Donald Trump’s Presidency and False Prophecy

The orthodox bishops came out of this conflict as defenders of the true Gospel of mercy. In the process, the prophetic ministry was put under suspicion. Sadly, the bishops began to appropriate the prophetic office into their ordained office, and away from 1 Cor 14 as Paul indicated, by interpreting the meaning of prophecy as the preaching and teaching ministry of the Church. This is an idea that the Reformers were to adopt as standard.[11] The effect was that prophecy, instead of being what Paul suggested, the most common gift for the Christian community (1 Cor. 14), became an increasingly rare gift.[12]

After a while the Montanist prophets declared that the “prophetic age” (their own) was over and the movement settled down as a legalistic sect – and eventually petered out. But the Montanist movement extended negative consequences throughout Christian history. It vastly curtailed (but did not totally end) the frequency of spontaneous lay prophetic utterances. Instead of a flow of prophetic utterances in normal parish life, a vacuum of ongoing (and necessary) practice of discerning prophecy was created by church elders and leaders. That is, there were few, and scattered, living persons experienced in the gift of prophecy in their churches or could exercise discernment and cautious prudence.

Later on, the Catholic Church developed the concept of “spiritual direction” in which a mature person, usually an ordained cleric, would act as the discernment person to mystics, nuns and others who experienced visions and prophecies. But this was a very specialized and limited ministry.[13] The Reformation rejected this tradition and the excellent literature on discernment that it generated, and saw prophecy, as the other gifts of the Spirit, restricted to the Apostolic Age (the doctrine of cessationism).

In the revivals among the Protestant Churches that occurred from the 1600s, where the gifts of the Spirit were newly discovered by one community or another, lack of discernment on prophecy and experience in discerning prophecies, was a constant problem. This lack often discredited many of the revival movements of the Church. This was the principal reason why the Great Awakening (1737-1742) of New England was cut short. Specifically, there arose traveling prophets who put forth false prophecies and presumptuous judgments about other ministers and churches. The American theological genius, Jonathan Edwards, witnessed this discernment failure first hand and single-handedly created Protestantism’s best discernment works in response.[14]

Tags: donald, false, presidency, prophecy, trumps

Category: Living the Faith, Winter 2020