My Conversation with John Armstrong on the Transforming Fire of God-Love
Phil Miglioratti @ Reimagine.Network
"My central thesis lies in this straightforward conclusion -
the truth that God is love lies at the heart of all divine revelation."
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"I submit that "God is Love" is the most astonishing statement in all the Bible."
{Headline Quotes are from the author}
PHIL>>> Your latest book, "The Transforming Fire of Divine Love," is so much more than a theological reassessment of a foundational doctrine. Watching the deconstructing of evangelicalism makes this journey an essential "start-here" for Christ-followers and church ministry leaders who pursue "being transformed by a renewed mindset" (Romans 12:2). Is this your manifesto to the Church in the 21st century?
JOHN>>> It is not so much a manifesto as my attempt to pour out of my heart, late in life, for the recovery of a living faith rooted in the nature of God. When faith is rooted in our feelings, our opinions and biases which are often rooted in confused doctrinal ideas or mistaken appeals for the wrong type of fear, the result will always be something less than life-transforming grace. The Scriptures plainly say: “the love of Christ urges us on” (2 Cor. 5:14). This means love urges us to live for Christ. I have a plaque on my bedroom wall that once hung in my family home in Tennessee. My mom, a devout Christian, gave it to me before she died. Some readers know this saying: “Only one life will soon be past, only what’s done for Christ will last.” I will truly do what will last if the love of Christ motivates me deeply. Fear will not do this. Paul writes that “the love of Christ . . . surpasses knowledge, so that (we) may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). I heard so many formulas about being filled with the fullness of God. Most were too simplistic, even trite.
And Paul prays for the church “that the Lord (would) direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ” (2 These. 3:5). This is my prayer for the church, especially in the parched and confused church of North America. The way we persevere and follow Christ must always be by love. “Keep yourselves in the love of God; look forward to the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life” (Jude 21). If God is love then all that protects us and lead us into His presence will be nothing more or less than love.
When I truly saw how little we speak and appeal to people to live by the love of God the more I saw that we were not being transformed by the fire of divine love. My title reflects this. It is drawn from several important biblical references to God’s character as love. Even judgement is the result of this divine love if you understand the Bible.
"Make no mistake about this - you must discover for yourself that God is love!"
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"We must know the God we believe in.
There are many views of God that cause far too many Christians to be confused about who God is.
I was forced to rethink the character of God."
PHIL>>> For those who think "Jesus loves me; this I (already) know" ... you present a bold challenge: "I hope you will ask questions; they can lead you into divine love by firing your imagination for what is beyond natural reason. But first you must open your mind and heart to begin this journey into love." You seem to be implying we have turned this simple but essential core truth ("God is love") into a simplistic assent that actually extinguishes the transforming power of that truth. You make it clear that "God is love" cannot be merely a memorized scripture passage; it is an unfathomable description of the core DNA of our Creator. A this-changes-everything revelation.
JOHN>>> I do believe we have turned John’s message that “God is love” into a simplistic formula. In the process I tried to correct this by stressing various attributes of God. I resonated with divine holiness ( still do) but saw it as the corrective to this error regarding love. I now believe the real corrective is to see more clearly what ”God is love” means. If love is who God is then love will lead us to God in a way that will re-center our thought and life on Christ alone.
If God IS indeed love then we should always think of God as LOVE, not as some combination of things. God us not as the sum total of a string of so- called attributes. (This is really more about philosophy than theology.) I adopt an expression that helps me with this that I learned from two Catholic women from the 20th century who said we should speak and think of this love as “God-Love.”
"God cannot be discovered through logic and science though both have a powerful role to play in modern life.
Faith is not mastering words or Bible verses.
True faith is an inner confidence grounded in what we can only see (perceive) dimly (1 Corinthians 13:12)."
PHIL>>> Is it possible that since the Renaissance, evangelical systematic theology has been overly "enlightened" by this worldview that is based more on our reasoning and critical thinking than the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit? Are we trusting in our interpretations and explanations of God's Word more than an unceasing prayer-fueled conversation with God? Has our devotion shifted from our relationship with our Lord and Savior to our statements of faith about our Lord and Savior? We seem to avoid mystery, as if we have air-tight answers to every doctrine, and are devoid of theological humility; unnecessary since our version of Christianity is without flaw.
JOHN>>> Not only is it possible I believe this is precisely what has happened. When I began my research three years ago I read the Church Fathers, the theologians of both the Christian East and West, the medieval mystics, the Protestant Reformers, charismatics and modern evangelicals, etc. I began to see that what we call “systematic theology” was a often a man-made system we used to explain a great deal that we should accept by faith. We need to accept “mystery” for what it is and not try to explain everything by our various categories. A great deal of this, as I said above, is about philosophy more than theology.
