The Palace narrates “a series of first-hand prophetic visions” involving the redemption of a street orphan whose curiosity about a fabled palace and its King drives him to set out on a journey of discovery. The boy encounters the king, who unexpectedly shows great interest in the boy over several visits until the king invites him into the palace and even into adoption as a son.

The boy trains for warfare for his king. In the process of training and actual mission, the allegory astutely explores a wide range of human motives of both those in service of the king and those who oppose it. The strength of the book mirrors the insights of the C.S. Lewis allegories as well as Pilgrim’s Progress, but offers a sense of intimacy, communication, and miraculous power with “the King” that, due to their traditional theological limitations, these famous classics lack. The Palace offers a sophisticated and nuanced appreciation for the spiritual obstacles, strengths and weaknesses of the young, commissioned warrior as he encounters the unique problems of an array of social groups. In this, the narrative becomes an effective “how to” manual for the normative New Testament disciple.

Jonathan Seiver

This allegory was a joy to read and apply its lessons. Reading this to each other would be a great intimacy builder for Christian families as well as an uplifting discipleship training exercise for any group.

Reviewed by Jon Ruthven

William De Arteaga has created a ground-breaking, major contribution that is foundational to the evolving understanding of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement projected to reach 811 million in only four more years.

The author offers a surprisingly sympathetic narrative of one whom he regards as the foremost, and ultimately, most influential theologian of the charismatic renewal, a woman nonetheless maligned as a “new age” heretic, Agnes Sanford.

De Arteaga’s work employs two metaphors to express its thesis that Sanford’s ministry overcame cessationism (the “Galatian bewitchment” 3:1-3, replacing the miracle power of God with human effort), by a series of “Marcion shoves” (a reference to a heretic pushing a truth into error in order to bring that truth to the attention of the mainstream). In Sanford’s case, hers was a trial-and-error sampling of various contemporary positions on healing, being dialectally “shoved” into a thoroughly biblical understanding.

In the early 1930s, the loudest voice against healing, however, was the heretical consensus doctrine of Protestantism of that time: cessationism, that is, miracles of healing simply do not happen today. Sanford began her God-given quest by having to reject the “Galatian bewitchment” of her cradle faith, Protestantism. In this De Arteaga showed how Sanford, in the total vacuum of Christian biblical scholarship on healing, was compelled to search a variety of fringe groups for any possible insight into the truth about the healings she had received from God. Through all this, Sanford held to the centrality of Jesus and his scriptures, but only gradually, with no help from the church, discovering how central was healing to the biblical mission and message of Jesus and the New Testament.

Agnes was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in China, educated in the US, who as an adult continued their ministry back in China briefly until she met and married an Anglican missionary, Ted Sanford. Against the growing destabilization of China by competing warlords in the 1920s and by the insurgent communists, the new family moved to the USA to minister in Anglican churches near Philadelphia. Upon the healing of her baby son of a severe ear infection and of her own deep depression by a fellow Anglican clergyman, Agnes Sanford’s life course was set. It was discerned that her depression derived from “violating her God-given nature” by trying to be an excellent housewife instead of the writer and minister of healing that God had called her to be.

At this point, since the Christian tradition at that time was unanimously cessationist (the “Galatian bewitchment”) Sanford decided to test (ever alert to the “Marcion shove”) the variety of competing ideologies on healing, Christian Science, occult “science,” spiritism, “New Thought,” New Age, etc. against the “standard” of Jesus described in the four Gospels.

Since she had personally experienced such miracles, Sanford’s curiosity was drawn to the only voices of the time, who seemed to affirm what she had seen so clearly. She skimmed Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health but found “it did not make sense.” She twice attended a “Christian” spiritist séance, “carefully keeping an open mind,” but discovered the leader himself was plagued by spirit-induced headaches. When Sanford prayed for the spiritist’s sick mother, she found herself in “deep depression” and “could taste in [her] own mouth” the foul odor on the breath of the spiritist. On top of that the spiritist’s mother immediately died. Sanford promised the Lord that she would “never go near a séance again.” Unwittingly, she came to understand that her prayer was mixing the “energy” of the demonic with that of the Holy Spirit. Thereafter, she would screen out for special attention and prayer anyone who admitted to involvement in spiritism. Despite her strict and clear repudiation of her experiment with “Christian” spiritism, critics pounced on her account as evidence of her “demonic” ministry, instead of it serving as a “Marcion shove” toward biblical truth. Sanford’s “scientific” and biblical process of “Do not quench the Spirit . . . test all things, hold fast to that which is good” (1Th 5:19-20) proved inflammatory for her critics.

