How John Mark Comer’s View of God Shapes His Spiritual Formation

A Long But Hopefully Charitable Reading of John Mark Comer's Theology of God

A number of weeks ago, I listened to a sermon by John Mark Comer on the sovereignty of God and the problem of evil. I was intrigued since Comer sets himself up against John Piper, John Calvin, and Augustine in his sermon. Comer for his part cites Greg Boyd, David Bentley Hart, and N.T. Wright to argue for his side.

As I listened and then re-listened, I heard Comer rejecting the doctrine of God’s meticulous providence—the idea that God is sovereign over or controls all things. Instead, Comer argued that competing wills on earth clash with God’s will in heaven. We are free agents, and Satan himself vies against God’s will. And more than that, the reality of chaos or accidents loom large (i.e., what Comer calls natural evil). So, he reasons, God cannot be the cause of evil, since evil humans, spiritual powers, or natural evil cause evil.

Given how popular Comer has become especially among young people, I wanted to know more abut him. So I began reading his books and listening to his sermons. In his Practicing the Way, Comer diagnoses the malaise of many Christians and points believers to a transformational apprenticeship to Jesus. In his newly re-released God Has a Name, Comer argues that our spiritual formation relies on our theology of God. As the subtitle reads, What you believe about God will shape who you become. In this latter book, Comer approvingly cites Tozer’s well-known phrase, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us” (Name, 19).

I agree, and I also agree with Comer’s affirmation of another well-known principle: “we become what we worship” (Name, 20). As I began to read and listen to Comer more and more, I realized that it would be helpful to analyze his doctrine of God because, as Comer argues, our view of God transforms us.

Yet I didn’t want to write a fly-by-night overview of Comer’s doctrine of God. So I spent time listening carefully to what he had to say about God so that I could better appraise his practice of spiritual formation. And given that many churches are using his Practicing the Way church curriculum, I believed it was worth writing a longish article on his theology.

I also wanted to charitably and yet critically read his work as a theologian who agrees whole-heartedly with Comer that we become what we worship. In the following article then, I attempt to outline his doctrine of God, so that readers can better appraise his teachings on spiritual formation.

In brief, I outline his view of God and evil, his general teaching about God, and how entering into the inner emotional life of God grounds our spiritual formation. Afterwards, I will explain how Comer misunderstands the Augustinian and reformational teaching on God, and so comes to unorthodox conclusions about him. 

1. Comer on God and Evil

John Mark Comer outlines his clearest objections to the Augustinian and Reformed view of God in a polemical sermon entitled Why? In this sermon, Comer argues that the will of God means God’s moral intention, and he believes Augustine (AD 354–430) redefined the theological definition of God’s will. After Augustine, Comer avers, the will of God comes to be understood to mean that God’s will controls all things. For Comer, John Calvin continues this Augustinian view of the will of God.

Near the beginning of his sermon, Comer plays a long clip of John Piper who (in the clip) says that God wills people to die (2:00). Comer takes offence at language of God being in control and sovereign over all things. He even calls this view dangerous. While this doctrine gives comfort at the beginning, Comer explains, when evil happens, how can we say that God’s will is still good (~ 5:00)? The reality of disease and relationship breakdowns make God’s meticulous providence hard to believe.

Against the notion that when someone dies, God wills it to be so (6:25), Comer points to 1 Corinthians 15:25–26 as evidence that death is the last enemy of God. He claims many things happen that God does not will; “God does not always get his way” because of human “free will.” Evil is the by-product of the creative freedom of humans (~7:40).

Comer’s reasoning works in this way: Death is evil. God does not will evil. Therefore, God does not will the death of anyone. Sin, death, and evil are caused by free will, not God. He points to 1 John 5:19 to show that the whole world is under the control of the evil one—and points to God’s battle with the evil one. We are in a battle and there is war on earth (8:20).

His theodicy (citing Dr. Gerry Breshears) works like this: given that Jesus teaches us to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” God’s will must be done in heaven but not on earth. God’s will does not always happen because there are at least five wills at play on earth (11:40).

• First, there is God’s will. God is king, and he does what he wants. God sometimes co-opts evil for good ends too like the Babylon exile. But these times are exceptions to the rule, says Comer, in opposition to the view he attributes to John Piper (13:15).

• The second will is ours.

• The third is other people’s wills. Importantly for Comer, some people are evil, and they do evil things by their free agency.

