A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation with Matthew Bingham

Life and Books and Everything — Clearly Reformed

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A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation with Matthew Bingham

March 31, 2025

Life and Books and EverythingClearly Reformed

It is often believed, by friends and critics alike, that the Reformed tradition, though perhaps good on formal doctrine, is impoverished when it comes to spiritual formation. The charge is that the Reformed approach to piety is all about head knowledge, about learning things as brains on sticks. Other Christians may be less critical but simply assume that there is no right or wrong way to do spiritual formation. This often leads evangelical to adopt an eclectic approach to personal growth in Christ. Many Christians in conservative Protestant churches end up adopting Catholic and Orthodox approaches as being more fulsome and effective. But what if there is a Reformed approach to spiritual formation that is rich, deep, historic, and more biblical than the alternatives? That’s what Kevin explores with Matthew Bingham (associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary) as they dig into Matthew’s fantastic new book A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation (Crossway).

Chapters:

0:00 Sponsors & Intro

3:27 Tell Us About Yourself

8:16 Spiritual Formation

14:18 A Heart Aflame for God

21:15 A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation

26:53 Sponsor Break

29:44 Biblical Centrality

40:40 The Reformed Triangle of Spiritual Formation

47:24 Quick Takes

1:06:41 Final Thoughts

1:12:14 Until Next Time…

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Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation

Transcript

This episode of Life and Books and Everything is brought to you in part by Crossway, publisher of the ESV New Testament. Share the Good News Edition. This edition features a reading plan, which will take you through parts of the New Testament.

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They have put together an eight-day Holy Week devotional leading you from Paul. On Sunday through Easter, entitled One Week to Save the World. These are short daily devotions, seven to eight minutes each.

You can read or listen to them. This will help you deepen your understanding of Christ's sacrifice and resurrection as you journey through the most important events in history. I know every time Holy Week comes around, it is a special week in the life of the Christian, in the life of the church, and it often gets filled up with other things and all of a sudden it's gone.

And so this is a great opportunity to make sure that Holy Week doesn't pass you by and you take some extra time to get into the Word, to think about the magnificent work of Christ and what it means for our lives. Greetings in salutations. Welcome to Life and Books and everything.

My name is Kevin DeYoung, Senior Pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina. And today I am joined by my special guest, Matthew Bingham. A few details about Matthew.

We were just conversing that he ended up doing a PhD program with Crawford Griffin at Queens University in Belfast, which was the other place I was really looking at and would have been great, ended up doing it at Lester with Crawford's very good friend, John Coffey. But Matthew did his PhD there, started over 10 years ago and then spent 10 years, you were saying, Matthew, in the UK, in Belfast and then at Oak Hill. And now the Vice President of Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Church History at Phoenix Seminary made the good life decision to move in the very middle of the summer from probably a beautiful English summer to whatever Phoenix is in the summer.

But you're enjoying it now. And Dr. Bingham has written different books and articles both for academics and for laypeople. And what we want to talk about today is this book and I'm not flattering Matthew.

I think this is a really, really important book. And I think it's going to be one of the best books of this year. And it's on a really important topic.

It's called A Heart, a Flame for God, a Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation, put out by Crossway. So Matthew, welcome to LBE. Thank you.

Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here. Just give a little bit more of your background, your bio, your wife, your family, where you're from and how you got interested in this topic.

Yeah, great. Thank you. So I'm married to Shelly, Lord Willing.

We will be married 20 years this summer. So praise God for that. And we have four children who, one girl, three boys, kind of 14 down to three.

So a little bit of a spread. And yeah, as you mentioned, now Phoenix Seminary. And before that I was at Oak Hill College in London in both places teaching church history and historical theology.

And before that I was a pastor in the United States, a pastor in a Reformed Baptist Church in Southwest Georgia. And so the topics at the heart of this book, Heart, a Flame for God, the concept of what does it look like to grow in the Christian life and to be conformed to the image of Christ? That's always been something that has been important to me, both personally and then in the work that God's given me to do. So this book and the subtitle explains what it is, a Reformed approach to spiritual formation.

And you talk about some of the critiques and you engage with them and where there may be some good warnings for evangelicals of a Reformed bent. And yet the critique out there I think is that, well, Reformed tradition may be good for helping people think about systematic theology and getting their doctrine right. But when it comes to actually growing in Christ, being a disciple of Christ, people are getting stuck.

And so people often have very eclectic approaches to spiritual formation as if, you know, maybe it doesn't matter quite so much, as long as we get our formal doctrine correct or people are pulling knowingly or unknowingly from Roman Catholic traditions, Eastern Orthodox traditions. What is the problem and what of those critiques before we get to wanting to critique the critiques? What's the problem and what of those critiques might be true? Yeah, great questions. You know, I think, yeah, you mentioned a couple things there that I think are really germane to the book and to the potential problems that it's that it's trying to speak into.

And yeah, as you said, the subtitle a Reformed approach to spiritual formation. And I think two things, one, sometimes there is a perception, I think certainly outside Reformed circles, but even sometimes within them that, yeah, Reformed theology, this is the more sort of heady intellectual side of certainly the Protestant tradition. And yes, it's going to help you sort of think logically and work out the covenants and their relationship to all these bits and pieces, get you all your theological ducks in a row with precision and all that's to the good.

But as you say, maybe it's a little bit heady, maybe it's a little bit abstract, maybe it doesn't connect with life, the Christian life lived and how to do that well. And so the book tries to, one, speak into that and we can get back to that. But the other related problem is, perhaps once you've sort of let that perception settle, maybe without thinking about that too much, there's also a sense, I think, generally amongst Christians that when it comes to Christian growth and spiritual formation broadly conceived, it sometimes I think is a very sort of whatever works approach.