What does the Bible mean when it talks about salvation? Scholar Jon Ruthven shares some “hasty, preliminary notes” as he works through this important question and asks for your feedback.

In response to a query from a friend, I am working through what “salvation” means. Certainly, in traditional Christian theology, “salvation” means being forgiven of sins, regenerated and being good, then in a position to go to heaven. I just attended a church service where I heard exactly that.

In the Synoptics, however, “salvation” pretty much always means “healing” or “rescue.” Even in Mt 1:21 and Hb 9:28 Jesus’ “saving” from sins may have had a primary referent to the broken covenant penalties of Dt 28, not simply going to hell, hence, the emphasis on healing in the New Testament “gospel.”

Since the Synoptic Gospels (Mt, Mk, Lk) were written, mostly later, as summaries and “big picture” correctives to a Christianity that immediately began to drift off course in so many ways, we ought to take these Gospels (and John) as our prime source, and not dismiss them as “historical prologue” to the “real stuff”—”justification by faith” in Paul, as Luther and Calvin taught. (Paul was more amenable to Protestant “demythologizing” of the Gospel than the Gospels themselves).

The Gospels, then, were attempts to reset and recenter Jesus’ original mission and message. Based on the direction church doctrine took after the introduction of the Gospels, it seems that this “reset” didn’t really succeed. Maybe that success would come far in the future, but certainly not from the 2nd century and thereafter, where Christianity increasingly became an exercise in human/demonic speculation and pontificating (creeds and apologetics), not revelation and power. In the New Testament, demons always “knew” perfect “theology”; they did not “know” God in the way of knowing that God requires.

There was a man who said he couldn’t become a Christian until he gave up his cigarettes. Normally, I would respond that he needed a “salvation” experience which would then empower him to give up the habit. But I wonder if this man and his cigarettes may have been God’s test to show if he was really going to obey God’s revelation: was he going to hear and obey God in this defining test or not? The cigarettes, by themselves, are trivial, the test of obedience is everything—the first step toward “salvation” that is, life in the revealing, empowering Spirit/presence of God. “Repent” means “turning in the opposite direction”—away from one way of living to another: it involves a basic decision, and action, for total change.

Salvation is defined in the New Testament as entering the New Covenant. Defined in Acts 2:39, citing Isa 59:21, and 2 Cor 3, describing Jer 31:33 (also Heb 12:18-25), receiving the New Covenant Spirit of prophecy and power. This is the mission of Jesus defined in all four Gospels: “He will baptize in the Holy Spirit.”

“This is my covenant with them,” says the Lord: “My Spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your offspring, or out of the mouth of your children’s offspring,” says the Lord, “from this time forth and forevermore.”

Robert W. Graves, ed., Strangers To Fire: When Tradition Trumps Scripture (The Foundation for Pentecostal Scholarship, 2014).

Strangers to Fire represents a phalanx of biblical responses by a variety of authors to the cessationism first developed by the serpent in the Garden: “Did God really say?” That was a challenge to the idea of revelation from God, a notion more fully developed by the cessationist scribes who opposed Jesus. Jesus said to them, “you have not heard His voice, you have not seen His form, the word of God is not in your heart, for you do not believe the one whom He has sent [to baptize in the Spirit of prophecy]. You search the scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life [but you don’t really believe or act on what the scriptures teach]” (Jn 5:36-47).

Cover for the November 2016 re-release by Empowered Life.

I have come to believe, however, that cessationism is only a reflection of the fact that Protestant theology is off center even in its soteriology, compared to the explicit mission and message of Jesus. The Reformation only slightly tweaked the Roman Catholic mass as the center of Christianity when it limited itself essentially to answering the question, “How much does it cost to go to heaven.” That isn’t the question upon which Jesus focuses. Rather, Jesus came to introduce the Kingdom of God—a synonym for the Spirit—that is, the New Covenant of Jer 31:31-34 (developed in 2 Cor 3 and Heb 8-12) and Isa 59:21 (the “punch line” of the most important speech in Christianity, cited in Acts 2:39). This new understanding of the goal of the Bible, that is, the mission of Jesus, revolutionized my understanding of Christian theology. Cessationism explicitly denies the core mission of the Bible that Jesus repeatedly commissioned his disciples to do: bring the people of God into the New Covenant of the Spirit of prophetic revelation and power. The very first paragraph of the “gold standard” of Christian theology, The Westminster Confession of Faith, explicitly denies the very core goal that the Bible itself affirms—the “prophethood of all believers”—the ideal state of the New Covenant. I spell out most of this in my new book, What’s Wrong with Protestant Theology: Tradition vs Biblical Emphasis (Word & Spirit, 2013).

Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur’s Strange Fire (Excel Publishers, 2013).

I would also recommend Michael Brown’s excellent response to MacArthur, Authentic Fire. The argument is clear, trenchant, and irenic by a skilled debater.

“This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

Jeremiah 31:33-34 NKJV

Are Pentecostals offering Strange Fire? (Panel Discussion)

Further Reading:

Interview with the editor: PneumaReview.com speaks with The Foundation for Pentecostal Scholarship President, Robert Graves, about their first published book, Strangers to Fire: When Tradition Trumps Scripture.

Read the reviews of Strangers to Fire from Tony Richie and John Lathrop.

“Are Pentecostals offering Strange Fire?” The panel discussion at PneumaReview.com about John MacArthur’s Strange Fire.

Del Tarr, The Foolishness of God: A Linguist Looks at the Mystery of Tongues (Springfield, MO: The Access Group, 2010), xvii +447 pages, ISBN 9780984447008.

Del Tarr, Professor Emeritus and past President of the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary, who holds a PhD in Communications from the University of Minnesota, applies scientific linguistic and theological insights in a breakthrough analysis of the phenomenon of glossolalia.

Tarr writes amidst a mixed tradition of academic responses to tongues speaking. On the one hand, there are several earlier attempts to interpret the meaning of glossolalia in the New Testament and today from a Pentecostal perspective, such as Carl Brumback, ‘What Meaneth This?’ (1947), Wade Horton (ed.), The Glossolalia Phenomenon (1966), Ralph Harris, Spoken by the Spirit: Documented Accounts of ‘Other Tongues’ from Arabic to Zulu (cases of “xenolalia”—unlearned foreign languages, 1972), G. Williams and E. Waldvogel, “A History of Speaking in Tongues and Related Gifts” in The Charismatic Movement (1975), Russell Spittler, “Glossolalia,” in Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (1992), and several more recent studies by Frank Macchia, for example, “Sighs Too Deep for Words: Toward a Theology of Glossolalia,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 1 (1992), 47-73 up to Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology (Zondervan, 2006).

Non-Pentecostal evangelicals have been less positive about glossolalia, since their more substantial critiques are shaped by traditional Protestant cessationism precipitated by the growth of Pentecostalism and the early charismatic movement. These include Grant Wacker, “Travail of a Broken Family: Radical Evangelical Responses to the Emergence of Pentecostalism in America, 1906-16,” in Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism (1999), A. Hoekema, Tongues and Spirit Baptism: A Biblical and Theological Evaluation (1966), R. Gromacki, The Modern Tongues Movement (1967), and F. D. Bruner’s expansive and insightful A Theology of the Holy Spirit: The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness (1970). Others include psychological, linguistic and sociological assessments of the phenomenon, such as J. Kildahl, The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues (1972), Wm. Samarin, Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (1972), and E. G. Hinson, “The Significance of Glossolalia in the History of Christianity” in Speaking in Tongues, Let’s Talk about It. Edited by Watson E. Mills (1973). A useful literature survey appears in Kay and Francis, “Personality, Mental Health and Glossolalia,” Pneuma 17:2 (Fall 1995).

In the era of the early charismatic renewal (1960s), Morton Kelsey’s classic, Tongues Speaking: An Experiment in Spiritual Experience (1964) was written from outside the Evangelical and Pentecostal debate in which the value on Christian doctrine competed with claims to religious experience (including tongues). To Kelsey, religious experience was also a valued—even beneficial—component in human existence, following similar studies by William James, Carl Jung, and Abraham Maslow, for whom Enlightenment rationalism seemed reductionistic. In this vein, Bruner’s traditional Reformed critique of Pentecostal “experience” met a substantial response in James Dunn’s Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament (1975). The somewhat cool reception Dunn’s excellent work received from his academic audience reflected a complaint by Hendrikus Berkhof about the “water tight” partition between charismatic experience and academic theology: “Although Pentecostalism is a great deal more than a ‘tongues movement,’ it is the first movement to focus attention on this gift as being of crucial importance for understanding the nature of the divine-human encounter” (p.30).

