April 25, 2023 Show with Jason Cherry on “The Making of Evangelical Spirituality”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father, James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer, George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister, George Norcross, and sports legend, Jim Thorpe.

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 25th day of April, 2023.

I'm thrilled to have a first-time guest today on the program. His name is Jason Cherry. He's an elder of Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, American history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville, Alabama.

We are going to be addressing Jason's book today, The Making of Evangelical Spirituality, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Jason Cherry.

Thank you for having me, Chris.

It's so good to have you on the program, and I think that you've written an important book that we are going to be addressing today. Before we go into the contents of that book, please tell our listeners about Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama.

Trinity Reformed Church and Providence Classical School

Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville is one of the greatest blessings of my life. Me and my wife, my family, were looking for a healthy church for many years and this is an answered prayer to that. Some friends of mine, we were working to plant a church in late 2018, 2019, and that's a difficult task, and we were having some difficulty launching until the COVID crisis hit and all the churches started shutting down, stopped worshiping on the Lord's Day.

And some of our friends who knew we were working on a church plant said, hey, we're Christians, we want to continue to obey the Lord and worship on the Lord's Day. Why don't you guys start meeting? And so we started worshiping when all the other churches closed down.

And so our church plant strategy was a worldwide pandemic. And so we started in a backyard with a few families and now we've got over 350 members, between 350 and 400 people every Sunday. It's almost too much growth.

It's a blessing. It's one of those good problems. And it's a church that's built around commitments that we saw lacking in the evangelical church. For example, one of our commitments is keeping our kids.

We wanted to emphasize keeping our kids. We see so many kids that grow up and leave the faith. In the South, if you've met an atheist, then you find that they were raised in the church. And so we wanted to emphasize that.

We also wanted to emphasize covenant renewal worship on the Lord's Day, real community, not just through programs, but through hospitality, and also Catholicity. And one of the things we do, we're a reformed Presbyterian church, but on the issue of baptism, we don't divide on the issue of baptism as best as we can.

And so there's quite a few Baptist families in our church. And when it comes to their decision how to baptize their children, we defer to the head of household on that question, not because we're relativists, we have our convictions, just because we don't feel like this is the time and place we need to be dividing over those things when we have a common faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Great. Well, if anybody wants more information about Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, go to trinityreformedkirk .com, K-I-R-K, which is the Scottish word for church, trinityreformedkirk .com.

And it's wonderful to hear another example of how Romans 8 .28 became fulfilled in the launching of a church or the growth of a church, because of the unbiblical and even unconstitutional mandates both by local and federal government during the so-called COVID crisis or pandemic, and how the attempts to thwart God's church backfired in many instances, and how people came to discover churches who had their priorities in order according to God's plans and decrees and desires.

And so I am so glad to hear about such a healthy number of people gathering there in Huntsville, Alabama at Trinity Reformed Church. Tell our listeners more about Providence Classical School, the church where I am formerly a member, or should I say was formerly a member, on Long Island, New York, where I'm originally from.

Grace Christian Academy is also a classical Christian school and I just recently emceed a fundraising banquet for Grace Christian Academy, which was hosted by keynote speaker, Pete Hegseth of Fox News, who's also somebody who's very passionate about classical Christian education.

Why don't you tell our listeners about Providence Classical School?

Yeah, Providence Classical School's another great blessing of my life and for my family. The school started in 1996 in a basement, and now it's a school that has over 250 children, K through 12. I'm a humanities teacher in the secondary program.

I've been here for nine years. And one of the unique things about this school is we have 40 different churches represented among the families that go here. And I've learned a lot about Catholicity and getting along with other brothers and sisters in Christ who have different faiths or come from different faith traditions, different denominational backgrounds.

And yet we come together, we're united in Christ, and we make it work and we educate our kids classically. We desire for them to get a classical education, a classical Christian education, and not just to learn intellectually, but also to learn the virtues of the faith, how to live out their faith, and how to think in terms of a Christian worldview.

Well, if anybody wants more details on Providence Classical School in Huntsville, Alabama, go to providenceclassical .org, providenceclassical .org. Well, we have a tradition here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Jason, whenever we have a first-time guest, we ask that guest to give a summary of their salvation testimony, including any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised and the providential circumstances with which our sovereign Lord raised up to draw them to themselves and save them.

Let's hear your story.

Salvation Testimony and Reformed Theology

Chris, I grew up in a family where we went to church every Sunday. It was a Southern Baptist Church in Texas where I grew up. And I remember from a young age going to church. I remember going to Sunday school and learning about the gospel.

I remember going to Sunday services, singing the hymns, listening to the preaching and the prayers. And just going back to my earliest days, it's hard to remember a time when I didn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as Lord of the universe, Lord of the church, and as Savior and forgiver of my sins.