• Fourth, there is Satan’s will. God is at war with Satan, and the world is under Satan’s control (for now), he claims. He quotes Greg Boyd positively, which points to demonic creatures with free will and the capacity to do evil. He thinks C.S. Lewis illustrates the point well in Screwtape Letters.

• Fifth, Comer affirms the reality of chaos or random chance. For him, chaos or chance defines what natural evil is. He affirms accidents and luck. He denies that everything happens for a reason. According to Comer, some things happen for no reason.

To illustrate his practical point, Comer asks the question: If you lose your job, should we say “God is in control?” No (22:30). As Comer argues, it could be God who wills it, or it could be simply your fault. It could be some evil co-worker. It could be satanic. It could be chaos, or natural evil. You simply don’t always know. You cannot know because for Comer God is not always in control.

He points to Paul’s thorn in the flesh as an example (~25:00). Here, he wants to show that the thorn in Paul’s side could have come from many sources, not just God’s will. (Keep track of this because it will be important in my observations below about his doctrine of God and related spiritual practices).

For Comer, the answer to the problem of evil is the cross of Jesus. Comer says substitutionary atonement was not the dominant atonement theory in the first millennium but Christus Victor was (~30:00). He believes both are correct along with other atonement theories. When it comes to atonement theories, it is a both-and not either-or scenario (31:00).

That said, Comer points to Christus Victor as “the knife’s edge for how we think about the cross” (31:30), citing Greg Boyd to confirm his argument. “God suffers at the hand of evil,” Comer argues. We are not alone in evil (he here affirms Greg Boyd’s description of the cross). 

Comer returns to John Piper who claimed that God is the cause of the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 (33:30). He contrasts Piper’s view with David Bentley Hart’s WSJ article on the Tsunami as a counter to Piper, affirming Hart’s view. Comer also points to Hart’s book version of the article called, The Doors of the Sea.

He points to hope in Romans 8, echoing Wright’s characteristic phrase “God will put the world to rights (35:00). He cites Wright at 44:29, confirming the source.

2. Comer’s General Teaching on God

Comer’s sermon Why? develops in detail aspects of his doctrine of God that he presents more generally in his God Has a Name. Since Comer re-released the book in October of 2024, we can also assume that he maintains his view of God from the book. And further, there Comer importantly tells us that our spiritual formation relies on our doctrine of God because we are what we worship.

Here, I want to point to key aspects of Comer’s view of God that he did not mention in Why? to give a fuller sense of his beliefs.

In short, Comer argues for a view of God that falls outside of Protestant confessions in a few key places. Comer affirms God’s passibility, mutability (64), his processing of emotions in partnership with humans (58), and denies that God has set the future in stone (62). Also, he affirms that God gets new ideas with us as our partner in directing the world (59). For Comer, God simply “can be moved, influenced, who can change his mind at a moment's notice” (61).

The reason why God can change at a moment’s notice is because God is a person, and Comer defines a person as a relational subject: “By person, I mean he's a relational being” (55). Hence, God “is open to our ideas, dynamic—involved in our lives, but not "in control" in the automated, what's-going-to-happen-is-going-to-happen-with-or-without-me kind of way” (59). Like any other relational being, God’s emotional life varies. Citing Gerry Breshears who says, "This is God processing his feelings with a human partner," Comer rhetorically asks, “God processing his feelings?” Then answers: “I love it" (58).

Throughout God Has a Name, one gets the impression that God is a person and thus relates relationally to his creatures by regularly changing his mind and by his varying emotions. God is “aching for a relationship with you” (50). And “He would be less of a God if he couldn't change his intentions when he wants to, or be open to new ideas from intelligent, creative beings he's in relationship with” (61).

Part of the reason why Comer defines God in this way seems to be his partial acceptance of the Hellenization thesis, namely, that Greek philosophical notions of God wrongly transformed earlier Hebraic views of God (e.g., 28–29; 61). Rather than seeing God as tri-Personal (Father, Son, and Spirit), Comer uses the word person to signify something no traditional theology has: that God is a person because he relates to his creation changeably and emotionally. This physiological definition of personhood differs in every sense from the Trinitarian theology of classical theism.

