Welcome to Deep Roots, the podcast brought to you by Oak Hill College, conversations about theology and ministry.
My name's Tim Ward and I teach word ministry and hermeneutics. That means Bible interpretation here at college.
My name's Eric Ortland. I teach Hebrew and Old Testament. We are joined today by our friend and colleague Matthew Bingham, who teaches doctrine and history. Matthew, thank you for being here with us.
Thank you guys. Great to be here.
Just to begin things, can you tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you came to Oak Hill? And how many years have you been at Oak Hill now?
So this is my fourth year at Oak Hill. And before coming here, I was a pastor in the United States in Georgia. And then we were in Northern Ireland for a while.
I was doing my doctoral studies, pastored there briefly as well, and then came down to Oak Hill in the summer of 2018.
Just tell us a little bit about the church where you pastored in Georgia.
Yeah, thanks. It was a Reformed Baptist Church. It was a church plant actually that we got started there. And we started with, it was my wife and I and two other families and a few other assorted folks.
And yeah, it was a great experience. It was not easy, but the Lord blessed it and we were there for five years doing that.
And you were at a Baptist Church in Ireland as well, if I remember correctly.
Actually, we were in a Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland, in Belfast.
My mistake, I apologize.
Don't make that mistake in Northern Ireland.
Yeah, we were in a Presbyterian Church, but they tolerated, we were not the only cradle Baptists, I think, amongst them in the congregation there. They were very kind to us. They even let me preach from time to time.
That's real grace right there.
Absolutely, but not on Baptism.
No.
You wouldn't want to go there.
No.
Excellent. Good. Now, Matthew, your great love is church history. Just tell us a little bit about what drives you and motivates you in teaching church history here at college. We're so glad you do. Just tell us your heart in that.
Yeah, thanks. And so I've always liked history. Before I felt any sense of call to ministry, that was actually the plan to go and do a PhD in history and pursue teaching and research in a more secular kind of way.
And then upon going into ministry, feeling that sense of call, pastoring the church, it's been a really happy piece of God's providence that I've kind of been able to combine the two, coming here to Oak Hill, getting to teach and to think about history.
And so all of my academic work is in history. That's where my degrees have been.
And yeah, it's really a great opportunity, great experience. It's interesting though with history.
If we think about what we've kind of got four main divisions at a theological college like this, and it feels like of those four, so we have biblical studies, systematic theology, practical theology, and then historical studies, church history.
It feels sometimes like church history and historical study is the only one of those four that sort of has to justify its own existence.
I can feel a little bit smug about this because no one says, oh well, the Old Testament is that important, you know, so I never have to worry about that.
That's right. No one's ever said to me, helping people learn how to preach really well. Why do you do that at college?
So we've got the three really important subject areas and the one you teach.
It does feel, and actually, I mean, in fairness, there is a certain logic to it. I can sort of see it. I can sort of see it.
And yet at the same time, I want to put the plug in for church history because I feel like actually it's having an historical sense, having an historical awareness is actually really, really important.
It's important for the church. It's important for people in ministry. It's important, I think, for leadership in a church context.
It's important for, I think, one's own sort of soul and one's own Christian life. I think it's really nourishing.
So if you, as you have students in doctrine and history classes, maybe they're not saying this out loud, but they're thinking hundreds and thousands of years ago, this stuff happened.
Do I really need to know this? How will you negotiate that with a student and with a class?
Help us think that through. Why does this matter so much in practical ways for our own Christian life and for our ministries?
Yeah, no, thanks. I mean, it does come up. And in fact, with the, so I do the church history survey course here.
And so this is the very first semester and we kind of start there. And one of the first things I try to say is that first to try not to oversell it.
I mean, as I mentioned, there's a logic to, I think, it's not an accident that people say, well, do we really need this? Right. And so I try to say to folks, you know, look, I'm not saying that if you are talking to someone in the church context who has a pressing problem, a pressing life crisis, you're not going to say, well, have you thought about the investiture controversy and how, you know, this might.
Who's this guy in 452? Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, to me, first step, don't oversell it. But then to try to help students to see how it's not just about knowing names and dates.