It's a real, there's a real pragmatism in that, look, if something works for me, if an approach works for me, if a practice resonates with me, if it sounds exciting, if it's interesting, if it seems to stir me up, then that's all to the good. As those sort of yes, we want our doctrine to be solid, but then when I think about how I engage my heart and my mind with these truths, pragmatism reigns, and that's where I think as you alluded to, sometimes evangelicals can be very open, again with knowing or unknowingly, they can be very open to spiritual formation practices, techniques, approaches, mentalities that actually are imported from other traditions that sometimes are actually running in a different direction than the Reformation heritage that really ought to be ours. So I want to talk about this term spiritual formation here at the outset because you explain some hesitation with it, but why in the end you're content to still use the phrase and how you define it.

So I had a class in seminary that was entitled spiritual formation, and I went to Gordon Conwell up in Boston, and I had a wonderful experience in lots of good classes, so I'm thankful for it. This class, however, was not my favorite, and I don't think it was many people's favorite. I mean, in the first week or two, we were being put off into groups of three or four, and we were doing Lectio, Divina, and which again, if it's, and you can explain what that is, if it's simply meditating on scripture, well, that's wonderful.

That's a key, but it was very much from the Dallas Willard Richard Foster tradition of spiritual formation, and most of us in the class thought, this is, I didn't want to get into group and sort of enter my imaginative self and maybe we were just all, you know, two left-brained, reformed folks, but my experience with spiritual formation was, huh, this is, we're learning, just what you said, we're learning all of these other things from this one set of, of influences and authorities, and I love at one point you say, if we trust the Reformation tradition broadly conceived, and these authors and this heritage and this creedal tradition, as getting the gospel right, why wouldn't we at least give the benefit of the doubt that maybe they got the spiritual formation right as well. So back up a little bit there, what do you mean by spiritual formation and should we continue to use this term? Yeah, that is a, I think, a really interesting question, and so when I was working on this, this book and sort of conceiving of the project and what is, what shape is this going to take? One big question for me was, do I use the word, do I use the term spiritual formation or do we just put it to one side and use other terms? And the reason for that is because the term has a lot of, I think there's some baggage that's attached to it, you know, there's this, it really, it's a kind of 20th century term, again, not the concept behind it, but the term itself, the parent of those words, spiritual formation, it's a 20th century term, it really took off amongst evangelicals in the latter half of the 20th century, where you had some very influential voices within the sort of broad evangelical camp who were using this term and you'll even, you know, your reference to a spiritual formation movement, you mentioned some of the authors, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster being two of the big names, others as well, and they had, I think, two things they were doing that I really support and I, and I, I would think we all would want to say amen to one, they were concerned for spiritual depth amongst evangelicals and they were responding and realizing, you know, there is a, there is a real energy in evangelicalism and, but often it's directed exclusively toward outward growth. We want more people reach with the gospel in more places, which is wonderful, amen, no one's going to disagree with that, but like so many things, when a good thing, when a true thing is prioritized to the expense of other equally good and true realities, it can distort the situation and they were responding to a perception and I don't think an unfounded one that historically evangelicals had sometimes been so concerned with outward spread that, that individual spiritual growth and depth had been neglected.

And so one, they wanted to address that problem and they wanted to say, Hey, discipleship matters. You know, it's yes, we want the gospel to go out, but we also want individual men and women to be conformed to the image of Christ. So they're about that, which is awesome.

Then secondly, they did another thing that I think I would applaud. They said, and actually maybe the way to sort of get at what it means to grow is to look backwards into the past. And let's look at those Christians who went before us and they weren't using the word retrieval at that time.

But that's what they were doing essentially. Let's look to historical examples, historical writing, historical best practices to enrich the present. And I think that is excellent.

However, the problem is and it was and is that a lot of within the broader evangelical spiritual formation movement, there was a very kind of wide sort of ecumenical focus. And there really was this sense that, Hey, it doesn't matter if a person's coming from this tradition or that tradition, let's just look for who were the sort of big spiritual exemplars and let's cite them. And often in some of these works, you will have medieval mystics and Eastern Orthodox authors and people who are even more difficult than that to classify what they are sort of quoted right alongside Reformation voices like Martin Luther and John Calvin.

And there's no sense given often that whatever value you might find in these different voices, they are actually coming from very different theological places. And you can't detach their theological paradigms from their prescriptions for how to grow as a Christian. And that's where some of the difficulty comes in.

So I'm talking to Matthew Bingham about his book on a reformed approach to spiritual formation, really encourage everyone to get this. And Matthew, I'm just going to walk through chapters of this book. And one of the first ones is on foundations.

And as you were just saying, you talk about spiritual formation and some of the things that are good in this sort of retrieval project, you say the problem arises when such things and you're talking about a smorgasbord of spiritual practices, when such things become disconnected from the sort of word based spirituality that the Bible constantly commends and are instead repackaged as standalone spiritual techniques and activities. You talk about the reformers were interested, not only in the doctrine of justification, but a reform of piety. And they thought a lot about this.

And your principal conviction here in this foundation chapter and then spiritual formation in a Reformation key in chapter two is that a reformed approach to piety is word centered. Now that will sound sort of banal to people and even some of the voices you may want to critique will say, well, of course, we believe in the Bible, we all say that we all say that the Bible is an important part of spiritual formation. So what is this reformed tradition? And you look a lot at the Puritans.

What did they mean by insisting upon the centrality of the scriptures in our spiritual formation? Why is that so key to understanding how we are meant to be formed in Christ? I think the when we talk about a word centered piety, I think we really mean two basic convictions that both kind of come together under that heading. In the first instance, we mean a piety that is derived from scripture so that we're using God appointed means to grow in our love for Christ and grow in conformity to His image. So we can't have sometimes again, as we talked about earlier, they're in this spiritual formation space, this pragmatism creeps in where whatever works for you, whatever works for me must almost be sort of good on the face of it.