John MacArthur, Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2013), 333 pages, ISBN 9781400206414.

As we shall see, John MacArthur’s abhorrence of “further revelation” via prophecy and related spiritual gifts derives, not from scripture, but from the frustration of Calvinists under Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) of watching so many of their members defect to the Quakers, the crazy charismatics of the time. People were falling down, making a lot of noise and encountering Jesus in visions, prophecies, and healings. Sound familiar? Calvinist scholastics responded to this outrage with the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF)—often now regarded as the gold standard of Calvinist theology.

Despite the charismatic experiences of even some of the authors of the WCF, and especially their founder, John Knox, whose charismatic experiences were abundant and powerful, the dogmatists managed to ram through this narrow, unpopular paragraph in 1646, which, was to be imposed by threat of death on the British Isles—including Catholic Ireland. This curious history is thoroughly documented in a revised PhD dissertation by Garnet H Milne, The Westminster Confession of Faith and the Cessation of Special Revelation (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2007). See review in Pneuma 31:2 (2009), 318.

1. … It pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto His Church [Heb 1:1] and afterwards for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing [Prov22:19-21; Lk1:3; Rom15:4; Mt 4:4]; which makes the Holy Scripture to be most necessary [2Tm 3:15; 2Pt 1:19]; those former ways of God’s revealing His will unto His people [miracles, prophecy] being now ceased [Heb1:1-2]. [Emphasis mine]

When the WCF was presented to Parliament for approval, the suspicious representatives bounced the document back, quite reasonably fearful that this document was asserting itself as a substitute for scripture itself. They demanded that the writers support every claim in the Confession with a clear grounding in the Bible. The writers grudgingly complied, though their exegetical skills fell far short of supporting their elaborate theologizing. If you can make sense of how these scripture verses they added [in brackets] support the dogmatic claims in this paragraph, then you are a far more insightful exegete than I.

Introduction

Cessationists,¹ those who argue that certain gifts of the Spirit have ceased, are increasingly using an argument-from-analogy from Paul’s epistle to the believers in Ephesus.

This paper offers a biblical rebuttal to the cessationist use of Ephesians 2:20 as an argument for the cessation of prophecy, and, by extension, the other so-called “miraculous” gifts of the Holy Spirit. After a statement of the issue itself, this paper examines the only significant “anti-cessationist” response offered so far, that of Wayne Grudem, and then goes on to offer some alternative responses of its own.

Ephesians 2:19-22 [NKJV]
Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

Status of the Problem

One of the few remaining New Testament texts to which cessationists appeal for support of their position is Eph 2:20.² The argument-by-analogy is along these lines: since apostles and prophets appear as the “foundation” of the “temple” or church, and since each course of stones in this temple metaphorically represent successive generations of believers throughout church history, then these “foundation” gifts necessarily passed away before the second generation of Christianity.³

From the frequency and extent this argument is made in cessationist circles,⁴ one would assume that there would be a serious reply from their theological dialogue partners, the Pentecostals and charismatics. Pentecostal or charismatic scholars generally have failed to adequately treat this cessationist argument to any significant degree.⁵

Wayne Grudem’s Rebuttal to the Cessationist Use of Ephesians 2:20

Wayne Grudem is the only non-cessationist scholar I can discover who deals with the cessationist argument from Eph 2:20 in any detail.⁶ Quite reasonably, then, Grudem’s response stands as the default Pentecostal/charismatic position recognized by cessationists,⁷ along with their perceptions about its strengths and weaknesses.

Though he presents his position as an attempt to mediate between charismatics and cessationists, it appears that Grudem’s defense on this point shares traditional cessationist presuppositions about the nature of apostles and of the “foundation” in Ephesians 2:20. Grudem seems to agree with cessationists who argue against the continuation of the gift of prophecy in that the gift is somehow identical with the first generation (“foundation level”) of Christian prophets: that necessarily when these particular prophets died, the gift of prophecy died with them. The same, he would also agree, would be true of apostles.