Now, fairness, I think there's some value to knowing some names and some dates. And I think that can be helpful. That's not a bad thing. I'm not against names and dates. But at the end of the day, to me, it's really about cultivating a sense of this historical movement and the sense that I'm situated in a particular time, in a particular place.
I have a context. I have a relationship to those Christian men and women who came before. I am affected by them. There's continuity and discontinuity with them. And there's important things that I need to take from that and learn from that and bring to bear on the way I think about the present moment.
Do you think it's true to say in a sense that we're debtors to Christians of earlier generations, even if they were in a different part of the church, and even if we might have had significant and perhaps valid theological disagreements with them, in a sense, we're still debtors to them?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's the obvious ways in which someone had to teach the gospel to me, someone had to preach to me, someone had to preach to the person who preached to me. So there's this obvious sense of a chain that goes all the way back in which we're all debtors to those who came before.
But then in a wider sense, the way that we do things at my local church is not something that we all invented out of nothing. We stand in this relationship to the past. We're conditioned by it.
And I think if you don't realize that you actually do have these sorts of traditions weighing on you, and you just imagine that everything you do is somehow unique to you or that you invented it, you know, it's not that you won't have traditions, you just won't understand them, and you won't be in a position to think wisely and well about them.
Yeah. And I guess we will get into talking about just some real particulars from history and how that really helps us. The thing that was occurring to me just as you were talking, just at the really kind of basic level of here are some of the ways in which history is significant.
It just occurred to me, would this be right? At some level, just the nature of our sin is not going to incline us to think that we owe a great debt to those who came before, and we've been thoroughly shaped because we all like to think of ourselves as I made myself, I'm responsible for my own achievements.
I believe that's just because I'm really clever and I thought it through. And I wasn't created by anybody else. I wasn't made or shaped by anybody else. The way that sin just makes you think that you're the pinnacle, and you made yourself who you are.
Is that kind of fair? Just a right sense of history having shaped who I am. Being really aware of that is actually going to come through sanctification.
Yeah, and I think in that, recognizing that we all have blind spots and we have things that we miss and that we're all probably conditioned more by our wider cultural context than we care to admit.
C.S. Lewis has this great preface he writes to Athanasius on the Incarnation. So he's writing this essay as a preface to this much older fourth century text.
And in that though, he talks about why we need to read old books. And though he frames it in terms of reading old books, the case is basically put in forward is why we need to think about the past, why we need to think about Christians who came before.
And the point that he brings out really, really well is this sense that every age has its own outlook. And that means it's going to have its own strengths and its own weaknesses.
I'm conditioned by the fact that I live in the 21st century west, and I can't escape that. So there are going to be ways in which my patterns of thought mirror the patterns of thought on offer in the editorial page of The Guardian, even in ways I'm not conscious.
So how do I check that? And actually getting in touch with Christians from the past with their own set of issues, but they're just not my issues today. There are different set of weaknesses and blind spots, but that can help me to kind of see myself a little better.
You know, it's like having some sort of contrasting surface against which to see the outline and the contours of your own identity more clearly.
A bit like if you travel the world now to a different culture, you'll find out things about yourself that you thought either you didn't know about them, or you just thought, well, all right thinking people do this and then you discover, no, they don't.
Certainly with people like me, it's suddenly, you know, about history. There are massively more different cultures and kinds of people to show you how just localized you are.
In fact, in that essay, Lewis said that we should for every book we read, we read written in the 20th century, we should read one written before the 20th century to balance it out and cleanse our palate as it were.
One of the things I've been most concerned with my kids who are teenagers now growing up in a very secular 21st century Western, the world progressive context.
The particular hot button issues that our culture has have a fee. They can have a feeling of inevitability obviousness.
That, you know, all the issues with marriage and sexuality, that the kinds of answers our culture is giving our culture likes to present itself as giving the most obvious inarguable like obviously it's that way.
And just being aware that for most of recorded history, nobody thought that way at all. That doesn't make them perfect and everything, but just having a sense that this is actually extremely new way of thinking and probably 50 years from now, the questions are all going to change people.
Just having that is crucial to engaging with our culture.
If I remember this rightly, my son's late teens now, but when he was younger, watching on telly, something lots of people with horrible histories.
