Should Christians Expect Miracles Today? Objections and Answers from the Bible, Part 3, by Wayne A. Grudem
20. Paul says that the Church is “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (Ephesians 2:20). Doesn’t this mean that prophets, like apostles, were only given for the foundational years of the Church when they needed new words from God, but that they don’t exist today?
I think this verse does not talk about the ordinary prophets who functioned in the various churches at the time of the New Testament. Rather, I think this verse refers to the apostles (who were the foundation of the Church) and calls them “apostle-prophets.” The reasons for this are as follows.
Sometimes in the New Testament the term “prophet” (Greek prophétés) is used to refer to the apostles. This is in contexts where there is emphasis on an external spiritual influence (from the Holy Spirit) under which the apostles spoke. Two examples of this are found in Ephesians 2:20 and 3:5.
Here Paul cannot be speaking of all the prophets in local congregations at that time, for prophets are said to be the “foundation” of the Church—and not just individual churches but the Church generally. As well, they are said to be the group to whom the “mystery” was revealed that Gentiles should be included, having equal standing in the Church (Ephesians 3:5-6). These things were not true of all the believers who had the gift of prophecy in local congregations in Corinth, Thessalonica, Rome, Tyre, Ephesus, etc. Certainly we cannot say that all of the believers who were converted and began to prophesy in local congregations decades after the Church had begun were the “foundation” of the Church universal. Nor can we say that they were the ones to whom God had revealed the fact of Gentile inclusion in the Church. But these things were true of the apostles in their foundational role in the the Church, as God revealed to them the mystery of the Gentile inclusion (cf. Acts 10:9-36; 11:4-18; 15:6-18; Galatians 2:1-2, 7-9).
This identification of the apostles as prophets in Ephesians 2:20 and 3:5 is made more clear by the grammatically legitimate translation “the apostles who are also prophets.”47 But in Ephesians 4:11, in a different context (where Paul is talking about gifts given to the Church generally), Paul uses a different construction to distinguish “apostles” from “prophets” and shows that he is referring in this case to two distinct groups.48
If someone takes another view of this verse, and thinks it refers to two groups, “apostles and prophets,” it would not really affect my understanding of the gift of prophecy in New Testament generally. This is because, according to this understanding, Paul would be talking about a very small and restricted group of “prophets”—people who were like the apostles in that they were the foundation of the universal Church, and they received the revelation of the full inclusion of Gentiles in the Church. Ephesians 2:20 and 3:5 would then be talking about this specialized group. For information on the nature of the gift of prophecy in ordinary New Testament churches, however, we would have to look at verses where ordinary congregational prophets were discussed, such as 1 Corinthians 12-14, 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21, etc.
Another instance where an apostle is viewed as a prophet is the apostle John in the book of Revelation (cf. Revelation 1:1-3). The term “prophecy” is appropriate to this book because of its emphasis on revelation given by God. The book of Revelation is an example of a prophecy given through an apostle and therefore possessing absolute divine authority—it is part of Scripture.
Category: Pneuma Review, Spirit, Summer 2000
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