Strange Fire and Churches of Christ
Love and Elitism
The real problem that I believe MacArthur is trying to address is the division that has happened around the way we talk about the Holy Spirit and God’s activity in the world. I spend a lot of time with some Charismatic brothers and sisters, and I understand the critique.
It’s very possible to think that you’ve arrived at a place superior than others because of your spiritual experience, or what you’ve sensed God work through you to heal or prophesy. It’s very easy to fall in love with the gifts more than the Giver.
I’ve also been around Cessationists enough to know that this isn’t just a “Charismatic problem” Knowledge, after all, does puff up.
And it is ironic, that the main verse in the Bible that Cessationist and Charismatics argue about is in Paul’s magnificent chapter of what Christian love looks like.
And that context matters just as much as anything else in this conversation. Christian love defers to one other, it esteems one another, it doesn’t accumulate privilege and status when God gives you gifts like healing or preaching or the gift of knowledge.
Christian love shouldn’t crash someone’s conference or take away someone’s books and then tweet about it.
In fact, I believe that for these two groups to be able to reconcile and apologize and humble themselves before the other, that would be a miracle. Perhaps the best kind of miracle.
I Can’t Only Imagine
It seems to me that the way most Christians talk about God in the world today is either that God is something like magic (good for the occasional miracle, if you just pray the right prayers, believe the right way etc.) or we are Deist’s (the idea that God created the Universe, wound it up like a top, and stepped away.) The universe is either empty of God, or God is someone we can control.
This is a problem.
I was talking to an Anglican priest friend last week about this, and his answer was so good I think it might be helpful here.
He said something like, the main problem really isn’t what we think it is. The real problem is that we’ve lost our imagination.
There is a fundamental difference between a Catholic Christian’s imagination and a Protestant Christian’s imagination. In Catholicism, the whole world in enchanted, God is closer than we are to ourselves, and the entire Creation is dripping with the Glory of God.
So back to us Protestants, both the Charismatics and the Cessationists are basically talking with the same limited imagination. We believe that either God punches a whole in the roof of the world and tinkers in from time to time in order to heal our Aunt’s cancer or give me a better parking space…or we believe that He doesn’t do that.
Category: Spirit, Spring 2014
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