Ken Walker, “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn,” Charisma (September 1999), pages 38-46, 91.

What happens when young people pray that God would do whatever it takes to bring about revival? Is there a connection between prayer and the tragedies that have taken place in Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado and at Wedgwood Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas?

Eight months before Columbine, Mike Higgs wrote in the September/October 1998 issue of Pray! magazine, that “Littleton, Colorado, students are on their way to establishing a prayer group on every campus in their community.” Jonathan Graf, editor of Pray!, reported that one of the student leaders of this movement told adults to “lead us, join us, or get out of the way!” Graf went on to comment in his editorial that “In a very real sense, the Columbine shooting was a result of the prayers of these young people. They wanted God to do something so huge on their campuses that the world would take notice. Satan tried to stop them when two troubled boys entered Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, and started shooting. But God turned Satan’s scheme into the very answer to their prayers. Something huge for the kingdom is coming out of this tragedy” (Pray! Nov/Dec 1999, p. 5).

There has been an E-mail, reportedly circulated by Pastor Dr. Ed Tropp of Circle Drive Baptist Church in Colorado Springs, that has said, “What the news is not reporting is the revival that’s begun. There were 2 other backslidden Christian kids in that library while people were getting killed, who watched her step up and give her life and came out and vowed never to compromise their faith again as long as they lived. Christian kids that were in public schools in the whole area that had been embarrassed because they wanted to be cool, didn’t want to stand up for Christ, have all opened their mouths this week and there are hundreds of teenagers turning to Christ. They don’t want to hear about peer counseling and psychology, they’re falling on their knees and crying out to Jesus Christ. . . .One girl stood forward and said, ‘I believe in Jesus,’ and what that has done in the hearts of the people in this community is unbelievable. What the news isn’t reporting is what they don’t understand, a revival has begun.”

Wendy Murray Zoba quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, “It may be that there will be no salvation for the human spirit from the more and more painful burdens of social injustice until the ominous tendency in human history has resulted in the perfect tragedy.” In her opinion, Columbine was the perfect tragedy to awaken the United States (“‘Do You Believe in God?’: Columbine and the stirring of America’s soul.” Christianity Today, Oct 4, 1999, p. 33).

As the rest of the world is experiencing unparalleled church and Christian growth, America has become an unchurched nation.

The Power of the Cross: The Biblical Place of Healing and Gift-Based Ministry in Proclaiming the Gospel

8. Doesn’t Hebrews 2:3 tell us that miracles were restricted to the apostles, “those who heard him”?

In Hebrews 2:3-4, the author says about the message of salvation,

It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard him, while God also bore witness²³  by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his own will.

The miracles here are said to come through those who heard the Lord firsthand (“those who heard him”), so it is argued that we should not expect them to be done through others who were not firsthand witnesses to the Lord’s teaching and ministry.²⁴

But this argument attempts to draw more from the passage than is there. First, the phrase “those who heard him” (Hebrews 2:3) is certainly not limited to the apostles, for many others heard Jesus as well (Luke 10:1 ff.; John 6:60-70; 1 Corinthians 15:6). But more importantly, this position is claiming something the text simply does not say: That the gospel message was confirmed by miracles when it was preached by those who heard Jesus says nothing at all about whether it would be confirmed by miracles when preached by others who did not hear Jesus.

Finally, this passage says the message was confirmed not only by “signs and wonders and various miracles” but also by “gifts of the Holy Spirit.” If someone argues that this passage limits miracles to the apostles and their companions, then he or she must also argue that gifts of the Holy Spirit are likewise limited to the first-century Church. But few would argue that there are no gifts of the Holy Spirit today.

9. When Paul says, “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:22-23), doesn’t he warn us against seeking signs and say that we should just preach the gospel of Christ?

Here Paul cannot be denying that he performed miracles in connection with proclaiming the gospel. In Romans 15:18-19, a passage Paul wrote while in Corinth, he said,

For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has wrought through me to win obedience from the Gentiles, by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that from Jerusalem and as far round as Illyr’icum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.

September 6, 1999 issue of Christianity Today

Roger E. Olson, “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Arminian: My Reformed friends sometimes treat me like the enemy, but actually we need each other,” Christianity Today (September 6, 1999), pages 87-94.

Many remember the schism between George Whitefield and John Wesley as a microcosm of the debate between Calvinists and Arminians. Roger E Olson points out that although they made up before they died “ . . .their disagreement has lived on in American evangelicals’ waxing and waning debates about sovereignty and the doctrines of election and free will” (p. 87). He says that the unity enjoyed by the post-World War II evangelical coalition is beginning to wane with more and more Reformed Scholars, like R.C. Sproul and Michael Horton, questioning whether an Arminian can be a genuine evangelical. Horton goes as far as to say “An evangelical cannot be an Arminian any more than an evangelical can be a Roman Catholic” (p. 87).

Olson defines Arminians as “Protestants who deny unconditional election and affirm resistible grace” (p. 87). He further states “I hope for a new détente between those of us who believe in the soul’s ability to cooperate with regenerating grace (Arminians) and those evangelicals who believe that regenerating grace must precede even repentance and faith (Calvinists)” (p. 87).