The thing on children's TV here. And it's pretty funny. And in a sense they're informing children about history. But my memory of watching some of those was him as in the end what it defaulted to so often was just laughing about how stupid they were then.
And no one actually popped up and said, Okay, we're so much better now. But the overall tone seemed to me that somehow everything we think at this particular moment in history, in this particular tiny little place in the world is obviously much more sensible than all the idiotic people who live back then.
But do you do you think the other particular or to other particular features to think of the particular culture that we live in, that just dispose us to think in those sorts of ways dispose us to not take seriously.
What may have been good in those who came before us.
That's really interesting. And I think you're absolutely right about. Yeah, I mean, I've seen some of those horrible histories I totally yes, what you're saying that is right and that's often the way the past is is presented.
And one thing I think is really interesting about that you know if you think about what what's the big story of the 20th Christianity in the 20th century the big stories is the globalization of Christianity and global expansion of Christianity.
And with it the recognition the right and proper recognition that Western Christians do not have the full story to tell we don't have a monopoly on what it means to be the Church of Christ in the world.
And so I think in light of that I think all of us are very aware and sensitive to and rightly so the fact that Christians from around the world have something to teach us and show us.
And we need to hear that and listen to that. And yet, you don't always see the same with Christians from other periods in time. I mean, it's kind of the same dynamic isn't it you have very different cultural moments, going back in time, where you have a whole different set
of assumptions and challenges and yet often we're very quick to dismiss those people groups in a way that we never would with with contemporary global Christians. Yeah, that well known line first line of a novel is the past is a different country.
They do things differently. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think I'm quoting that right, something like that. Well, and as someone who lives in a country where I was not born and who thinks about the past I can say that I think that's right on the money.
In fact, you mentioned that idea of getting to know yourself when you travel abroad and I don't know if this been your experience Eric but I since coming to the UK, even though we are in many ways sort of proximate cultures.
I have, I've become very aware of the sort of contours of my American this since coming to this country in a way that I just never could have been had I just stayed at home. Sure. Well, let me say working with American colleagues.
I started to see things about my own Englishness that I thought were just will all godly right thinking people do that don't they. And I'm slip that you guys have have been very gracious no one said it, and again to realize, maybe that's not godly, maybe that's just me being a bit English.
So I, so you haven't pointed it out.
Thank you for that. There's a kind of graciousness that's possible here, where we can listen to and respect other Christians, and let them be sinners and who need God's sanctifying grace as well.
We don't put them on a pedestal, especially Martin Luther in that way who I admire so much, and who said and did some pretty despicable things, and yet I deeply admire the man as well and I'm not Lutheran I wouldn't qualify as Lutheran, you know, we just don't line up
theologically in a number of ways. And I'm so profoundly thankful for the man.
Are there other important figures in church history or periods in church history that for you just really crystallize this dynamic of helping you see yourself that you know periods or figures really gotten a lot out of.
And at the same time you see the flaws, and you know as well that the imperfections. Yeah, no, that's a really great point and actually in our own moment.
That is one of the real hot button issues isn't it is how do we, how do we, what do we do with historical figures who we look at aspects of their, whether it's on a moral level or on a theological level we say, what, how is that.
That's not something I want to replicate or.
I admire that. What do we do with that, and it is interesting one one thing I think is helpful for me anyways to realize that it, it cuts both ways.
So, you know, I have often found myself sort of rebuked reading Christians from the past and realizing that they have concerns that I just don't care about.
And then realizing maybe I should care about the things that.
Can you give us some examples. Yeah, I mean, so one example that strikes me on the sort of more theological priorities level.
I think I was talking to you about this not that long ago, I had this experience reading Anselm, Curdeus Homo on the, on the God man on the incarnation.
So real quick who is Anselm and what on earth does Curdeus Homo mean.
I know that because I did Latin A level, but you know not everybody has the gift. Just really quick on it.
Right, so I mean so Anselm is a medieval theologian, and he is writing on the incarnation on this question of why the God man, and he's writing on the incarnation why did the sun take on our humanity, but he's writing it really with an eye towards thinking about atonement
and the cross and where does, how does the incarnation then lead to the atonement and the salvation of the world.
