Answering the Cessationists’ Case against Continuing Spiritual Gifts, by Jon Ruthven

We have all heard the story of a Chinese missionary overhearing a Pentecostal person “cursing Christ” while speaking in tongues in Chinese, repeated like an urban legend (the poodle in the microwave; the alligators in the sewer; the disappearing hitch-hiker, etc.) for decades. The “Chinese curser” seems to be a story recycled from Alma White, Demons and Tongues.⁴ Such negative stories can more than be matched, however, by such works as Ralph Harris’s popular paperback, Spoken by the Spirit: Documented Accounts of “Other Tongues” from Arabic to Zulu (Spring­field, Mo.: Gospel Pub. House, 1973) or Albert J. Hebert, Raised from the Dead: True Stories of 400 Resurrection Miracles (Rock­ford, IL: TAN Publica­tions, 1986) and numerous others.⁵

But does in fact an examination of history show that spiritual gifts and miracles ceased in the post-apostolic era? Recently, a friend of mine who taught in a traditionally cessationist seminary set out to prove that Warfield was right: that the gift of prophecy ceased after the apostles died. When he carefully examined the literature, however, he came to publish exactly the opposite conclusion!⁶ At my suggestion, he wrote another excellent piece of research showing that the early church fathers actually used 1 Corinthians 13:8-12 as proof that prophecy would continue in all the church until the end of the age.⁷ In no case, did he find that the fathers ever used 1 Cor 13:8-12 as a text to indicate the closing of the canon or the “maturity” of the church as modern cessationists have tried to do. In fact, he shows that it was the heretics who tried to use 1 Cor 13 in this way!

Many good books have been produced showing the frequent outbreak of miracles and spiritual gifts throughout church history (See also the excellent series by Richard Riss entitled “Tongues and Other Miraculous Gifts from the 2nd to 19th Centuries” which appeared in the first five issue of the Pneuma Review, Fall 1998 (Vol 1 No 1) through Fall 1999 (Vol 2, No 4)). We will offer only three seldom-quoted examples of many hundreds available. Chapter 22 of St. Augustine’s City of God is devoted to the story of how Augustine himself became a full blown “charismatic” after being a bit of a theological cessationist. He repudiates his previous position, and provides examples of over seventy miracles he recorded in and around his churches. Augustine com­plains in section 22,8 that contempor­ary miracles are relative­ly unknown not because they no longer occur, but simply because of bad communication and because people are condi­tioned to disbelieve them.⁸ Pope Gregory VI in writing about the successful evangelism of Britain enthused: “…great miracles imitate powers of the apostles in the signs they [perform].”⁹ Much later, Luther seems to have undergone a similar conversion to that of Augustine toward the end of his life.

Martin Luther was never a shrinking violet, but at one point he sounds bolder than Kenneth Hagin! After snatching his friend, Melanchthon “from death’s arms,” Luther describes his incredibly aggressive prayer: “In this instance our Lord God had to pay me; for I threw the bag of concerns before his door and I dinned his ears with all of his promises as to how he desired to favorably hear our prayer—promises which I well knew how to document in Scripture! I put it to him that he had to grant my request if he expected me to continue to trust his promises!”¹⁰

Until recently, as in Augustine’s time, most Christians in the West have been conditioned, even by church leaders, to disbelieve and discount any contemporary miracle stories. Now, with the advent of primarily charismatic television ministries and a knee-jerk reaction against the sterile Enlightenment rationalism that has dominated Western thought, many more Americans are believing in the power of God. Thirty percent of American adults reported that they had experienced “a remarkable healing” in their lives¹¹, while a total of 78% of Americans either “believe” (27%) or ‘strongly believe” (51%) that “even today miracles are performed by the power of God,” only 15% somewhat disagreed or 6% strongly disagreed!¹²

Tags: answering, case, cessationists, continuing, gifts, spiritual

Category: Pneuma Review, Spirit, Spring 2000