Whole movements have been constructed propounding systems of theology that may well contain truth but are NOT themselves “the way, the truth and the life.” Only Jesus is this Truth. You will never understand Jesus until you see that his life was lived by love and he always revealed the God who loves. Let me explain. The God and Father of Jesus is a different God altogether from the formal definitions and logical treatises that we write. The God and Father of Jesus is the God who sets himself above the formal and the logical, the merciless correctness of the law. But why?
God proclaims a “better” righteousness, and may even justify a transgressor of the law. The God who loves shows that the commandments exist for the sake of the human person, and not the human person for the sake of the commandments. This is the God who does not overthrow the existing legal order and the whole social system, but rather tempers it for humanity’s sake; a God who consequently wants to have the barriers of categorization between good people and and bad people, friends and foes alike, neighbors and strangers, workers and unemployed, removed. This God is merciful and kind because he is love. It is in this way that the God of Jesus puts himself on the side of the weak, the poor and the sick, and even–unlike the self-righteous–on the side of the irreligious, the immoral and the godless.
I do not think most Christians I know actually believe this is true but a reading of the New Testament shows that this is true. God is kind, wonderfully and eternally kind, to human beings made in his image and likeness.
"What if Jesus came to introduce us to our father who already loves us?"
PHIL>>> Lately I've been thinking we have an inadequate comprehension of the incarnation. Yes, Jesus came to model the message of the Kingdom of God. Certainly Jesus's death on the cross defeated the power of sin and death. But what if the role Jesus took on was also to announce he came to achieve God's plan of salvation by grace through faith, and declared "it is finished." Could his announcement be the grand revelation of the God who is love? Is this what Paul means when he wrote: "the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all" (Titus 2:11). Is this the amazing grace we cherish and sing about, that judgement and justice are real but no longer eternal threats, having been consumed by God-Love? Could it be that God-Love is not just available to those who hear the announcement but to all, because "the Lord says, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess the truth and glorify me" (Romans 14:11)?
JOHN>>> This is such a powerful question. Once you see that creation, redemption and final restoration are profoundly inter-connected, and all because of divine love, then your life will not be transformed. Before we existed God made us because he loved us. When we turned away God didn’t stop loving us. When we falter he remains love for us. We did not become refuse and rejected rebels. We remained his own and he longed to reveal love to us. When we see him in the age to come we will see how glorious he is in his love. When Jesus said,”It is finished” he was not saying the Father had been paid off so we that now we might be redeemed. He was saying that he had finished what the Father had desired for us all along. Both his life and death show us the love of God. Our evangelical theories of the atonement seem to demand a “payment” be made to the angry Father because we we under His wrath. But what if we were under his love and Jesus came to show us how deeply the Father loved us and how much he wanted us to come home as prodigals who had gone into the far country. Indeed, the parable of the Prodigal Son pictures exactly what I am saying here. This parable is the very essence of the gospel as I( understand it.
And what does it mean to Jesus came to “bring salvation to all?” I am not convinced that all will finally be saved but I am convinced God never ceases to love those created in his image. The idea that God created a massive number of people (approximately seven billion now) who will die in their sin and never see God strikes me as missing something basic when we see the “whole message” of the Bible regarding God’s intentions for human persons. I have seen this in my mission work in non-Christian lands and cultures though my actual dialogue with persons who were not Christians. Now, do not misunderstand me. Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life.” He is not a way but THE way. He is the unique and only Savior of humankind.
"The Christian West and the Christian East do not understand our moral failure in precisely the same way.
This distinction can actually effect how we hear the story of God as love."
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"We must continually resist prooftexting our ideas of God with Bible verses
if we are to find our way to the biblical truth of God's love.
We must begin by focusing our attention on who God is."
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"Christianity begins in God's heart, not in the Creed."
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"If our doctrine of God is wrong, almost everything else we believe will be wrong."
PHIL>>> It seems to me literally no two Christians who believe in the Word of God, have precisely the same beliefs and apply every scripture in the same way, and yet, we are one in Christ. This understanding should call us to a deep humility that even the most accurate of theologies is not perfect. If everyone's theology is weak or even incorrect at some points, we should listen and learn, watch for and seek wisdom from one another. In my opinion, this would exponentially increase, what you have so aptly labeled, "missional ecumenism" ... unity that focuses on our common mission, not our differing theologies ... because I am not inerrant. No one is.