And he's sort of working these things out. And I'm reading along and thinking okay this is very interesting he's talking about the cross.
And then he has this big, to me, feels like this weird sort of back alley digression on angels.
And he starts talking all about angels and he starts asking this question like were angels, he says she's asking you know did Christ die for angels and I'll know but why not and could he have and do angels need to be redeemed and could they be redeemed and he's on this long thing about angels and.
That's the point in the Bible study where the Bible study leads thinking who invited this guy Anselm into my Bible study.
So that's effectively what I was thinking reading because if I'm being honest I found myself, one, I was bored. Two, I was confused. Three, I thought, boy, this guy's taking a wrong turn here and I found myself skipping this over like let's get back to the important business.
And it does just sort of strike me, you know, I'm not saying that I've, you know, we can't go overboard with overly obsessing over angelology or something. At the same time it did strike me, you know, actually the Bible talks a lot about angels.
And I don't talk or think very much about angels. Do I ever have I ever preached on angels? I mean if they're in the text maybe you mentioned them but have I ever really given this serious thought?
And it was one of these moments where you realize and maybe actually maybe I don't want to go full Anselm in my angelology. At the same time, might he have something to teach me?
Might he be able to correct me and actually draw my attention to a fairly big strand in the scripture witness when it comes to angelic beings.
This is really interesting because I came to a similar conclusion much more circuitous way. Reading the book of Revelation, reading Greg Beale, a wonderful guy to read, and he pointed out the obvious.
Big, big sat com or short abbreviated com. The big fat one. But the shorter abbreviated one is really helpful and gets at the center of it. It's just so worth reading.
I'm with you. I think the short one was a really good job.
Meanwhile, back on angels. And he points out the obvious. In the book of Revelation, twice, John wants to worship an angel and the angel has to say, no I'm a fellow servant along with you.
That's amazing that John is so moved by angels in service of the divine king, fulfilling God's purposes for the whole world and serving the church that he wants to worship them.
And then amazingly, this amazing, radiant, higher form of divine life says, I'm a servant along with you. So clearly in the New Testament, all the focus is on Jesus Christ himself.
And yet I remember John Calvin on Hebrews 1, the line about aren't angels ministers sent to those about to inherit salvation.
And Calvin says, it's no small measure of God's love for us that he sends beings higher than ourselves to minister to us. And it just took me way too long as a Christian to see what Anselm and Aquinas and others would have noticed and been helped by and encouraged by and would not have considered a diversion at all.
That's really helpful.
You've given me a line that I really, really want to use again in the future, going full Anselm on Angelos. Next time I think someone's going a little too excited about angels, I'm going, are you going full Anselm on me?
Don't go full Anselm on me.
I mean, let's keep going. More examples.
Before we do one more example, can I point out one that I like from Anselm, at the end of the proslogion?
I don't even know what the proslogion means, but the very, I don't know what the title of the book means, but the last chapter is about heaven and the joy of the redeemed saints in the Lord, and the joy of the redeemed saints in each other's joy, that we're going to be enjoying God in heaven.
We're going to be enjoying the fact that our brothers and sisters in Christ, uncounted millions, are also enjoying the Lord, and so that it's going to have this exponential sort of multiplying effect, where joy is going to go greater and greater, our joy in Christ in each other, in each other's joy, their joy in us, and in Christ.
It's gorgeous. I had never read anything like that before. Never. I'm so individualistic. It's just me and other Christians. That's good.
But that's my example from Anselm. More examples from Anselm, or anyone else, Matthew, please.
Yeah, so the Anselm one is a nice example to me of sort of, you see your theological blind spots, and you see, okay, here's a big strand of biblical teaching that functionally I sort of ignore, really, if I'm being honest, and it's a reminder that my ways of thinking about the world and about reality are actually probably conditioned more by the mainstream popular culture than I realize.
Which is so materialist.
Totally, totally.
And we're going to fall into that even though we believe in the spiritual realm.
And there's a sense in which we can't escape that, and the Lord has put us here in the 21st century, and fair enough, but it's helpful, isn't it, to sort of dip your toe in a pool with a very different temperature.