Hey, I'm seeing something I'm engaging. This is exciting. This is stirring me up.

And I think the reformers were convinced that actually to grow in Christ's likeness means we need to be using tools and means and methods and approaches that actually are given to us in scripture. So that's the first sort of piece of that word based puzzle. And then the second piece that's related to it is the conviction that actually is that the word of God itself is the primary means through which God shapes His people.

It's actually engagement with scripture. It's hearing God's voice. It's reflecting on that.

It's it's praying back to Him using a vocabulary and a paradigm and based on promises that we're getting from scripture, all of these things. It's reflecting on my life according to the framework that scripture gives for my life that at every step, the word of God is at the heart of how God is shaping His people. So let's continue to talk about that a little bit.

And I want to bring up one of the intellectual spiritual heirs, I think of Dallas Willard and Richard Foster. And again, they're good things to draw from those authors, but also some concerns. John Mark Comer, and we talked about this before, you haven't read the book, I've only read his book practicing the way be with Jesus, become like Him, do as He did.

Those are the three big points of the book. So John Mark Comer is one of the most popular authors today. And even in Reform Baptist churches, PCA churches, I bet there are lots of people that are reading John Mark Comer.

And just for a few reviews, Tim Challeys did a good review, Wyatt Graham did one, Nine Marks has one coming out that are trying to, often they're appreciative critiques. They're showing, well, here are some things that are good. So Comer, his big thesis is apprenticeship.

And he says, the word Christian only shows up three times in the New Testament, but disciple, which he gives a gloss as apprentice shows up, you know, 260 some times. So his big thing is we're an apprentice of Jesus. Now I have some concerns there that it, what seems to be missing at the outset is a doctrine of regeneration.

I'm sure he would affirm it or focused on the cross now to his credit, he talks about sin. But here's what I want to point out when he gets to the sort of back half of the book, and he's talking about what are the practices? What are the rhythms? And he says, there's no official list of the practices of Jesus, but here's nine. So he's, he's, he's got his own nine marks ministry here.

He's got nine to practice the way, Sabbath, solitude, prayer, fasting, scripture, community, generosity, service, and because any habit you see in Jesus life would count. Walking in nature, climbing a mountain, washing feet, none of these show up on a classical list of spiritual discipline, yet each one could be utilized by an apprentice of Jesus for formation. Similarly, he cites the spiritual writer Gary Thomas, who categorized nine spiritual temperaments, each with its own unique pathway to God.

You, you reference this same idea in your book. So nine spiritual temperaments, each have their own unique pathway, naturalists, loving God in nature, sensates loving God with the senses, candles, incense, traditionalists loving God through ritual and liturgy, ascetics loving God and solitude and self denial, activists loving God by fighting injustice, caregivers loving God by caring for those in need, seven enthusiasts loving God with music and dance, eight contemplatives loving God through quiet adoration and intellectuals loving God with the mind, commerce says, no one of these is better than the others. The church tradition you grew up in or were saved into may have emphasized one or two dominant pathways that are different from your preferred approach to grow, you may need to expand your horizon of possible and explore new pathways to God.

So what is right? And I think you would say what is wrong about some of that approach to spiritual formation. Okay, here's anything Jesus did. There's nine approaches there.

Here's nine spiritual temperaments. No one way is better than another. I think that's what you're book is about because a lot of evangelicals were formed Christians.

Okay, I got my theology down, but they'll read something like that. And it will make an initially some intuitive sense. Yeah, which way works for me? I'm not discounting scripture, but for me, candles and nature does more and that's how I connect to God.

How do you respond to all that? Yeah. And I think you put your finger on it there. I think a lot of what you just summarized does make intuitive sense.

And I think there's a lot of things in there that one would agree with. And I think the problem is more how the different pieces align and the ultimate takeaway that they give, which I don't think is is ultimately helpful to us. But on the intuitive side, I mean, you know, to me, the examples you give there, it's pointing out some things that are just obviously true, right? The Lord makes us to differ.

We do have different temperaments. You know, I would imagine someone listening to a podcast like yours is going to, for example, resonate more with the cluster of attributes headed under that intellectual temperament. You know, you're interested in books and reading and thinking about the past and history and theology.

Other people, you know, some people love getting out in nature. Other people are very happy to minimize that aspect of their other life. You know, want to be inside, you know, whatever, fine.

That's great. Music, another one. Clearly, some people are more oriented toward music than other people.

Like who could disagree, right? And so I think when someone hears a thing like that, it just sort of makes sense. However, I think the problem is when you start to classify anything and everything under the heading spiritual formation, all of a sudden, well, nothing becomes spiritual formation. It's just whatever I do almost is spiritual formation.

And in the literature, you do see sometimes this tendency to just classify anything and everything that I do as spiritual formation, you know, whatever it is. And for example, one thing I see a lot is people will try to talk in terms of, you know, athletics as spiritual formation, you know, playing, playing basketball or whatever. This is spiritual formation.

And they come up with, you know, fine insights on the ways in which participating in a game of basketball is related to something that broadly connects with kind of growth and maturity and this sort of thing. It's, it's not that all their observations, I think, considered an isolation are incorrect or wrong or even unhelpful. The problem is, again, if everything is spiritual formation, nothing is.

And I think it's much more helpful to think in terms of sanctification as the broad category, and then spiritual formation as a more narrow aspect of sanctification. So, you know, God promises that he's going to work together in all things for his glory and for our good, if we're in Christ. And so that would include literally every aspect of my life, as in some way, shape or form, being used by God for my sanctification.