JOHN>>> I confess that this idea of inerrancy baffled me when I first studied it in my theological education in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I knew Carl F. H. Henry and Harold Lindsell, two of the most prominent leaders of the call for embracing this idea. I had to struggled with this a lot. I began to see what I would now see clearly: What is the point of affirming an inerrant original text without that text? It seemed like turning in circles to me. It still does. I have never doubted that the Holy Scripture is a faithful witness to what God wanted us to know. But we see it as “in a mirror” shrouded at times in human darkness. Face it we must interpret the Bible. But if this is true then whose interpretations do we believe? I once said, “Believe the plain sense of the Bible.” But what is that after all? Most so-called cults believe in inerrancy and yet they deny the basic traditional doctrines that have sustained the church for 1600 plus years.
Inerrancy only invites us to quarrel about “our views” and how right we think they are. We develop what is called a confirmation bias and refuse to think and grow. This has created a multitude of divisions over things the church never seriously debated. Evangelicals have added to these divisions and continue to create new ones.
"Carl F. H. Henry, called by TIME magazine
'the leading theologian of the nation's evangelical flank"
insisted that 'God is not a vague universal cosmic love
but [rather] is wrathful toward fallen humanity and needs to be placated.'"
PHIL>>> This explanation describes an authoritarian-king or a warrior-conqueror, not a God who expresses love because that God is, in essence, Love. God, our Savior; not God who demanded a sacrificial lamb, but God who became the sacrificial lamb. It seems to me, evangelical theology reflects an authoritarian, law-and-order mindset that supersedes God's love as paramount. Have we latched on too tightly to the vivid descriptions of fire and brimstone, eternal and excruciating punishment? Have we limited the scope of, by interpreting too lightly, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them" (2 Corinthians 5:19). Have we limited God's love to motivating Christians to go global to reach those not included in God's love? Is It possible the apostle Paul is announcing the reconciliation every human needs has been achieved (in and by Christ); forgiven unless you opt out?
JOHN>>> Wow, this question, at least for me, answers itself. As you can see in my answers above I am with you 100% in embracing this direction. I heard God’s love preached at a missions conference where I was told if you do not go to the end of the earth, or support those who do, you are not showing love for Christ and the lost. I have lived long enough to see that this type of motivation will fail eventually. I have witnessed major Christian missions organizations decline and fail in my lifetime. (I lived in Wheaton, Illinois, where many had their headquarters but are not downsized in major ways or they are gone altogether.) I very much believe in world missions. I just do not believe you can move people any constant appeals to love that really rely on guilt and a type of manipulation. There was a missionary in my congregation, decades ago, who preached a sermon before he left for his field, telling us we should know that millions were falling into hell because we did not care enough for them. Not only did he fail but his life fell apart and he left his wife and family.
"Love is not a truth we allow to impact our daily lives.
We must allow God's love to radically impact our lives.
Every day. All the time."
PHIL>>> John, from your pastoral perspective, if God-Love is central and radical, how should church ministry leaders begin to rethink-recalibrate-refocus:
JOHN>>>
- Worship: we should embrace a liturgy that is centered on God-Love and our music, words and reflect divine love in every way possible.
- Discipleship: Making disciples is teaching them observe what Jesus commanded. Everything he taught was rooted in divine love so we must make this central to our doctrine and formation.
- Fellowship: We can form social, spiritual and mission contexts framed by love, especially love that is practiced.
- Stewardship: People give and share when they love. God-Love presses us to give.
- Leadership: A good leader will live God-Love and appeal for response based on this love.
- Evangelism: I have always had a passion to share the good news. I still do. I now see that my motive for this is love and my way of doing it is rooted in love.
"The more I read, the more I did not understand."
PHIL>>> One more insight or challenge or question we need to ponder...
JOHN>>> How can I begin a loved-based life for renewal in the church? I look around me all the time and ask God to help me show his love to those I see. My prayer life has truly changed. I am writing a new book that can be used to share the gospel of divine love more simply.
"I pray that you, my reader, will embrace this message of divine love as your kairos moment
PHIL>>> John, what prayer would you invite us to pray with you ...
JOHN>>> God of love, you have shown mercy to me and the world. You are eternally and unbelievable kind and gracious. Help me to see your are love, not just as a doctrine but as a macro-truth that will change the church and the world.
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BONUS CONTENT
√ to view/purchase "Transforming Fire"
√ then scroll for John's previous published books
√ for John's videos, including an intro to "Transforming Fire"
✔️ to read my interview with John on "Tear Down These Walls"
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