Bingham A Heart Aflame for God

A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-4335-9264-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

How 21st-Century Evangelicals Can Pursue Spiritual Growth through Early Modern Puritan Piety 'Keep your heart' (Proverbs 4:23). 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling' (Philippians 2:12). 'Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ' (2 Peter 3:18). Scripture beckons Christians toward obedience and maturity, but many modern approaches to spiritual formation are less than biblical. In A Heart Aflame for God, Matthew C. Bingham studies God-ordained spiritual practices modeled by the 16th- and 17th-century Reformers. Primarily drawing from Puritan tradition, Bingham shows readers how to balance belief in salvation through faith with a responsibility for one's personal spiritual growth. He studies biblical practices-including meditation, prayer, and self-examination-from a Protestant perspective. Blending historical analysis and practical application, this edifying study cultivates a greater understanding of Reformed theology and an ever-growing relationship with God.  - Puritan Tradition for Modern Evangelicals: Shows readers how classic Protestant traditions-including prayer, meditation, and appreciation for the natural world-steer wayward hearts toward Christ - Rich Reformed Perspective: Presents spiritual formation practices that are consistent with the 5 solas of the Protestant Reformation - Intermediate-Level Study: Written for theological students, pastors, and Christians interested in early modern Reformed theologians

Matthew C. Bingham (PhD, Queen's University Belfast) is vice president of academic affairs and associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is the author of Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution and has served as a pastor in the United States and Northern Ireland. Matthew is married to Shelley, and they have four children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bingham, Matthew C.

Leseproben

1

Spiritual Formation

A Simple Concept with a Complicated History

This book is about living the Christian life. And a basic biblical assumption about the Christian life is that it ought to be a growing life. When the Bible describes walking with God, the expectation is that it will never be a static, settled affair but rather a journey characterized by continual development, increase, and forward movement. The Christian “press[es] on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:14). Indeed, an expectation of growth is built into the very idea of being “born again” (John 3:3). Birth marks the beginning of new life, which will be characterized by subsequent maturation and growth. Thus we read that having been “born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” Christians are like “newborn infants” who “long for the pure spiritual milk” of God’s word “that by it [they] may grow up into salvation” (1 Pet. 1:3; 2:2).

Such growth in Christ is, first and foremost, the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers. When the apostle Paul writes that Christians are “being transformed . . . from one degree of glory to another,” he describes the transformation in passive terms, as something that is happening to the people of God as the gracious result of the Spirit’s work in their lives: “For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). And yet while the overarching transformation is God’s work in us and not ultimately our work in ourselves, the Bible also makes clear that growth in the Christian life involves our active, intentional effort and energy. Shortly after Paul attributes our spiritual growth to the Spirit’s work in us, he urges believers, without any embarrassment or sense of tension, to work for spiritual growth themselves: “Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God” (2 Cor. 7:1).

Clearly, then, the Bible portrays Christian growth as both God’s work and, in some lesser but no less real sense, our work. The question of how these two ideas relate to each other in harmony rather than contradiction has been the subject of much controversy throughout the history of the church, and in chapter 2, we examine more closely how Reformation-minded Protestants have understood that relationship. But for now, let’s simply note that the Bible puts both ideas forward and that in this book we are primarily concerned with the second idea, that believers must be actively involved in Spirit-wrought Christian growth.

In recent decades, the term spiritual formation has been adopted by many as a helpful way of referring to the active role we take in pursuing godliness. As we see in this chapter, the term has a somewhat complicated history and is not without its critics. Yet when properly contextualized, it’s a term that can still helpfully communicate what we are interested in here. What distinguishes our interest in spiritual formation from other books discussing the same is that here we are working to understand what spiritual formation sounds like when set in a distinctly Reformed-evangelical key.1 To do that, as mentioned in the introduction, we are drawing on the work of early modern (ca. 1500–1800) Protestant theologians, pastors, and devotional writers, looking to understand how they brought “holiness to completion in the fear of God” (2 Cor. 7:1) so that we might better do the same today.

What Is Keeping the Heart?