And so I believe that that includes a basketball game. It includes all the different things. And if I'm more interested in, you know, boating and you're more interested in playing the trombone, then those two things are going to factor differently in our lives and great.

However, clearly, there are aspects of that broader picture of sanctification that we, I don't think any of us would be comfortable classifying as spiritual formation. Why? Because spiritual formation, I think, is most helpful understood as those active tools, those active means that we take up with intentionality to pursue godliness and to cultivate piety. So one great example, you know, the death of a loved one, if a spouse dies, a parent dies, a child dies, then this is a tragic event.

But I don't think any Christian would argue with the idea that God is going to be working in and through even that moment of deep pain to sanctify you and to draw you to himself and to cultivate Christian virtue and Christ likeness in your life. I don't think we'd get any pushback on that. And yet who on earth could ever imagine that the death of a loved one is a good thing, something to pursue, a sort of tool in our toolkit, no one would talk like that.

We all would get that there's a difference here between the things that I experience and the things that I do broadly conceived and these intentional tools that I pick up to work out my salvation with fear and trembling in a deliberate way. And that's where I think that's one of the things that I think gets lost in some of these more expansive, broad, holistic ways of talking about spiritual formation. I think you just sort of dilute the concept and allow some strangeness to enter in.

I also want to mention Greenville that seminary education though a sacrifice and a commitment is worth it. The calling of a pastor is a high and sacred calling. I've been a pastor for 23 years now and it is a wonderful, it is hard work, but it is a glorious calling and I am always thankful for taking the time to do classes in person and sit at the feet of good teachers and rub shoulders with other Christians and this commitment and this investment in pastoral ministry is going to serve you a lifetime.

So do not cut corners and I love that GPS has that vision. Their seminary and curriculum is biblically grounded, past fairly focused, confessionally faithful to the Westminster standards and the inerrant truths of Scripture. If you are ready to take the next step, you're welcome to join GPS explore and visit them.

Go to gpts.edu slash experience. We also want to mention our friends at Westminster Theological Seminary. Think back to the last time you tried to read the Bible in a year.

Some of you may be doing that now and you can get stuck. Often Leviticus numbers can be a time. Maybe you make it to Joshua and the land allotments do you in.

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I like what you said. It's you know, think of these nine things that he takes from Gary Thomas' book, naturalist, since he's traditionalist, on and on. Yeah, we all instinctively can resonate.

Yeah, I find myself in some of those more than others but it's the category. If it were simply a list of here might be different ways for people to use spiritual gifts or here are things that you might be drawn to in your Christian life but at least what he quotes from Thomas is there is great freedom in how we can meet with and enjoy God. So these are pathways to meet with and enjoy God.

Now the Puritans wrote tens of thousands of pages about how to do that very same thing. The Westminster Shorter Catechism famously is to glorify God and enjoy him forever and what one of the things so really helpful about your book, Matthew, is you look not just at the Puritans that were formed tradition but at Scripture and Scripture is not embarrassed at all to see this great overflowing fullness of what the Word of God is going to do in our life. So all of these spiritual formation books, again, none of them are going to say Scripture is unimportant.