But also on the sort of thinking about the Christian life, thinking about morals and ethics, you know, I'm often struck by the way in which writers in the past, for example, thinking about sort of post-Reformation British Christianity, so English Puritans, this kind of thing, when they write about-
Which is your home area, isn't it?
It is.
This is the thing you know more about than anybody.
Possibly, possibly.
More than me.
But you know, I think about, they are like really adamant, and it's like not even a debate to them that, for example, Christians shouldn't be involved with dancing, right?
I mean, of course you wouldn't be involved with dancing.
They're not even really debating it when they talk about it.
It's like it's so obvious that a Christian would not engage in this sort of carnal, worldly, provocative thing.
And it's really interesting because I read that, and it doesn't necessarily make me think that they're totally right about dancing and that I shouldn't have danced at my wedding or something, but it does give me pause, and it does make me think, well, you know, we live in a just sort of sex-saturated culture.
And in what ways am I insufficiently attuned to this area of Christian ethics and this idea of sexual purity?
And you read these people who had such a different standard, and it caused you to say, you know, there are things that we all, I think, are watching and looking at that would have shocked and horrified our 16th, 17th century,
brothers and sisters.
Now, whether they're right or wrong in that reaction is, you know, we can talk about that.
But the point is we're operating with just a radically different standard for what constitutes godliness in this area.
I quite like this is quite nice.
So it's not a sense of, oh, horrible histories.
They were all stupid back there, and then nor is it the kind of idolization.
Oh, there was a golden age and it's just been declined ever since in Christian things.
But it's whether they are entirely right or whether they're not.
Hey, guess what?
They're probably a mixture just like us.
It's a different voice that makes you see things about yourself that you might not otherwise have seen.
That's that's really helpful.
I want to say we've been talking so far about particular thoughts and ideas and perspectives from figures in the past, which is hugely helpful.
Actually, on that one, if I were to throw mine in from my area of preaching and teaching, the thing that we don't need to talk about this now, we might do a whole other podcast on it.
When I first started reading what capital are reformed folks after the reformation and actually during the reformation to what they thought about preaching,
they keep mentioning this thing called the keys of the kingdom coming from places like Matthew, Chapter 16, Jesus saying to Peter, you got the keys of the kingdom.
When they talk about preaching, they talk about the keys of the kingdom all the time.
It's absolutely central in how they think about preaching.
I struggle to think of a contemporary book on preaching that I know of that doesn't have a strong eye on history that thinks about the keys of the kingdom,
that even aware that's an issue you might want to talk about when you talk about preaching.
Now, I'm still thinking through whether they got all overheated on the keys of the kingdom when it comes to preaching.
But it opened up a whole area that if I only read contemporary books and went to contemporary conferences, I pretty probably not going to I probably not going to be aware of it.
So what did they mean by the keys, keys of the kingdom?
I think that's all of the podcast.
In simple terms, they've got in view, I think that that strong notion, which actually to many evangelical folks now sounds a bit too worryingly Roman Catholic.
That when, as it were, when the the under shepherd whom God has appointed to be your pastor, when he looks you in the eye and says, because I hear you say the words of repentance,
whether he's doing it in one to one pastoral ministry or whether he's doing it in the words of the absolution in the liturgy and the service, when he's doing that, there is a sense in which the Lord is at work in forgiving power for you.
That can sound worryingly like the kind of Roman confessional priestly absolution thing.
And of course, these, these products are folks, they don't mean anything like that.
What they mean is that the Lord in his goodness gives you another person, you can't see the Lord Jesus, but you can see this other person, a pastor whom the Lord has given you, who can be a real means of assurance.
I think they're in that territory.
I'm still thinking it through as I read more of those folks.
That kind of makes sense.
If you could I ask you, in as much as every age has certain strengths and insights and certain blind spots and things that won't be good as seeing.
I'm not sure how I would answer this question, but do you think 21st century Western Christians are good at seeing things about the gospel that maybe 16th century or 17th century Christians weren't as good at picking up on?
