Interested In Spiritual Formation? Look To The Reformed Tradition.

As I made my way to bed, shedding the day’s clothes for fresh pajamas, I continued the conversation with God that had started when I was prostrate on the living room floor, nose squeezed into the gutter between two psalms.

After helping to replant a church in 2019, walking that young congregation through the challenges of the pandemic, and continuing to process the tragic death of my stepfather in 2021, I spent many nights face down on the floor in the fall of 2022. Something felt profoundly broken. In that season, many nights ended the same way: with a guttural longing I was unable to give words to. I wanted more of God, and I wanted my church to experience more of God too.

In A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation, Matthew Bingham—associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary—offers a much-needed contribution to the spiritual formation conversation, giving airtime to the oft-overlooked Reformed thinkers. His goal is to help readers “understand what spiritual formation sounds like when set in a distinctively Reformed-evangelical key” (22).

This book was written for people who, much like me, have grown “frustrated by a religious culture that, at its worst, can seem superficial, shallow, and almost wholly disconnected from the ancient faith that once inspired men and women to bravely go to the lions” (5). However, rather than looking outside the Protestant tradition, Bingham argues we can find the robust devotional tools many of us long for by looking to the reformers and the Puritans.

Reformation Triangle

According to Bingham, “Spiritual formation is the conscious process by which we seek to heighten and satisfy our Spirit-given thirst for God (Ps. 42:1–2) through divinely appointed means and with a view toward ‘work[ing] out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling’ (Phil. 2:12) and becoming ‘mature in Christ’ (Col. 1:28)” (35). Reformed spiritual formation is centered on the Word, marked by simplicity, and committed to engaging the heart through the mind.

Reformed spiritual formation is centered on the Word, marked by simplicity, and committed to engaging the heart through the mind.

Foundational to Reformed spiritual formation is what Bingham calls the Reformation Triangle, which is “the nexus of Scripture reading, meditation, and prayer” (191). These practices are so interconnected that it’s difficult to see where one begins and the other ends. “By allowing the three [parts of the triangle] to inform each other,” Bingham expounds, “we come to understand our growth in grace in terms of conversational communion with the one who made us; he addresses us through his word; we think meditatively on what he’s said; we respond back to him in prayer” (194).

Within the Reformed tradition, heroes like John Calvin, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Spurgeon reached amazing depths of faith with these three fundamental disciplines. Though some evangelicals claim we need to look to other traditions for supposedly more robust spiritual practices, it’s worth considering whether our understanding of these practices lacks depth, rather than these practices being deficient themselves.

Building on the Foundation

Though it’s foundational, the Reformation Triangle isn’t the totality of Reformed spiritual formation. Bingham explores an additional trio of spiritual disciplines: looking inward (self-examination), looking outward (the natural world), and looking to one another (Christian relationships). When these practices are rightly understood, “they represent different angles from which to view the Reformation-triangle disciplines and different contexts in which to practice them” (201).

Bingham’s greatest contribution to this conversation is his emphasis on engaging with the natural world to commune with God. He confesses, “When I read Puritan pastors unfolding theological lessons from their everyday observations of nature, I feel as if I’ve been transported to another, rather alien, world” (245). In a world mediated by man-made things, we’d do well to meditate on God-made things, a practice well modeled by the reformers and Puritans.

Scripture tells us that God speaks to us through creation. Yet many of us cannot hear the “heavens declare the glory of God” over our noise-canceling headphones (Ps. 19:1). Others of us cannot set our gaze on an ant to “consider her ways” because our attention is riveted on the never-ending stream of TikTok (Prov. 6:6). Bingham encourages Christians, “If we want to pursue spiritual formation through encountering God’s creation, we cannot even begin until we make ourselves go outside” (248).

Leaning Toward the Practical

There’s ample evidence of good practices for spiritual formation in the Reformed tradition. But we haven’t always done a great job teaching people how to read Scripture, pray, and meditate.

Hesitancy to teach people how to do these is a product of Reformed history. Bingham notes, “Reformation-minded Protestants were reluctant to provide the sort of detailed directions sometimes found in Catholic devotional manuals, in part because they worried that doing so would inappropriately bind the consciences of their readers with extrabiblical prescriptions” (148). Thus, even when they spent pages celebrating the value and delight in meditation, Reformed teachers were often “rather vague about what one is actually meant to do” (149).

Scripture reading, meditation, and prayer are so interconnected that it’s difficult to see where one begins and the other ends.

Evangelicals of all ages long to experience deeper communion with God. But they often look to other traditions—like Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism—because of the lack of specificity within the Reformed tradition. Certainly, we should avoid legalistic prescription. But we shouldn’t abandon attempts to provide some guidelines for those we shepherd. After all, when Jesus’s disciples asked him to teach them how to pray, he willingly gave them a template to follow (Luke 11:1–4). This book begins that process with a proposal for a Reformed spiritual formation that’s deeply scriptural, simple, and stirring.

Bingham’s task was immense, given the abundance of source material of the many prolific Reformed writers. He clearly limits his recommended practices to those found in Scripture. Yet other practices like the Sabbath and fasting appear both in Reformed devotional life and Scripture but remain notably absent from the book. This important volume invites Reformed pastors, writers, and thinkers to continue the conversation that Bingham has begun.

The book will, in the words of the Puritan Isaac Ambrose, “kindle and inflame holy affections.” This is a resource I’ll gladly share with my congregation as we learn to experience God more deeply together. A Heart Aflame for God is an important book on spiritual formation, especially for those unacquainted with the depth and breadth of Reformed spirituality.