They're all going to say it's important they might even say it's essential. They might even say that it's the most important but then a whole bevy of other things get slotted that aren't driven through what the Word of God is to teach us and inform us and we'll come back at the end because you have a really really excellent chapter about nature and how Edwards and other Puritans really can teach us something about appropriating spiritual formation through nature but it was always a word centered approach to that. In this chapter on foundations you talk about the critique that sometimes for example you say Roman Catholics may say Protestantism is a religion of the book and that's good but it's very paltry and you say but what if this more that some of these other traditions would say hey we need more you talk about relics and oils and candles what what if the more to avoid paltryness how does such a charge you write avoid making an indictment against the Bible itself for whatever paltryness quote unquote one might find in the shallow end of the poppy vangelical pool and we can all agree it can be shallow yet you say the Bible is decidedly not paltry for the psalmist spiritual platitude and fullness is found in God's word and one need not look beyond it for an imagined spiritual more just spin that out a little bit because that is a really key part of your argument that we I can imagine someone listening to this saying well of course I been doing the Bible my whole life and I just feel like I'm at a dead end I want something more what what do you mean by saying we shouldn't accuse the Bible of being paltry yeah so one of the things that that idea of this wanting more one of the things I find interesting when you read and one of the books that I quote from a fair bit in the book is actually it's a it's a collection of essays each one written by an evangelical seminarian who left evangelicalism and went to Roman Catholicism fascinating to read through these stories and one of the things that links them that you see almost in every one of them is this sense that the the individual found something lacking in evangelicalism and found more on offer in in the case of these testimonies Roman Catholicism here similar stories when people talk about converting to Eastern Orthodoxy and again this sense of more more and they've just found this expansive new world with all these different things in it all these different religious things that they could interact with and they were just sort of so excited by this and yes this is giving me the more that I'm looking for and when that's put in kind of this sort of abstract you know excited sort of prose it can sound oh wow you know what are you talking about but when you actually look and you actually drill down and this is what I try to do a bit in chapter two of the book you know where you quoted from you drill down and what do they mean when they talk about more and what you find is yes there is a whole world of religiosity and religious practices and religious rituals within say Roman Catholicism that you will not find within the Protestant Reformation tradition there's a whole host of practices and maybe these are exciting or interesting to people things like lighting candles you know not candles so you can see but candles in a sort of ritualistic way things like they often go under the heading of sacramental so not the sacraments seven in the case of Roman Catholicism but but all these other little material physical tangible objects with which you can interact and through which you can derive you know some sort of spiritual benefit or blessing and they go on and on about these things in the and the richness of it but you start looking at all these practices and you realize that these have no support in the Bible and at best they're extra biblical coming from outside the Bible often they seem to cut against key biblical principles and so what you end up realizing is that hold on how are you making a charge that says evangelicalism is threadbare or lacking and I need to find more over here without actually implicitly though you'd never say this levying that charge against scripture itself you're essentially at the end of the day saying that the Bible is threadbare the biblical cupboard is bare I can't find spiritual resources within the Bible itself and so I need to look to various traditions that even their advocates would not argue are derived from the biblical text itself but rather sort of they might say it's some sort of oral tradition or whatever but even the advocates are saying yes you have to go outside the Bible to learn about this or that practice this or that tool and I think that is a place that I certainly don't want to be and I would imagine that when framed that way even many of the folks who are becoming dissatisfied with evangelicalism would want to I would hope pull back and say actually you know what that that's not at all something that I think the Psalmist would affirm for example and I don't want to either yeah you know we were talking about some of the the common critiques of Reformed tradition and we'll come back to this again but you know you're just brains on a stick you just are getting head knowledge and you're very transparent in the book to say yes sometimes that is an accurate critique and if we think that spiritual formation is simply you got the correct doctrine you're spiritually formed you're very good to say you know and the Puritans didn't didn't talk that way either and yet you know there's so many bad cheesy and worse things in pop evangelicalism I mean there's just no end to it we should at the same time you know it's very easy to be be hard on our own tradition or own sort of tribe or larger tribe but one of the things that compared to others now if you compared to perfection none of us but if compared to others evangelical in particular Reformed do transmit scripture and truth in biblical knowledge better than maybe any other tradition so one of the things that was very interesting you quote here in this foundations chapter from Eastern Orthodox from an Eastern Orthodox theologian who says but what we have to say what have we to say about average lay people in our parishes this is Eastern Orthodoxy can we honestly say they know the Bible well or even as proficiently as evangelical Protestants do today I don't think so and then he says fortunately this is beginning to change but this has been my experience with people that I've known either at a distance or close at hand who moved to Eastern Orthodoxy order Roman Catholicism they may say look the the liturgy is suffused with scripture yeah and that's and I think that's an impoverishment in many of our evangelical churches but I've yet to find anyone who says you know what there is as much Bible teaching Bible knowledge in fact sometimes when people move to Bible study fellowship or doing something else or it's one thing to come in as an adult when you have 40 years of evangelical Bible studies and teaching to come in but what happens in these traditions again there's plenty of things that we can say you know our own traditions need to improve on but I just saw a survey last week and it was looking at in America Catholic mainline evangelical and I don't know a fourthadoxie was in there but these different groups and it was what do 18 to 25 year old something what do young people believe about LGBTQ and gay marriage and they looked at it from Gen Z millennial Gen X boomers in almost every one of those traditions was just like like this the the older you are the more conservative we would say scriptural your views on this the younger you are the only tradition that had something of a close to a flat line were evangelical Protestants that are teaching on these things so yes we want to be self-critical but I think there can be a tradition within evangelicalism that the more we self-flagellate the the better we must be and it's it's okay to say yes here's one thing that we do reasonably well compared to many others and we don't want to lose it so talk about all that's a long setup talk about this reform triangle I really like the way you put it and this is the the next big section in some ways that the heart of your book what do you mean what's the reform triangle of spiritual formation just unpack each of those three points yeah I and before getting there I think I think you make a great point about the the folks going over to Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and just the really big difference between as you say an adult or a young adult who has actually benefited from the immersion in scripture and the teaching that comes with it that evangelicalism provides and then they're sort of viewing this world of more as well I've already got this sort of solid stuff here and I'm just going to all almost a little bit of aesthetics to sort of spice it up a bit very different from well what if you were raised in that and that's all you knew and actually empirically the proof is in