But Comer’s view of God also comes from one-sided exegesis of the text. He cites the passages of God that show God acting in creation without dealing with the passages that present God as transcendent beyond the created order. For example, Comer cites passages like Exodus 32 and Numbers 14 where Moses struggles with God and changes God’s mind. Such passages illustrate the claims he makes about God in large part. However, Comer does not cite or at least spend any significant time on the passages that say God is not like a man who changes his mind (e.g., Num 23:19), nor does he distinguish between God’s transcendence as the Creator of all and his immanent activity among his creatures. He focuses on the latter without dealing theologically with the former.

Had he affirmed both sets of texts and aimed to develop their theological meaning, he might have found Augustine to be a great resource since Augustine (AD 354–430) speaks of how God can immutably change and impassibly suffer. Comer might have benefited from Cyril of Alexandria’s (d. AD 444) argument that God the Word of the Father suffered in his own flesh.

Importantly, he also could have read Reformed and classical authors who struggled to articulate the double reality that God is First Cause of all things and human agents have free will, something both Augustine and the reformed traditional generally affirm.

Let me cite one example to illustrate what I mean. Comer in his God Has a Name cites Blaise Pascal to say that God gives us the dignity of being causes in his creation through prayer (65). I agree with Pascal’s point. We certainly have the dignity of real, genuine causes because God as First Cause has enabled our creaturely contingent free choice.

Comer, however, explains how we are causes by saying we are partners and collaborators with God in directing the world. Instead of drawing on a rich philosophy of causality within the Christian tradition that shows how God is First Cause and our contingent order of causality work together, Comer folds our freedom into God’s freedom. We both make choices in the same order of causality.

I’ll explain why this matters at the end of article, but the distinction between First and contingent causes preserves both the Creator-creature distinction and explains why we can have free will and affirm that God is in control as Paul says, for example, in Ephesians 1:11: “God works all things according to the counsel of his will.”

Notably, because Comer dismisses Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” (61), he does not avail himself of some of Aristotle’s distinctions that explain how different orders of causality work. And as a consequence of not knowing or using such distinctions, Comer does not maintain God’s transcendence as Creator but instead collapses the Creator into the same order of life as his creation. For example, in a context discussing how prayer changes God, Comer writes, “Yahweh is a person. ... He's interactive and malleable and open to suggestions” (234).

As far as I can discern, Comer sees God working on the same plane of causality that we are. That bridges God’s transcendence into the created world without any explanation of how.

3. Entering into the Life of God Emotionally

For a book on God, Comer says little about the tri-personal God of Scripture. I remember him using the word “Trinity” once, and that was in the updated portion of his book published in 2024 (God Has a Name, 281). For the most part, Comer speaks about God as Yahweh and focuses on how Yahweh in Jesus visited his people. I found this especially strange since we are baptized into the singular name of Father, Son, and Spirit according to Jesus (Matt 28:19).

In his Practicing the Way, however, Comer makes a number of positive statements of the Trinity. He speaks of God as “a community of self-giving love” (36). Believers “enter the flow of love within the inner life of God” (36) and become “rooted in the inner life of God” (38). Our hospitality embodies the inner life of the Trinity, which allows us to feel like God (132). And in another place, Comer writes, “At the heart of the Trinitarian community we call God is an outflow of generous, self-giving, forgiving love” (187). Again, by a generous life, Comer expects to feel like God feels in his generosity (187).[1]

Thus our spiritual formation involves (a) entrance into the inner-life of God and (b) experiencing the emotional life of God. But Christian theology in all classical traditions (Reformational, RCC, EO) has maintained that we cannot in this life enter into the inner-life of God because God “dwells in unapproachable light” which makes even approaching his Being impossible (1 Tim 6:16). So we can know him through his visible signs and especially because the one Word of God the Father became incarnate for us and for our salvation.

But again: entering into the God’s inner life means entering into the infinitude of the Father of eternally begetting the Son, and the Son eternally being begotten of the Father, and the Spirit spirating from both in what John Webster describes as the abundant life of God: “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26).

Some mystical traditions have spoken of experiencing the inner life of God to a degree. And Comer identifies as a mystic (Way 51–52). But when such traditions speak of it, they are usually careful to distinguish the deep mystery of God’s life.

So Gregory of Nyssa in his Life of Moses will point to how the closer Moses gets to God on Mt. Sinai, the more the darkness enfolds him. Even Gregory of Palamas will speak of uncreated energies of God as the way in which we participate in God. A modern mystical approach might propose a divine Sophia (e.g., as in Sergei Bulgakov). Others may emphasis the analogia entis (Erich Przywara). But the point is that Comer does not use any of this theological language, and he implicitly denies the transcendence of God for an immanent real relationship with God to his creatures.