I remember at a young age, reading the Bible in my bedroom, very interested in the things of Christ. The Lord gave me a desire to learn about Him and to believe in Him. And I was baptized on a profession of faith when I was 13 years old.

And then as I went through the high school years, the college years, where there's a lot of temptation and different situations, doubts, the Lord was good to keep me. The Lord's grace was sovereign over my heart.

And through all the difficulties, the temptations to sin, the hard times and the failures, I never had a time where I fell away, where I doubted the Lord to the point of denying Him. And as I came through college, the Lord blessed me with a beautiful wife, Tracy, and we have two beautiful daughters.

And my family is the blessing of my life that I thank God for more and more as each year passes. And that family, that wife and my kids is a big part of how the Lord's grace has kept me and persevered me through hard times.

And my story is really one of God's grace to a sinner who didn't deserve it.

Amen. Well, how did you come to discover and embrace reform theology?

Well, I was growing up in a Baptist church. And as a teenager, there was a youth minister there who was a reformed Baptist and he was teaching us the scriptures. And once he started opening up the word of God and teaching it in really an expositional fashion, I was immediately drawn to it.

And once you start doing that for long enough, you can't help but see the doctrines of grace. And so I remember specifically when I was 15 years old, I started to see the sovereign grace of God in a way that blew my mind and enhanced my love for Christ.

So that kind of started my journey on it. And as I worked through college and certainly the later college years, I started to pursue those things more and more. And then in 2007, I was out of college for a year and a half and I enrolled at Reformed Theological Seminary.

I was working a full-time job in the medical field at the time, but I was also taking classes and I went to RTS. And of course, that took me even further along in my journey in the Reformed faith.

The Meaning of Evangelical Spirituality

Amen. Well, you have a new book, The Making of Evangelical Spirituality, which you have authored. And the term, as you are likely well aware, spirituality is one of the most abused and twisted terms out there.

You have people who, many people who will claim, oh, I'm not a member of any particular religion or denomination or theological perspective, but I'm a very spiritual person. And that word is being used to somehow protect an individual from responsibility to actually believe in the right thing.

And of course, most importantly, the right God, the one true God of the scriptures. But tell us exactly what you mean by the title, The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.

What I'm concerned with in this book is the phenomenon that I observed as I interacted in different faith traditions throughout my life, Baptist churches, non-denominational churches, various student groups in college, the different folks I interact with in my school, also Presbyterian and Reformed churches, cutting across the denominational spectrum, I've heard this language of God spoke to me, God is speaking to me, God told me.

And I was struck just how that seems to be the ubiquitous spiritual assumption of evangelical Protestants that cuts across denominational lines. And so spirituality certainly has a broad meaning in culture, Robert Fuller's book, Spiritual but Not Religious, kind of explains how kind of just your average person in America embraces spirituality, but not Christianity.

But in the Christian tradition, spirituality is basically just the entirety of our lived relationship with the Lord, our personal relationship with the Lord. And it seems like that the ubiquitous assumption for an evangelical Christian is that their personal relationship with the Lord is going to include God speaking back to them extra biblically.

In fact, those of you in the audience who listen to Iron Sharp and Zion radio regularly, will know that very recently, we had Justin Peters on the program. In fact, it was on April 20th. We had Justin Peters of Justin Peters Ministries discussing the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and a part of that conversation was the very thing that my guest today, Jason Cherry, has mentioned.

And we also, in that conversation, brought up the fact that this phenomena about the Lord telling individuals something, the Lord speaking to individuals, it is not exclusive to charismatic, Pentecostal and self-professing non-cessationist or continuationist churches and individuals, is it?

No, it doesn't. And there's really a spectrum of beliefs here. I mean, everyone who talks this way doesn't always mean the same things. One of the things I try to do in my book, this is chapter two, is I try to create a taxonomy of the people who think this way and have these spiritual assumptions.

And so maybe on one end of the spectrum, you have the spiritual populists. They're those who, they hear people using this kind of language about how God spoke to me. And so they then also begin using that language, kind of thoughtlessly so, just kind of to keep up with the community around them.

But if you were to press them, they would probably deny that God actually spoke to them outside of Scripture. Then there's the spiritual, what I call the spiritual fire eaters. And these are those who really are convinced that God spoke to them.

And yeah, these are certainly common in charismatic churches. But in my experience, they're also in Baptist churches, non-denominational churches, Presbyterian churches as well. And one of the characteristics of the spiritual fire eaters is that they are rather aggressive in making sure you understand that this is how God speaks.

They really want you and all the other Christians around them to hear God's voice, just like they have heard God's voice. And for them, it really becomes the center of their relationship with the Lord.