the pudding as it were if these liturgies were themselves sufficient to form saints in the way that the rhetoric goes why do we see so much nominalism in these traditions and so many people leaving it statistically there is there are a lot of more people coming to evangelicalism than leaving it for these traditions so again I think it's a subset of of folks who are strongly attracted to a certain set of practices that feel attractive and exciting and different and reacting maybe again again to some things that we would all criticize but yeah I think we do do a lot of things well and I don't want any comments that I'm making to detract from that so I just want to yeah well put underscore what you're saying but yes in terms of the book so yeah so after part one deals with foundational issues that you mentioned and then part two gets into this idea that I describe as the Reformation triangle and essentially we're talking there about scripture intake meditation and prayer and the triangulated relationship that emerges from the three of those things so scripture again I focus on reading scripture but as I mentioned at some point in the book you know hearing scripture we're talking about taking God's word into our minds and hearts right however you're doing it so we have scripture hearing from God and then we have meditation which again taking cues from the Puritans here who don't mean by meditation kind of what we often think of today with the you know headspace app or whatever else we're using they're just basically talking about reflecting on thinking deeply on thinking with intention about the scriptural truths we've been hearing from God so hearing from God then meditation reflecting on God and so hearing from God then met it back to God well maybe not so much meditation but certainly for me growing up in in evangelical churches certainly Bible reading and prayer are talked about quite a bit I mean I heard a lot about that but I think when you add meditation in and you start to read these Puritan authors what you realize is that for them the three things really kind of each blend in to the other and at some point they almost are sort of well a coin only has two sides and now we're talking about three but you know three sides of the same coin if I can speak that way there they're almost one activity with three facets and four the Puritans and I think the Reformed tradition more broadly communion with the living God really is coming to us it's happening with scripture intake meditation and prayer that is what it is there are extensions of that into other spheres and in the third part of the book we kind of look at some of those but essentially that's how we meet with and enjoy God and that phrase meet with and enjoy God I have I wrote it down here you mentioned it in context with some of these other books on spiritual formation that talk about you know nine different ways that we might meet with and enjoy God and well I don't deny that the whole world is is is the Lord's and rich and in in an attenuated weakened sense yes we meet with God all the time everywhere and everything we do but I think that the Bible points us towards actually these specific things Bible intake meditation rightly defined and prayer as no actually this is how we meet with God this is how we enjoy God and other things are actually extensions of this core thing and taking it in letting it spread out into perhaps other places but at the heart it's these things and that's what we mean with this Reformation triangle term yeah I really like that and what you said it's absolutely true it's it's not that these other things that Calvin said the world is the theater of God's glory you know classic example you see a sunrise or you see the mountains can that draw one closer to God can God use that well of course he can and the heavens declare the glory of God but insofar as the ordinary means of grace the word of God and prayer and in corporate worship say the sacraments it it's the word as it interprets so someone may say I just you know I love children and when I hold a newborn baby I just I feel so close to God I feel God in a special way well maybe but a whole lot of people who've never heard of Jesus also like to hold babies and they may feel very close to their own conception of God lots of you know how many people you know who else likes sunrises and sunsets in the world everybody who likes oceans and mountains so what makes what makes it Christian if we're not careful it just becomes what sort of things in the world give me a vaguely spiritual feeling or a sense of transcendence or a sense of warmth and well yes God reveals himself in the natural world but we appropriate that through scriptural knowledge so that it can become to us true spiritual formation I want to come back again to that chapter at the end on on nature which was so helpful talk to us Matthew about you know I'm just going to throw out a few things that you find in the spiritual formation literature and just give us some quick bullet points on helpful not helpful what may be helpful or not so mysticism lekdeodavina centering prayer just give us your quick let's just start with mysticism some people talk about a mystical experience about God what is mysticism and if you read the mystics it can sound like well I don't see what the big deal is so what's right and wrong about the mystical tradition let's start there yeah this is a big one and volumes and volumes have been written on what is mysticism and who are mystics and who is and who is in and what are we even talking about and so you're going to find different definitions of it and different ways of approaching that concept but my sense is that at the end of the day what unites those is some sort of sense that amongst the you know the so-called mystical tradition often people are talking about kind of medieval folks from the middle ages who who we're looking for but it goes before them and it and it goes continues after them it's this quest for we might call it a sort of unmediated encounter with the divine you know this and and I use the word divine deliberately because mystic applies to people who you know there's christian mystics so-called but then it applies to all sorts of folks who are outside of christianity all together and so mysticism this quest for an unmediated encounter with the divine some sort of direct contact with the divine and what we see amongst these christian mystics so-called is there's a couple things that I think we might take issue with but for me in the book where that comes out quite a bit is this idea that if you are really going deep in your you know contact with god and your communion with him you will get to a point where you transcend words and this seems to be a thread that that unites a lot of these these voices that words are important and they're good and the bible even gives us words but that's sort of where you start and where you end up is this communion with god that somehow transcends that and you get into a sort of wordless prayer and just reveling in the in the presence of god in this unmediated way and again I don't think that's the picture that the bible itself paints and I think the Reformation and the Reformed tradition in particular within the Reformation we find theologians and pastors who who get that and that's that's a help important thing to voice as well and and I try to bring this out in the book when when I'm bigging up the Reformed tradition it's because my conviction is that the Reformed tradition on these points they are seeing the biblical picture more clearly than other traditions I think it's the bible itself that gives us a word-based piety and the reformers are just in church history I think the group that really kind of sees that with clarity and explores it with depth and that's where mysticism I think goes wrong yeah it you say in your chapter here in the prayer according to Bernard McGann the leading scholar the authority on Christian mysticism quote the mystical element in Christianity pertains to the preparation for the consciousness of and the reaction to the immediate or direct presence of god and you hit those two things it's unmediated so not through the word and it's a next stage beyond knowing it's this mysterious cloud of unknowing it's this one quotation here it's an ascent through rationality toward the edge of language and that's what is problematic about mysticism even though we may talk about well Jonathan Edwards had a mystical experience meaning just a transcendent and a deeply felt experience but mysticism as as an ism has these qualities and is problematic just real quickly then could you sometimes find in literature centering prayer in Lectio Divina what what is meant by those and are those practices that would pass muster with the Puritans yeah good good questions and Lectio Divina is an interesting one and that's one where I think if someone says that's what they're into I would just want to say well what do you mean by that that's right