Yeah, I think absolutely. I mean, there's a sense in which even before we think of what specific examples might fit the bill, just sort of think about the basic logic of the conversation we're having. We'd have to assume that there would be things about being a Christian in the 21st century West that would make us alive to certain realities, alert to certain realities that our past Christian forebears would have been a bit,
dead to. And I think that's absolutely right.
So for example, one obvious one that comes to mind is I think we are thinking about evangelism, and we are thinking about reaching non-Christians in a way that would have probably been impossible for a 17th century British Christian.
If you are in the 17th century and you're living in this country, just about everybody is at least a Christian on paper. It doesn't mean everyone is a Christian in the John 3, you must be born again kind of sense.
They were certainly aware of that, but everybody sort of nominally would put their hand up, yeah, of course, I'm a Christian. You know, you had occasional exceptions to that, but that's basically the thing.
So the whole sort of conversation about how we talk, how we preach, how we reach people with the gospel, obviously they're very alert to the need for conversion, but the whole conversation takes on a very different tone and tenor in that context.
Whereas now we're having conversations about apologetics, about engaging with people of other faiths, engaging with Islam. How do you talk to someone who it's not just that they're not a Christian, they don't think that these questions have any relevance or info that they need to hear.
They're thinking this is sort of like a medieval holdover. How do you talk to somebody like that? So we're going to process that differently.
And I think there are other examples as well. We already mentioned the global perspective that we now have. It's not that past Christians didn't read the Great Commission and have a sense of these things, but we have a sort of global awareness and a sensitivity and an interest.
That I think would have been really inaccessible to people in certain times and places.
We've been thinking about ideas and angles and viewpoints folks had in the past. If we shifted to maybe particular periods or individual figures.
Your answer to this is going to be, I want people to know about everything. But if you're the pastor of a church and you want people to get hold of one particular individual or period from church history, that's really going to help them in their own life as a Christian. Where are you going to go?
Well, there are obviously lots of answers to that. And that's going to depend on one's individual tastes and preferences. But for me, I do think that for in my own life, let's put it that way, I have been most helped and shaped by the post-reformation English Puritans.
And why is that? Well, in part, these were people writing in the late 16th century and through the 17th century, so late 1500s into the 1600s.
And they just put out this incredible body of devotional literature, this incredible wealth of commentary on scripture, sermons, all sorts of investigations into the Christian life in sort of, sometimes it can feel like exhausting detail.
But they really just turn over what does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to be godly? And they just have a very searching sort of comprehensive vision for living the Christian life that I found really helpful and really encouraging.
And one of the things that I think is encouraging, and we were talking before about each era has its own sort of strengths and weaknesses. And often when I read these Puritan authors, I see strength there where I see weakness in myself.
So, for example, you know, I look at myself and I think I'm pretty soft in a lot of ways. I'm used to incredible material comfort. I mean, by any global or historical standard, all of us in this room live like, you know, kings and queens.
And you're reading people who had to struggle greatly with just the basic material necessities of life. And, you know, that perspective shapes their outlook.
And I find when I read these Puritan authors, they seem less surprised than I often find myself when faced with the reality that yes, the world has fallen, and the creation itself is groaning and waiting for redemption.
They don't seem as surprised that life is hard, and that sometimes bad things happen and loved ones die. I mean, you think about somebody like John Owen, Puritan pastor, who had, I think he had 11 children.
He lost so, almost all of them. All of them but one died. And then one of them died as a teenager, isn't that correct? That does ring a bell. Yeah, I mean, it was a really, yeah.
And I think his wife died before him. Poor man had to bury his entire family. And I think one of the last books he wrote was Communion with God. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know if our audience has read it.
For me, I think Communion with God, outside of scriptures, may be the book that has helped me the most, just in terms of being a Christian and coming before. And he wrote at the end of his life, the poor man had to bury every member of his family.
And the way he talks about it. It is extraordinary, isn't it? It is extraordinary. I interrupted. I'm sorry, Matt. Just on that, Communion with God. I mean, John Owen's big, can be hard going to read, but there is a kind of simplified version out there, isn't it? Is it Kelly Kaepich?
Yeah, that's right. That's right. K-A-P-I-C, if you want to pick that up. Can I make an appeal for the original Owen though? I find him very difficult to read. Bad English. But I find if I read him out loud, I can hear what he's saying.