Secondly, to feel like God does would indeed be a good thing. But if we do by entering into the inner life of God who lacks hormones, flesh, blood, and gut biome, then how can our passions and desires of the flesh, to use Paul’s language, allows to feel like God whose Spiritual existence fills even heaven and highest heaven (John 4:25; 1 Kings 8:27)?

The classical answer is Jesus. We are adopted by grace into God’s family to become what Christ is by nature as humans. This is one reason why Jesus partook of flesh and blood so that he could call us brothers (Heb 2:10–12, 14–15).

I think Comer may have picked up on this had he pointed to the stories and events of Jesus in the Gospel books. But rather than doing that in Practicing the Way, he alludes to the Bible and cites snippets here and there. But the Jesus presented in Practicing the Way filters through Comer’s theological understanding of Yahweh in Christ.

I say all of this because I want to affirm what Comer does. But I must affirm both God’s transcendence and God’s immanence without denying either but affirming them in just the way God is and acts.

1 Samuel 15 presents the classical case for this double affirmation since the same passages both affirms “the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret” and “the Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel” (1 Sam 15:29, 35; cf. v. 11). If you cannot affirm both precisely in the way they are true about God, as the Christian tradition has sought to do for two millennia, then I don’t think you can successfully speak about the God of the Bible.

Lastly, Comer’s invitation into the inner-life of God in order to feel like God seems rooted in a particularly psychological definition of personhood. For example, Comer calls God “a person” because he is “a relational being.” But in Christian theology, God is tri-personal—Father, Son, and Spirit—according to relations of origin. In other words, the word relation refers to the ineffable relation between the Father and Son through a relation of eternal generation that has no psychological meaning.

Comer in this way has used words like person and relational that traditionally speak about God’s transcendent inner-life but then applies them to God in general being a relational, responsible, and malleable person (God Has a Name, 53, 157, 159, 234).

4. A Mere Protestant Response

I would like to return to Comer’s polemical sermon against the Augustinian notion of God’s will and evil. Here, the knife’s edge is sharpest, so to speak. And in my view, Comer has misunderstood the Augustinian and Reformed view of God’s will and in place argued for a view of God that neither the Eastern nor Western Fathers of the church could affirm.

Comer argues for a theodicy that resolves the problem of evil through a proposal of competing wills in this world. God wills good morally, but people, others, Satan, and chaos confound his moral will towards to the good. This is because of free will. God does not cause sin, evil, and death, although Comer admits God rarely brings good out of evil events.

Doctrine of God and Evil

In my estimation, the reason why Comer opposes his view to the Augustinian and Reformed doctrine of God is because he misunderstands them. The word cause as in God causes all things means not a physical cause in space and time as we might think of it. Rather, God, because he is beyond space and time, is the cause of all things in ways befitting his Spiritual, timeless, and immutable nature.

Reformational authors such as William Perkins or Peter Vermigli speak of God’s causality as the First Cause outside of our order of experience, which itself enables our free or contingent choices at the level of secondary causality. God as First Cause of all things enables contingent or free choice in the level of second order causality. This explains why so many reformed authors and confessions will point to free will and choice as remaining in us after the fall.

It is also why Augustine (whom Comer cites) believes God does not will the substantial existence of evil (a key point!). God is not evil, nor creates evil, but Augustine argues God orders evil. We are the cause of evil which is in our choice, as we pervert created goods by our corrupted desires.

Augustine can easily claim then, “the free choice of the will is the reason why we do wrong and suffer your just judgement” and “I was utterly certain that none other than myself was willing or not willing. That there lay the cause of my sin I was now coming to recognize” (Confessions 7.2.3, 7.3.5).[2]

To place God’s will as one will among other wills on earth makes God not the God who is everywhere present, giver and sustainer of all life, and upholder of all things as Scripture says (Ps 139; Deut 32:39; Heb 1:3; Col 1:17).

Here, Comer argues in such a way that God sounds like an agent among agents, a being among beings. But God is beyond space and time, which is precisely why Paul say of God, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) or why David can say, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence” (Ps 137:7). Ultimately, it explains why Paul can say simply, God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph 1:11).

God is the First Cause who enables our free, contingent choices, not an agent who wills in a created way; God is Creator. Comer misses this point, and so criticizes the Augustinian tradition while at the same time uncritically talking about God in such a way as to make God cross the chasm between the Creator and creature in ways that make God will like humans will.