and my assumption is that they might well tell me all things with which I would agree you know it's really meditation really yeah Lectio Divina you know divine reading a sort of slow steady approach to the bible a contemplative way of reading scripture again depending on what you mean by that you you may well have described something that is basically I think what the Puritans were we're doing and we're after and amen to that I think the problem with the term like that is it's again it's a it's a bit of a it can be a kind of trendy term and it can become a a box that people can put all sorts of things in so and and I think it is a term that sometimes is adjacent to these conversations about mysticism so all the things that you and I were just talking about I think are close at hand often when people use this term Lectio Divina or people can mean put yourself in the text what what meaning what do you see there what you know imagine yourself in this moment or what might what is Jesus saying to you right now you know Jesus calling sort of approach to spiritual those are those are the problems but yeah for many people may just mean a slow applicatory contemplative reading but I cut you off yeah no and and and you're and actually what you touch on there that's another one when we look at sort of meditation on scripture in Roman Catholic traditions like an Ignatius of Loyola for example the the founder the Jesuits who talked about these things and we see other writers they often go down this road of imagining oneself into the biblical scene and that's another place where it's like well to some extent okay you know if what we mean is I'm reading a narrative in the gospel of Mark and I am trying to sort of vividly think through what I'm hearing you know I mean you you know you're you're preaching a sermon on a gospel passage I'm sure you try to describe the story and make it come alive in a certain way for your hearers but I think the the danger there and what I think often it does slip into is we're actually sort of in you know creating new revelatory content that is actually the product of our our imagining you know as you said what what is Jesus saying to me if I were there in the scene you know and well that's not something that God's given us and so we need a discipline sort of reading in that sense and anything on centering prayer yeah centering prayer again it's one of these things where yet if you go in again with so many of these terms there's no sort of like authoritative glossary that said this is what it is and if you don't describe it exactly this way you're wrong so again different ways of talking about that I think would be more or less problematic but at the end of the day the the problematic elements there do happen I think when when that kind of approach to prayer detaches itself more and more from God's word and becomes more and more about me exploring my own consciousness and my own perceptions of of nature and how is God speaking to me through through the wind or whatever it might be it's just undisciplined at times and there's potential to go off into spaces that are increasingly distant and remote from what scripture has given us that's right I'm talking to Matthew being him about his book a heart a flame for God we have just a few minutes left I want to hit on a few more points I mentioned several times this chapter in the second half about nature so part three is widening our scope so after looking at the Reformation triangle scripture meditation and prayer then you say well let's widen this and by doing so you're not doing what some of these other authors have done which is to say all right if those three things don't work for you here are three other pathways to God you're saying with those three things that that's the spiritual formation we're talking about prayer meditation scripture now how does this fit into these other areas so one is self-examination another Christian relationships looking to one another and then the natural world so you say looking inward looking outward looking to one another it's a great way of putting it and we don't have time to do all of them but just say a little bit about the natural world because you say in here that it even helped you in your own preaching to think about am I doing this as much as depirations would have done and that was good for me to think about too I thought yeah I I don't I mean I like to be outside I like to see things but I don't think about where where is scripture through the natural world teaching me things and teaching me lessons and you make a very compelling point that they they did natural observation all the time so talk to us about this looking outward how does the Reformation triangle intersect with nature yeah they they really did I mean to a surprising degree I mean I think even even those of us who are a bit familiar with with Puritans and Puritan literature would would perhaps be surprised to read they have whole collections where all it is is just sort of like devotional thoughts prompted by things that they're witnessing in the natural world one thing that's interesting to me when I think about they do this a lot more than I've done this in my own preaching and I just think you know well if I'm a 17th century person in you know rural England I'm spending a lot more time out in nature and I have far fewer other inputs and so I think they have just a natural space to kind of reflect but also they're reading the psalmist who seems to be doing very similar things they're reading the proverbs that says look to the ant you sluggerd and they're kind of working with that and what I think is interesting though is and where a Puritan approach John Edwards is another one in the 18th century who who makes all sorts of you know connections between God's truth in scripture and the book of nature if we can use that term but I think the discipline is and where they are bounded in a way that some of these other approaches to spiritual formation feel to me unbounded is they are very clear that all of these sort of the revelatory input from God we're learning about who God is and and what he's done in Christ this is all coming to us from scripture and when they're out in the natural world they're allowing natural phenomenon to sort of prompt and enrich reflections they already had insights they already had from the Bible so when you read through like Jonathan Edwards some of his reflections on nature I think can at least to me initially appear rather fanciful and you're thinking where are you getting that but then you actually go into what he's saying he's not learning like new things about how God works from looking at a caterpillar inching along rather he already knows things from his meditation on scripture about how God works and then the caterpillar is reminding him of that and he's saying well look the whole earth is the Lord's and the Lord made the caterpillar and the Bible is full of examples where we are told explicitly this natural thing actually points us to a deeper spiritual reality and in fact if God is one and God's truth is one that you know it's designed in such a way to prompt that thought but you would never come to that thought just from looking at the caterpillar because as you said about holding a baby there's people all around the world who love sunsets and holding babies and and maybe caterpillars I don't know but you know we know the we know the God who is we know the trying God of scripture through scripture and then the world becomes this theater to display that glory for those with eyes to see regenerate hearts ears that have been opened by the gospel to appreciate and assimilate and understand these natural realities yeah it's really helpful I I love to go on a run go on a walk outside and see beautiful things but it was a challenge to me to appropriate the scripture I already know so if I see a giant oak I think what does it mean to be an oak of winter when the grass dies think about the grass withers the flower falls with the word of our God stands forever these are things that most Christians have somewhere in their knowledge of God's word and you can look and see lessons all around you so want to be real clear that the Reformed approach in your book is not at all saying the only thing that can help with your spiritual formation is just to read books just read books and read the Bible but you're saying it must never be divorced from that word centered piety one name that we haven't mentioned yet but you maybe mention more than any other in the book and provide an appreciative critique I think that's the language you use is James K. A. Smith and you have you talk about him throughout but you have a whole chapter in your last section on challenges James K. A. Smith and I've read a number of his books and you talk about desiring the kingdom or you are what you love and I think that the insight that has been helpful to many Reformed Christians is he's sort of said look if we just think of worldview as just get