When we think specifically of the active role that believers are called to play in their own spiritual growth, one of the Bible’s loveliest exhortations comes from Proverbs 4:23:

Keep your heart with all vigilance,

for from it flow the springs of life.

This verse was a favorite of the English Puritans, who used it during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to capture and communicate a sense of the Christian’s overarching spiritual task. If you are a Christian, your main business before God and other people is to “keep your heart” in and through all life’s varying circumstances. The Puritan pastor John Flavel expounded this verse at some length in his work A Saint Indeed: or, The Great Work of a Christian, Opened and Pressed (1668). “The greatest difficulty in conversion,” wrote Flavel, “is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion is to keep the heart with God.” He described keeping the heart as “the very pinch and stress of religion” and “the great business of a Christian’s life.”2 Flavel’s writing on this theme is perhaps the best known, but other Puritan authors such as Stephen Marshall (ca.1594–1655) and Richard Alleine (1610–1681) appealed to the verse as well, finding in it a pleasing distillation of the Bible’s approach to godliness and growth.3 Marshall, for example, suggested that “there is not one Pearl of greater price, one sentence of more divine use than” Proverbs 4:23.4 The English Puritan theologian John Owen insisted that “watching or keeping of the heart” is that “which above all keepings we are obliged unto.” Elsewhere, appealing directly to Proverbs 4:23, Owen stressed that among a person’s various “keepings” or concerns—for family, for possessions, for reputation—one must “attend to that of the heart” above all else. “There is no safety without it,” wrote Owen, for if you “save all other things and lose the heart, . . . all is lost.”5

But what exactly does it mean to keep the heart, and why did these early modern pastors find it such a helpful concept? Flavel explained it like this:

To keep the heart . . . is nothing else but this constant care and diligence of such a renewed man, to preserve his soul in that holy frame to which grace hath reduced it [i.e., led it back to], and daily strives to hold it. . . . [T]o keep the heart is carefully to preserve it from sin, which disorders it; and maintain that spiritual and gracious frame, which fits it for a life of communion with God.6

The idea here is that the “renewed man” (i.e., the regenerate or born-again believer) has been powerfully changed by the Holy Spirit in a basic, fundamental way—“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17)—and yet he must now, with God’s help, actively press after a greater, more thorough realization of that new life that is already his—“Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (Eph. 4:1).

This involves battling sin, of course, but beyond that, the idea of keeping the heart also suggests a positive cultivation, an active maintenance, and a daily “fight for joy.”7 To keep the heart is not just saying no to sin but actively saying yes to God and the things of God. As a Christian strives to keep her heart “with all vigilance,” she will be aware of a nagging tendency for her heart to drift toward false gods of every description, and her active attention will return again and again to how she might untangle herself from idols and instead, as Flavel put it, “maintain that spiritual and gracious frame, which fits it for a life of communion with God.”8 Thankfully, God gives us means or tools to use in this struggle, and the burden of this book’s later chapters is to examine those as they were taken up by our Reformation-minded fathers and mothers in the faith.

One chief attraction of the phrase keeping the heart is the way it nicely captures the biblical sense that our Christian walk is holistic, encompassing all that we are and all that we do. This is primarily because in the conceptual world of the Bible, “the heart” is an all-encompassing term, and thus to “keep it” implies an all-around self-watch. When David says, “My heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices,” the parallelism of the psalm suggests an equivalence between his “heart” and his “whole being” (Ps. 16:9)—as David’s “heart” goes, so goes David. Likewise, when he laments, "My heart is in anguish within me” (Ps. 55:4), this clearly means that David himself is in anguish. Elsewhere, David’s request to God “Unite my heart to fear your name” (Ps. 86:11–12) suggests a desire to see a comprehensive reordering of his entire person, an integration in which “the lines meet at a point beyond himself, the fear of the Lord.”9 When the Old Testament prophets celebrated the wholesale renewal of the human person that would accompany God’s new covenant, they employed this same heart language, with God promising, “I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26; cf. Jer. 31:33). Here these two hearts, one of stone and the other of flesh, suggest two completely different orientations toward life and love and godliness. Later, Jesus drew on such Old Testament heart imagery when he wished to contrast superficial, external rule keeping with a deep and abiding...