And then on the furthest end of the spectrum are what I call the spiritual heretics. And these are like the Mormons who they write down their revelations. And then we get a new book of revelation, like the Book of Mormon.

And the problem with them is they're just too consistent. Their consistency causes their heresy. Because yeah, if God's speaking revelation to me, maybe I should jot this down. Maybe it is important. And it's that kind of consistency that drives groups like the Mormons into heresy.

So yeah, it's a wide spectrum of people, and it's not just charismatics who think this way.

And at the risk of duplicating too much of what I already discussed with Justin Peters, I think it's an important element of the conversation to bring up again. That very kind of spirituality that you mentioned that is more of a universal phenomenon where you have both cessationists and continuationists or continuists alike saying the same kind of thing in regard to God communicating with them.

Very often I have found, especially being involved in Christian media, going back to the 1980s, probably before you were born, there is, and it really infuriates me to tell you the truth, there is a common way that Christians will cloak themselves with false humility, and they are actually exalting something that they've created with this false humility to make it appear as it came from the very mind of God.

And I'll give you an example. And this, of course, again, is across the board. You don't have to be charismatic or Pentecostal to say something like this. But you will have, for instance, a songwriter.

He writes a song, or she writes a song, and someone says to that person, I really love that song. That song, I am going to include it in my personal worship. I'm going to ask the worship leader at church to perhaps include it in our own worship at the church where I am.

I've gotta tell you, you are really a gifted songwriter, and I love the insights that you have, and just the creativity and beauty which you have unfolded in this song that you wrote. Oh no, don't thank me, don't keep praise upon me.

It's all from God. That kind of thing is really, as I had mentioned, I think it's false humility, and trying to exalt that song or that book or whatever it else is that you've created without saying it to the level of scripture or something.

It's all of God, nothing to do with my talent. Please, don't embarrass me by complimenting me. It's all of God. Wouldn't you agree that this is not only a false way of communicating something but an irritating one?

Well, I think you're right on both cases, and I think you are right that there is a certain sense there where people are using God spoke to me in that way, and sometimes I think they're even deluded themselves.

Like sometimes I think they really do believe what they're saying, which is almost even more scary, but it's a certain way of giving authorization to what you've done in the case of the song like you've mentioned.

It's kind of authorizing that this is legitimate, this is good, this needs to be consumed by others, and so it gives this, it's kind of this easy authority to assign to what I've done or I've said or song I've written.

Well, I'd like to give our listeners our email address if they have any questions of their own for my guest Jason Cherry on his book The Making of Evangelical Spirituality. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. What were some of the compelling factors that led you to say to yourself, you know, I really need to write a book on this issue, and the way that you began to do research and so on, which eventually led to the finished published product?

Well, like for so many that write books on subjects, it was because I was confronted with it in my own church context multiple times where this was being used in a very destructive way, where people were using this kind of language to do certain things, to engage in certain activities or ministries that were clearly unacceptable or inappropriate for them to do.

And when I started to see this multiply in very harmful ways in the local church context, it made me curious first off on just kind of why this was so ubiquitous. And so it started with a lot of curiosity.

I wanted to know how did we get to this point where people are just using this language, it's clearly inappropriate what they're concluding, what they're announcing, and yet nobody can say anything to them because they've got the force field of God told me.

So I was curious largely, how did we get to this point in evangelical Christianity? And when I went, I went to look for a book, maybe there's a book that can explain this to me, and I didn't find one.

And so I found there was a gaping hole here. There's a lot of books out there explaining how to hear the voice of God. There's a lot of conferences out there like by the Bethel Group or the Vineyard Group that you can come and you can learn how to hear the voice of God.

But I wanted to understand why are there so many books teaching people to hear the voice of God? What's happened in the four or 500 years of American evangelicalism where this is now the baseline assumption as we've said, not just for charismatics, but for many conservative Bible-believing Christians who find their names on church membership roles in what otherwise would be healthy conservative Christian churches?

John Hus and the Question of Prophecy After the Apostolic Age

Okay, we have an anonymous listener who asks, I have been told even by some Reformed Christians that John Hus had some kind of a word of knowledge or prophecy before he was executed when he said in 1415, before he was burned alive, you are going to burn a goose, but in 100 years you will have a swan which you can neither roast nor boil.

And that obviously was a quote by Hus who was referencing the fact that his last name actually means goose. And since 1415 is obviously a year before, I'm sorry, 100 years before, nearly to the year, two years shy of it, in 1517 we have Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the castle, the church, the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

So yes, just like our listener, our anonymous listener, I have heard that presented as if John Hus had some kind of a revelation from God. How do you answer that? And this is, once again, something that is typically said by cessationists who will, when speaking of the life of John Hus or the Reformation in general.