Interesting. And actually, I think there's a kind of sermonic influence. I feel like he's preaching to me, and I find it a lot easier to keep up with him if I'm reading him out loud. That's just me. Maybe other people have a different experience.
Actually, can I just, just on what you were talking about that made me think, I mean, I'm verging into your territory, so you can tell me more about this. A couple years ago, I read John Flavel. Flavel? Flavel? Not sure. Let's call the whole thing off. He was a pastor in Devon, wasn't he? Wrote a book called, is it The Mystery of Divine Providence? It's a book on providence.
Yeah, The Mystery of Providence. And I read that, what you were saying just made me remember it. He says things about providence, and clearly he was saying this to his congregation that I would never say. So at one point he said something like, he's talking about marriage. He said, maybe there have been people, married couples, he said, I think there probably have been, where they have been too devoted to each other.
And it was clouding their devotion to the Lord. So the Lord took one of the partners away in death. And I remember thinking, did you actually say that in your pastoring? I mean, I have no idea if he was right to do so. But for me, it was one of those moments of just like you were saying, he took seriously the realities of suffering and deprivation and grief.
Because it was daily. He spent a lot of time ministering to people who were going out onto the high seas, sailors. He wrote this amazing sermon, Ship Captains to Read, out on ship. He's just living with realities of death every day. And that would have led him to say that kind of thing. And as he said, it brought me up short. I'm not surrounded by that.
And I ought to take it far more seriously than I do. And you don't have to completely agree with everything you said the way he said it to benefit from it. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you could look at that and you could actually say, I don't think that's a helpful thing to say from the pulpit. But the fact that he would have said that, it just is putting you into this radically different frame and challenging some assumptions I have. Because maybe I'm not going to go full-flavor on that particular point. Maybe I could be a little more bold in underscoring some very biblical.
Don't go full-flavor.
What are some other names from the English Puritans who are really meaningful and been really helpful for you?
Yeah, so there's a lot. I mean, really, one thing that students often ask, well, which should we read? One thing I tell them to remember, I don't want to say you can't go wrong. But at the same time, when you think about something like the Banner of Truth that puts out these Puritan paperbacks, those Puritan paperbacks, it seems like there's a lot of them, and there are.
But they have selected those 50 volumes or whatever from a vast sea of printed material. The early modern period in England sees this explosion of print culture. And so they are selecting from hundreds, if not thousands, of devotional treatises, these that they think would be helpful.
So there is a sense in which, pick one that interests you, and it's already been hand selected from a much larger catalogue. That being said, one that I would mention in this context is Richard Sibbes. And if you've heard of Richard Sibbes, you often hear of his The Bruised Read.
The Bruised Read and The Smoking Flax.
Which is a great one. There's one I like just as much, if not more though, it's a similar kind of theme. It's called The Soul's Conflict with Itself. And it's an exposition of, I believe it's Psalm 42, Why Are You Cast Down, Oh My Soul?
And he's just really examining and turning over this sense of spiritual, I mean we might call it spiritual depression, however we want to call it, this sense that I don't feel the realities of the Gospel in the way that I know I should feel and the way I want to feel.
And he's turning it over and what I find really interesting about it is that, one, he has a remarkable, I think, sense of psychological sophistication. It's not a 21st century psychological sophistication, but he acknowledges a whole range of things.
So, for example, he acknowledges that one aspect of feeling low may very well have a biological basis. Now his biological basis is all about weird humors and too much vile or whatever. But the point is, he is seeing that there's a lot of different reasons why we feel low.
Which is another reminder that people in the past sometimes aren't as dumb as we think they are, you know.
But the other thing I think is interesting, and you know one thing that characterizes Puritan preaching often is that they will, from our perspective, really sort of belabor, you know, a very short section of scripture.
I mean we often preach, you know, when I go to preach, you know, you take a pericope, you take a section, a passage, and they will take a verse or half a verse and just preach at length.
So here is Richard Sibbes expositing Why Are You Cast Down My Soul, just for pages and pages and pages. And we might think sometimes they get the balance wrong. Do they read things in that aren't there? Maybe that's a fine debate to have.
