead character, Cicero. The story and key figures are all revealed by the use of fiction which draws you into their lives and actions quite wonderfully. I have a much deeper understanding of the Roman way of life leading up to the time of Jesus.