Agents of Evil

As to Comer’s arguments about Satan and demons being the cause of evil and Comer’s citation of Paul’s thorn in the flesh as an example of this, Augustine affirms that spiritual beings cause evil. The idea of multiple wills is not somehow excluded by Augustinian and reformational authors. The key difference, as noted, is the level of causality at which these wills operate.

As Augustine observes in his commentary on Psalm 78:49­–50, God uses evil angels to make way for his wrath. Demons can freely do evil, and God can order that evil towards justice because He and they operate at entirely different orders of causality, given the difference of their natures.

Or consider the whole book of Job. Gregory the Great says, “Satan unknowingly serves the purposes of God’s hidden justice” (Moralia, 2.20.38).” God’s order of causality differs qualitatively to his creation’s order of causality. The Creator-creature distinction does not disappear when it comes to God’s will! To use language in Gregory of Nyssa, there is a diastema (a gap) between us and God! Hence, God can work all things for good to those who love him (Rom 8:28).

Comer insufficiently speaks of multiple wills on earth without integrating the whole of Biblical revelation of the best of the Augustinian tradition. It makes his criticisms feel like a straw man attack. And it makes his positive argument feel shallow, which it is.

God’s Will

Comer’s accusation that Augustine changed the definition of God’s will from moral intention to meticulous providence falls flat. The historical documents do not bear out this claim. As someone who has spent over a decade reading these sources, the claim seems too broad and unconvincing.

To cite one example, consider Novation’s (AD 200–258) comment from his On the Trinity, “For He is a certain Mind generating and filling all things, which, without any beginning or end of time, controls, by the highest and most perfect reason, the naturally linked causes of things, so as to result in benefit to all” (§2).

Novation, as with most ancient authors, finds no qualms about saying that God “controls … the naturally linked causes of things.” This is another way to say that God as First Cause enables contingent causes (our choices, events on earth, etc.).

Augustine did not change the theological definition of will as Comer claims. Granted, Augustine did in his theological writing emphasize God’s will and how grace is predestination applied in time.

Identity of God

The problem here fundamentally hinges on the identity of God. Is God’s order of causality within our creation or not? Comer implies yes, which might be why he does not conceive of God being in control of all things because of the various wills of people on earth.

In Comer’s argument, to say God causes something means that God pushes the first domino in a chain of cause and effect. But that kind of causality is precisely what the Augustinian and reformational traditions reject. Certainly, God can work in the world like that if he so pleases. But God exists outside of time, and so he does not push domino one at Time A into domino two at Time B. Zeus may work that way, but not the God of the Bible.

Neither heaven nor earth nor highest heaven can contain the God of the Bible (1 Kgs 8:27). He is everywhere present as Spirit (John 4:24). He has no human body, no local place where he dwells. He is Creator; we are creatures. He is not the great Clockmaker who winds up the created order. Instead, by the word of his power, he holds all things together at every moment in time (Heb 1:3; Col 1:17).    

God can cause all things as God while also enabling real free choices. Comer’s doctrine of God does not apparently allow for that reality. And it is why Comer finds the cross being that great act whereby “God suffers at the hand of evil,” a statement from Greg Boyd which echoes Bonhoeffer’s “Only a suffering God can help us now,” which was theologically developed by Jürgen Moltmann in the decades after.

While Comer does not delve too deeply in his Why? sermon, Comer clearly rejects the doctrine of impassibility in his God Has a Name. There, he speaks about God being open to partner with human beings in his direction of the world. He calls God “malleable” and open to changing to his mind (59, 64). Largely, I think this is because Comer defines God as a person, and a person for Comer is a “relational being” (55). Since we are relational and are open to ideas, malleable to the desires of each other, Comer reasons God is too. God suffers change like we do.  

Yet the earliest Christians affirmed impassibility particularly to show how the God of the Bible was not like the fickle gods of the pagans. For them, God was impassible precisely because God was not like the created order, not like the pagan gods who lived for lust and violence. With the earlier Christians, the entire classical, medieval, and reformed tradition also affirmed impassibility to name the God of the Bible.

The question of impassibilty also led to many key debates in the history of the church that it even divided Nestorian and Cyrillians (later, Chalcedonian) Christians. Nestorius believed God was so separate from creation that we must speak of the man assumed who suffered not the God who assumed the man. To protect God’s impassibility, Nestorius made an opposite error to Comer: Nestorius divided God from the man assumed (the body of Jesus) to ensure that only the man assumed suffered.