There's a lot of examples like the John Hus story. So take the John Hus example and multiply it by about a thousand. There's a lot of things like this in church history that happened after the apostolic age.

Yeah, so how do we address this? Well, of course we could go in and try to scrutinize each and every one. That's not really possible though. Yes, making a prediction 100 years in advance, that could be possible.

Maybe though he did have some sort of insight. Maybe he drew some conclusions because of just the lay of the land. He was reading the signs of the times as Jesus commanded us to do in Matthew chapter 16, verses one through four.

In fact, Jesus says we are evil if we can't connect the dots of what's happening in our world. And so maybe that's what John Hus is doing. But also when it comes to that broader question of the cessationist, non-cessationist debate, I think in some ways that debate is a little unhelpful, mainly because, well, I think it would be better to talk about, have the debate, have the different points of view, but it's really about what's normal, what's normative.

And can there be exceptions to the norm? Well, I think that's certainly within the realm of possibility. And I know a lot of cessationists who will admit that. And so certainly you're looking at an extreme moment in history with John Hus.

So maybe it's an exception, but that doesn't mean it should be the normal expectation for Christians today to hear God speak a fresh word to them in their quiet time.

Well, thank you, Anonymous. Excellent question. And guess what? If you provide for me off the air, of course, through an email, if you provide for me your full name and mailing address, you have won a free copy of the book we are addressing today by my guest, Jason Cherry, The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.

We're going to our first commercial break right now. And if you would like to join our anonymous listener with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence and your country of residence. If you live outside the USA, only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away. We're going to be right back, right after these messages with more of Jason Cherry.

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The Holy Spirit, Prophecy, and the Language of Guidance

We're back with our guest today, Jason Cherry, an elder of Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama. We're discussing his book, The Making of Evangelical Spirituality. Our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence. We have Cindy in Findlay, Ohio, who asks, Good afternoon, Chris and Jason. Please forgive me if this has already been addressed or if it is not pertinent to the discussion today as I am setting this question prior to the show.

And I am tending to little ones and am regularly distracted. Since Christian spirituality is a consciousness of fellowship with the Spirit of Christ interrupted by carnality and sin and develops when a born-again believer makes a consistent and ongoing choice to surrender to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, when discussions with charismatic-leaning believers arise about the gifts of the Spirit, aside from getting into the cessationist debate, I sometimes merely mention that it is the believer's obligation to focus on the fruit of the Spirit, referenced in Galatians 5, 22 through 23, more so or even rather than the gifts of the Spirit, especially the apostolic gifts, which I personally feel have ceased.

Nevertheless, when those who would consider themselves more spiritual because they display these so-called gifts of the Spirit, how would you help these individuals to see and value that true spirituality, mature spirituality, is evidenced by the fruit of the Spirit rather than the so-called gifts?

I think she's on to something. And the overall question that she's addressing is, what is the Spirit's main work? And I think that's actually one of the troubles with this kind of spirituality is that it's assuming that the Spirit's main work is to give me a specialized message into my head, when in reality, the Holy Spirit's main work is to make us holy.

It's a dead giveaway. He's called the Holy Spirit for a reason, and certainly the Holy Spirit's doing a lot of things. He makes a dead sinner come to life spiritually. The Holy Spirit's doing lots of things, but the chief role of the Holy Spirit is to make us holy.

And what is the evidence of that? Well, it's the fruit of our lives, as was mentioned. So I think that's exactly right. And so, and that's where you can, I think when you're talking to charismatics, you can say, okay, let's just set aside the cessationist debate.

Let's just assume for a moment that New Testament prophecy is intended to continue into the current day. Now, I think that's a big if, and we can talk about that more. But even if it's supposed to continue into the present day, this is not the normative thing for Christians.

If you look into the Old Testament, we have God speaking to people. Yes, Moses and the others, but that was very few people, actually. In the Old Testament, there are a few people over a period of a thousand years who get special revelation.

This isn't supposed to be the normal thing for regular Christians. And by the way, in the Old Testament, those prophets, most of them were killed for speaking God's word in that way. So maybe we shouldn't be so eager to get this kind of revelation as we think we're supposed to be.

So it's about what is the primary way God operates? What is the primary role of the Spirit? And I don't think there's any way, even if you give them the non-cessationist debate point, I don't think there's any way you can conclude from Scripture that the Spirit's main work is these charismatic gifts.

Well, thank you, Cindy. And guess what? You have also won a free copy of the book we are addressing today, The Making of Evangelical Spirituality, by our guest, Jason Cherry. Make sure that you send us your mailing address in Findlay, Ohio, so that we can have that book shipped out to you.