the the 10 right doctrinal planks in your head and he's coming out of a certain you know at Calvin in a certain Dutch Reformed Christian Reformed tradition which has been very big on worldview for the last hundred years if we think that that's it just get your head with the right ideas and now you're a former Christian he's saying well our whole life is a liturgy and there's rhythms and there's practices and it's not simply getting the right knowledge in your head so I I'm trying to lay out the appreciative part what what is the critique of James K. A. Smith because I find in you know even more than Dallas Willard or Richard Foster among the sort of people that I read and listen to I'm much more likely to find Smith being a formative influence than though some of those other guys so I think it's important to say what did he get right and what are the overall project? Yeah I when I describe my interaction with him as an appreciative critique I really do mean the appreciative part as you've referenced sometimes we can just say that and really it's more critique than appreciation in his case I mean when his book You Are What You Love came out you know the book about desire and love that that was very influential for a lot of folks that that I was friends with and I read it and I found a lot in there that I liked what did I like for one he's just a great writer and puts things in an interesting fresh way but I think what he is not the end of the story and you know if you've in scholarly circles you will meet people whether they're historians or even New Testament or Old Testament scholars who know lots of things about sort of historic Christian truth and they are no closer to the kingdom than when they began and that's a scary thing and it's a reminder that you can memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism and potentially not be any godlier for it and I think he's getting at that and he's putting his finger on that and he's right and he talks about you know the way in which discipleship is about actually someone who's truly Christ-like is going to love the things that God loves and the psalmist talks about this and hates the things God hates and that doesn't sound like however the question is how does your heart get sort of turned in the right direction and so one one critique that I don't talk loads about in in the this book a heart of flame but I think is theirs I think and you referenced with other authors I think there's an in absence of a discussion and doctrine of regeneration there in terms of the basic orientation of the heart but assuming a regenerate Christian united to Christ what do we do how do our affections get stirred up in godly directions and I think the answer the Bible gives us is through again that God's word is at the core of it and it's meditation on the truths of God that lead to the right affections and emotions and where Smith goes in um a lot of his stuff is this direction of bodily engagement so the chapter on the book uh the subtitle I think is um you know what about the no the the titles what about the body and um he says well the the way that the heart is through the body and for a variety of reasons that I am packing that chapter I just don't think that that is a biblical notion and I don't think it's a notion that actually upon closer inspection even makes sense or holds up under its own uh terms very good and I encourage people to read the interaction I think it's very thoughtful respectful uh a final question for you Matthew and thank you for giving your time the last chapter you talk about weaknesses and difficulties and it's it's very helpful realistic you talk about sin in the Christian life our temperament our biology creeping worldliness so these are various things snares of Satan that can life circumstances can prevent us on this path of spiritual formation so here's my last question I could hear imagine somebody reading the book listening to this podcast and saying okay I I see biblically what you're talking about and I see some of these dangers I don't want to fall into that but I hear you say Matthew and Kevin prayer scripture meditation look I've been hearing that my whole life and I'm just stuck and I don't feel close to God I don't feel like I'm growing God my faith feels dry and dormant what do you say to the person who has that reaction to the sort of typical traditional and I think ultimately correct reformation triangle that they may have grown up with and feels to them rather lackluster well I think it's it's hugely important to to address that and one of the the things that bring out at the at the start of that chapter it's the last chapter in the book there's there's an epilogue but that's the last full chapter on when things go wrong and I kind of start by saying you know something to the effect of look you read a book like this and it's easy to sort of just imagine that everybody's just leaping from one spiritual high point to another and they're just loving their prayer and their meditation they're reading the Bible and it's so rich and it's so great because for the last you know 300 pages or whatever it's been I've been giving lots of examples and quotes from Puritan authors and Reformation authors who are delighting in these things and and celebrating how God works to shape his people through his word and yet I want to underscore that in I think all that's true but the lived reality for the individual Christian often will feel rather different and when you look at this same tradition the same Reformed tradition the same Puritan tradition you find ample evidence that these men and women godly men and women who followed this path faithfully to the end of their lives they went through many deep valleys spiritually and it was not always one big felt celebration and and bursting with spiritual joy they had those moments but they also walked through places of real just barrenness spiritual dryness even despair at times and I bring out some of those examples one just to say if this is what you're experiencing you're not stepping outside of the experience of of the very saints that we profile in this book so that's one thing so what do we do with that well I think there's lots of things that one might say and if we were having a you know structure in a pastoral conversation with someone walking through that there's lots of things we might say to them by way of encouragement but at the end of the day I think the two observations one it would appear from looking at the history of God's people and looking even at the examples given in scripture we think of the Psalms it seems as though God actually calls us to walk through different seasons in different places and so it seems that God in his wisdom has not seen fit to make our earthly pilgrimage one of just unbroken highs it seems that's his intention so one thing I would say gently to to myself and to others when we're feeling are are we wiser than God on this point if if you know Paul says that he and his companions despaired to the point of death almost you know in the Corinthian correspondence and are we wiser than than God in this you will go through the valleys the promises that he will not leave you or forsake you and then secondly I think we would ask well what is the alternative if one is feeling a period of dryness that doesn't change the model that the Bible puts forward it doesn't change the the prescription that scripture gives it doesn't change any of that and so the fact that I'm going through maybe a period of spiritual barrenness which other saints godly men and women have walked through before me and shown me that it doesn't last forever and that this is actually something that God uses in that larger sanctification sense to form me and conform me to his image I have to ask myself well is there another way you know and the answer is no you you know Jesus says to Peter are you gonna leave too and he says well to whom shall we go you have the words of life and at the end of the day life in a fallen world is hard it's hard for the people of God but God is with us and he'll never leave us he'll never forsake us and the tools that he's given to us are good and as we work out our salvation with fear and trembling that's what he's called us to and the example of God's people shows us there's there's goodness in that even when we walk through difficulty that's a great way to end thank you I've been talking to Matthew Bingham a phoenix seminary this new book by Crossway I think it comes out in a couple of weeks sometime in April a heart of flame for God a reformed approach to spiritual formation I encourage everyone to get it it's very helpful timely academic in a good sense but still accessible so Matthew thank you for your time thank you for this great book thank you thank you have it for having me and for our listeners thank you for joining us on LBE you can check out clearlyreform.org for other resources like this one and until next time glorify God enjoy him forever and read a good book