In response to Nestorius, Cyril pointed to the biblical arguments for both God’s transcendence and his immanence (something that Comer does not do). Cyril then pointed to the truth that “the Word of God the Father himself suffered in the flesh for our sake” (On the Unity of Christ, 115). The Word suffered in the flesh, precisely because that is how God the Word can suffer “for he did not suffer in the nature of the godhead, but in his own flesh.” Comer does not make such distinctions, and so he makes God as God grieve and suffer as we do.[3] So God suffers without at distinction in Comer’s view, but with Cyril and the Chalcedonian theology of the church, God the Word of the Father suffers impassibility in his own flesh. That is how God can suffer.

Comer’s subtle and not so subtle nods to the Hellenization thesis make him privilege so-called Hebraic concepts of God, which really amounts to privileging the texts that say God changes his mind and experience emotions without the other texts that speak about God being above change and Spirit by nature. But we must affirm both sets of text, and then theologize about how both are true about God without privileging one set of texts against another but by worshipping the God of the Bible as he has revealed himself to us.

Theodicy

With all that said, readers will notice that I did not answer directly Comer’s question of theodicy. Even if God allows evil but does not regularly cause it at a level of secondary causality, how is he thereby vindicated?

In my view, the bigger question centers on starting points, about who and what God is. I believe Comer’s argument in his Why? sermon and books rely on a definition of God that does not match the opponents he claims to rebut: Augustine, Calvin, etc. For this reason, his polemics against them rings hollow in my ears.

Given my affirmation of the classical view of God, I am happy to affirm Bible verses like Deuteronomy 32:39 without qualms: ‘See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.” I can even handle Bible verses like Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (see here).

The reason I feel confident with even those difficult passages has to do with my doctrine of God, a doctrine of God shared by Augustine, Gregory the Great, John Calvin, William Perkins, Peter Vermigli, and many more besides.

And with these theologians and spiritual figures, I through a vital union with Christ will move with one level of glory to another as I gaze into the face of Christ (2 Cor 3:17–18; 4:6). But I and others like me do so precisely because we become what we worship, because our thoughts about God are the most important things about us, and our spiritual formation, as Comer agrees, flows out of our view of God.

I cannot recommend Comer’s Practicing the Way because of the God he speaks about in Why? and God Has a Name. I do appreciate Comer’s drive to know Jesus and how he has so identified our need for a transformed life. But I wish he had done so alongside the spiritual theology of those who wrote the Philokalia, a spiritual tradition that I know Comer values.

I’ll leave my comments here without saying more, but point to further resources. Words never seem to end. But I hope I added something to the conversation. I plan to read more Comer and come to understand him better. If I have made any mistakes, I am eager to find out where and correct myself. And if you, John Mark, find yourself reading this article, please reach out. I’d love to chat with you!

Further resources

Wyatt Graham, “Should We Practice the Way with John Mark Comer?”

Joshua Benjamins, “On Providence & The Cause Of Sin.”

Wyatt Graham, “Calvinists are Uncommonly good at Affirming free will.”

Wyatt Graham, “Do we have free will? Yes. Peter Vermigli's view of Human Freedom.”

Wyatt Graham, “What was Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh?” 

Wyatt Graham, “Only the Impassible God Can Help Us Now.”

Wyatt Graham, “Did God Create Evil?”

Wyatt Graham, “Do Reformed Theologians Deny Human Freedom? (Review of Muller’s Grace and Freedom)”

John Mark Comer, “Sermon,” “transcript,” official site.  

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[1]This paragraph borrows content from my review of Comer’s Practicing the Way.

[2] At the basic level of why anything exists as well, to say that God does not will everything but instead, chaos, Satan, or others do implies the non-existence of things in this world. In God, we live and move and have our being, as Paul says in Acts 17:28. This is because God the Father holds all things together by the word of his power as Hebrews 1:3 notes (see also Colossians 1:17). That Word is Christ, the Logos (John 1:1–14). Everything God created was good (1 Tim 4:4–5), including human wills, and so for a will of a human to be outside of God as First Cause implies its non-existence.

[3] By contrast, the early apologists like Justin, Aristides, and Theophilus claimed God was impassible (without passions and desires of the flesh) precisely to point to the God of the Bible.