But whether or not they read things in that aren't there, they certainly get a lot more out than we do when we're continuously preaching from longer sections.
And it's just another point of cultural sort of discontinuity that I found really interesting.
I make, hey this could be another podcast, I make a bit of a song and dance teaching here about what's to be learned from Puritan sermon application.
We don't necessarily want to go all the way there. I think Jim Packer has a line in Among God's Giants, his kind of introductory book to Puritan.
He says something like, this is not an exact quote, the Puritans on sermon application, the way they're applying into the soul is one of their great gifts to the church that comes.
I have loved this. This has been a brilliant conversation.
Last couple of minutes maybe let's bring some things to land. You very helpfully there steered us towards some particular books. If someone wants a way in here for a refresher, a reminder.
I'm just thinking any practical ways in which we could think of that local churches could really help.
People don't have time and inclination to go read massive books, people have busy lives, but ways in which pastors can really help people get into these things.
I could think of one thing I did when I was a vicar. I can't even remember how the idea came about, but it turned out to be a great thing.
We invited someone, I think it was Mike Reeves who's written some really helpful practical books on church history as well as a bunch of other things.
He was living not too far away. I think it was him. Mike, if you're listening to this and it wasn't you, I really apologize. If it wasn't you, it was a great night, thanks.
I asked him to do the history of the church in a night, one evening, which I mean it was ridiculous, like an hour and a half, two hours.
He did a fantastic job. We kind of treated, we sort of went around the room with some Augustine and then we came to Calvin and then I can't remember who we then came to.
Folks really loved it. Just gave them a sense of, oh, here are all the ways in which God has worked in the church to lead up to, well not lead up to us, but I know here we were in our little place in Hinkley just as part of that ongoing story.
It was a great thing. Any other things that you can think of that you've experienced or just because it's a good idea?
Yeah, I mean I think one thing that I've had success with in local church context would be doing little biographical sketches.
So take a figure from church history, could be someone really big name, Martin Luther, John Calvin, could be someone less well known.
But you take an individual, you know, an individual's life gives a sort of natural ordering principle and in 40 minutes to an hour you can kind of go through their life and you draw some lessons.
It's just a really nice way and a gentle way I think to introduce a whole time period and to see how God worked through the prism of a particular life.
Like in a church teaching night or length course or something.
Yeah, however you can find that, not the Sunday morning sermon, but wherever you can find that teaching opportunity.
And one person who has obviously a very prominent national and international ministry who models this I think really well is John Piper who has done this year on year in his church context.
Those are all available on Desiring God website.
You can hear these just one hour on Augustine life and lessons and I think it's a really nice way to draw out some of this stuff.
You know another thought though that comes to mind thinking about ministry in the local church and thinking about pastors and church history.
I think church history and a sense of history and a sense of where our congregation fits into this larger story is a really helpful aspect, an important aspect of leadership in the sense that you are trying to show the folks gathered here in this moment and this place and this time.
That though we may be small in number and though we may be few and we may not be very impressive, actually we are part of a much larger story.
And I mean in a sense that's what preachers, that's what you're doing in the pulpit when you tie folks in, you are saved in Christ and actually this is a part of a redemptive story much bigger than you.
And so in a sense it's sort of an aspect of that but to say hey, our church here might not be all that impressive.
We might even be living through a period where in God's providence things are hard for Christians.
But actually God has done great things in the past. He is doing great things and he will do great things and giving folks a sense of that history, plugging them into that I think is an encouragement to people who might not see a lot of encouragement on the ground in this particular moment.
It's a wonderful grace to realize you are part of a larger story, a larger family and noble Christians who have gone before you struggled deeply imperfect.
I think in one of John Piper's talks, I don't remember which one it was, one of the biographical talks he was doing, deeply admiring this person he was talking about but he said you get 20 feet away from them, you can see flaws, you can see blind spots.
Very saintly and very imperfect at the same time. But it's wonderful to know more about them.
Matthew, thank you so much for being here with us and thank you to the audience for joining in and listening to us. We hope it's been a blessing to you as it has been for us.
Thank you.