Grudem, however, ingeniously tries to deny the death of prophecy by claiming that only a special category of prophets is described in Eph. 2:20, namely, that they are “foundational,” and hence, cease because these particular prophets are in fact, apostles! He also offers an alternate possibility that perhaps these “foundational” prophets were an elite group that received and uttered apostolic-level revelation. He agrees, then, with cessationists that apostles, at least the original twelve (or thirteen, depending on how Paul is included) stood to be unique in that they are seen as the authoritative bearers of foundational Christian doctrine, which they wrote into scripture. Accordingly, Grudem sees the apostle/prophets of Eph 2:20 as the equivalent of the canonical prophets of the Old Testament, whose pronouncements and writings also held ultimate religious authority in that they later became scripture.⁸

On this view, and to preserve the continuation of Christian prophecy, Grudem must then define NT prophecy in two categories. 1) Agreeing with traditional cessationists, the first class of prophecy, which was to cease within the first generation, was a kind of interim canon awaiting its written form, while, 2) the second class of prophecy was represented by the “less authoritative type of prophecy indicated in 1 Corinthians.”⁹

Understandably, this novel defense has received a heated response from cessationists, who wish to deny any “two-level” gift of prophecy that Grudem describes.¹⁰ Without going into their argument in detail, they seek to prove that all manifestations of the gift of prophecy in the first generation will cease together, since prophecy is divine revelation, and such revelation must necessarily be enscripturated.¹¹

Grudem therefore finds himself in an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, it is crucial to restrict this class of men to the “foundational” and unrepeatable. This is because he sees apostles (and this first class of NT prophets) as the New Testament counterparts of Old Testament prophets. Therefore they “were able to speak and write words that had absolute divine authority,”¹² that is, in the canon of scripture. Because of the central apostolic role as scripture writers, and because the canon of the NT is closed, the gift or “office” of apostleship must necessarily cease.¹³ On the other hand, “apostleship” is seamlessly listed along with the other “miraculous” spiritual gifts in 1 Cor 12:28 and Eph 4:11, gifts which Grudem insists must continue in the church! In short, Grudem’s views of apostleship, prophecy, revelation and scripture leave him vulnerable to the charge that he is fatally inconsistent in his defense of continuing spiritual gifts.

In the preceding article, we left our friend, George, the novice charismatic whose excited testimony ran into a wall of biblical-sounding arguments from his pastor, a cessationist.¹ This article offered a kind of pocket guide of “pro” charismatic arguments which George (or you, gentle reader) can photocopy and send to your cessationist friends for comment. We now offer George some responses to a couple of prominent arguments he is likely to hear from his cessationist pastor and others like him.

The most thorough catalog of cessationist arguments—and answers—appears in these pages in Wayne Grudem’s four-part article, a reprint of chapter 2 in an excellent book by Gary Greig and Kevin Springer, editors of The Kingdom and the Power: Are Healing and the Spiritual Gifts Used by Jesus and the Apostles and the Early Church Meant for the Church Today? published by Regal Books in 1993.

This present article seeks to supplement that chapter with answers to two prominent objections to continuing spiritual gifts:  1) “History shows that miraculous spiritual gifts have ceased,” or, in a variation of that objection: “If miracles and spiritual gifts have continued, then why don’t we see them as widespread and obvious today as in New Testament times?”  2) “Ephesians 2:20 shows that the ‘foundational gifts’ of apostle and prophet have ceased.” In my experience, these are two of the most common cessationist arguments in use today which are worth examining.

1.    “History shows that miraculous spiritual gifts have ceased.”

Following Benjamin Warfield’s classic cessationist work, Counterfeit Miracles published in 1918, many today appeal to history to show the cessation of miraculous gifts. Warfield insisted that his book stood on “two legs”: biblical and historical proofs. But his “legs” were grossly disproportional: probably 97% of his book stood on the historical leg, while his biblical arguments were haphazardly scattered through his pages, responding only to the biblical arguments of his opponents.

Older Pentecostals and charismatics find this odd, since our critics have often said that we base our “theology” on “experience” rather than on the word of God. Yet an appeal to “history” is actually an appeal to “experiences”—at least to those in the past. These days, the shoe is very much on the other foot: cessationists increasingly appeal to “experience” (history) while charismatics, like Jack Deere, Gordon Fee, Wayne Grudem, Gary Greig, Max Turner and John Wimber are building increasingly sophisticated biblical arguments.²

George could feel his face growing red and hot. He was embarrassed—utterly stymied and tongue-tied. His excited story about his recent filling with the Spirit and his healing was met with a long, Bible-based refutation by his pastor and friend.

“George,” he concluded, “the Bible says these experiences of yours cannot be valid. True miracles no longer occur today because God gave them only to establish New Testament doctrine. You can’t go against the teaching of God’s Word just because of your experiences and feelings.” The pastor continues, “‘Ordinary’ spiritual gifts like evangelism, hospitality and teaching, of course, continue, but the ‘miraculous’ gifts have ceased.”

George certainly did not need to be discouraged, however. These days, even among conservative Evangelical scholars, the tide is definitely turning against his pastor-friend’s “cessationism.” Cessationism is a doctrine, mostly found in Protestant fundamentalism, that spiritual gifts (the “charismata,” such as listed in 1 Corinthians 12:7-10, 28) existed only to prove the validity of New Testament doctrine or accredit the apostles. This teaching also says that that the “miraculous” or “extraordinary” gifts died with the apostles, or with the writing of the last New Testament book sometime in the first century.

George needed a kind of pocket guide, like this article, for him to answer his friend’s overwhelming, Biblical-sounding arguments. This article will very briefly summarize an enormous Biblical case that can be made for spiritual gifts continuing today. The second part will examine the most common “cessationist” argu­ments George, and you, would likely hear.

The Case for Continuing Spiritual Gifts

Before we begin, let us look at the central problem with the “cessationist” argument, above. It claims that because spiritual gifts can be used as proof of doctrine, then the gifts must cease when the need for that proof is fulfilled (that is, when the New Testament was written). Should a medical doctor use that same logic? When he uses your heartbeat to prove you are alive, does this mean your heart must cease beating simply because he just removed his stethoscope and no longer needed proof? It is highly doubtful that the New Testament ever intended spiritual gifts to be used as proof, but even if it did, the New Testament itself shows many other, clearly-stated and necessary functions for spiritual gifts, which, by the same logic, should demand their continuation!

Let us now review some passages of Scripture that makes this case.

1. Romans 11:29 makes a universal statement about the continuation of the “charismata.”

“The gifts [charismata] and calling of God are irrevocable [not called back].” Cessationism precisely contradicts this verse. Cessationists may object, though, that this verse applies only to the offer of salvation to the Jews and not to the gifts of the Spirit.

Gary S. Greig and Kevin N. Springer, eds., The Kingdom and the Power: Are Healing and Spiritual Gifts Used by Jesus and the Early Church Meant for the Church Today? A Biblical Look at How to Bring the Gospel to the World with Power (Regal Books, 1993), 463 pages.

Thirty years ago, when I graduated from a prominent evangelical divinity school, I prayed long and hard for a book like Kingdom and the Power to answer the objections that my seminary professors had raised against my Pentecostal experience. My parting shot from the seminary was a tutorial research paper that eventually evolved into my doctoral dissertation and later, book, On the Cessation of the Charismata. The cessationist professor read only about half of the project, assigned it a “B” and refused to dialog about its arguments and exegesis. At the same time, a close friend and fellow student with normally high grades, who is now the New Testament Professor at Edinburgh, fared even worse: he received a “C” on his thesis, “Signs and Wonders in the New Testament.” There was little discussion on the ideas presented, aside from an assertion from one committee member to the effect that along with Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, Pentecostals should not have been allowed enroll at that school.

Times have changed since the 60s. The shrinking proportion of evangelicals who still maintain that spiritual gifts have ceased with the apostles are much more willing to dialog—if only because increasingly they now find themselves in a theological Alamo, where there are constant defections and increasing apathy on the part of the defenders. In the last decades, the debate over the gifts of the Spirit has become much more sophisticated exegetically and theologically. Many non-charismatic evangelicals today seem to be more willing to receive, or at least read, the new exegetically-grounded works of Pentecostals and charismatics.

The Kingdom and the Power is a work that represents a theology in transition from categories framed by traditional Protestant theology to ones more naturally expressed in scripture. Accordingly, Kingdom effectively avails itself of the breadth of scholarship from the last 60 years (see especially, pp. 24-28) as the numerous endnotes will attest, though without compromising the authority of its biblical grounding. The work presents itself as a polemic against critics of the Third Wave renewal generally, and cessationism in particular (p. 16). More significantly, the book’s extended scholarly argument represents a long step toward a comprehensive theology for the movement. Kingdom moves beyond its theological polemic, “Exegetical and Theological Studies,” in Part I, to Part II, to express its pastoral concern involving real-life application to ministry, and, in Part III, toward contributions from the disciplines of history, psychology, social anthropology and missiology. Seven appendices treat narrower issues dealing principally with cessationism.