Roger E. Olson is the Foy Valentine Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at the George W. Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University.

Working among many Reformed theologians, Olson learned that many equated Arminian with semi-Pelagian, a heresy named for a fifth-century British monk named Pelagius, who taught that men were born innocent and therefore could initiate salvation. Informed Arminians are quick to point out that they do not believe man can initiate salvation, for he is spiritually dead. They hold that God moved first through prevenient or enabling grace, which allows the sinner to make a decision to accept or reject the gospel.

Fredrick C. Holmgren, The Old Testament and the Significance of Jesus: Embracing Change—Maintaining Christian Identity: The Emerging Center in Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 195 pages.

I like to start every book by reading its foreword, and that is what I did with this text. I was delighted to find that Walter Bruggemann who penned the foreword was a seminary student with Holmgren in ancient days, and that he remembered Holmgren as the most quiet and most irenic member of their graduate class. I like people like that since they generally let me do all the talking. However, the foreword concludes with “There is so much to unlearn and then to relearn. Holmgren teaches us along the way” and I knew that sentence to be true. I opened my senses and proceeded.

My interest in this book began when I scanned its table of contents which indicated the book covered a subject that has been elusive for me over the past 40 years—finding the fulfillment and foretelling of Jesus in the Old Testament. Since I have always had difficulty in this search I put the book in my shopping bag and took it home.

Holmgren approaches his subject from several aspects: First he starts with an assessment of how things really are in the Jewish and Christian communities and emphasizes the dialogues between these communities which he discovered as he researched the subject. Next we read of his interpretation of how the early Jewish Christians approached the Scriptures and found Jesus therein. I found this treatment fascinating for it paralleled my own personal experience. I came to a saving knowledge of Christ when I was 30 years old. I had no background in the Scriptures at that point in life. I went with a friend to hear Billy Graham preach in Philadelphia in 1961. I did not know who Graham was, let alone what he was talking about, but I found immediate and total redemption and when I opened the Scriptures for the first time, I was already a believer in Jesus Christ.

That position which I did not understand intellectually at all back then and still to a large extent do not understand today gave me a mind set similar to the one Holmgren described in the early Jewish believer. After I knew Jesus, I somehow knew that He was the reason for the Scriptures and that they were qualified to accomplish what God intended them to do. They were God breathed and I knew that. Holmgren posits that the early Jewish believers went through a similar experience, that after they met the Savior, they suddenly could find Jesus in the depth of the Old Testament. The New Testament writers read the Old Testament and wrote what they knew out of their Christian experience. They found Jesus separately from the text, they met Him on the highways and byways of life, then knowing him they returned to the text and there He was. They did not read the text and thus discover Jesus, they found Him in the text after they had discovered Him to be the Son of God.

The Memphis Miracle was a meeting of North American Pentecostals in October of 1994 where the Racial Reconciliation Manifesto was drafted and signed and the Pentecostal Charismatic Churches of North America (PCCNA) Task Force was formed.

Challenged by the reality of our racial divisions, we have been drawn by the Holy Spirit to Memphis, Tennessee, October 1 7-19, 1994 in order to become true “Pentecostal Partners” and to develop together “A Reconciliation Strategy for 2lst Century Ministry” We desire to covenant together in the ongoing task of racial reconciliation by committing Ourselves to the following agenda.

I. I pledge in concert with my brothers and sisters of many hues to oppose racism prophetically in all its various manifestations within and without the Body of Christ and to be vigilant in the struggle with all my God-given might.

II. I am committed personally to treat those in the Fellowship who are not of my race or ethnicity, regardless of color, with love and respect as my sisters and brothers in Christ. I am further committed to work against all forms of personal and institutional racism, including those which are revealed within the very structures of our environment. 

III. With complete bold and courageous honesty, we mutually confess that racism is sin and as a blight in the Fellowship must be condemned for having hindered the maturation of spiritual development and mutual sharing among Pentecostal-Charismatic believers for decades.

IV. We openly confess our shortcomings and our participation in the sin of racism by our silence, denial and blindness. We admit the harm it has brought to generations born and unborn. We strongly contend that the past does not always completely determine the future. New horizons are emerging. God wants to do a new thing through His people.

V. We admit that there is no single solution to racism in the Fellowship. We pray and are open to tough love and radical repentance with deep sensitivity to the Holy Spirit as Liberator.

VI. Together we will work to affirm one another’s strengths and acknowledge our own weaknesses and inadequacies, recognizing that all of us only “see in a mirror dimly” what God desires to do in this world. Together, we affirm the wholeness of the Body of Christ as fully inclusive of Christians regardless of color. We, therefore, commit ourselves “to love one another with mutual affection, outdoing one another in showing honor (Romans 12: 10).”

VII. We commit ourselves not only to pray but also to work for genuine and visible manifestations of Christian unity.

VIII. We hereby commit ourselves not only to the task of making prophetic denouncement of racism in word and creed, but to live by acting in deed. We will fully support and encourage those among us who are attempting change.

In part 1 of the sixth chapter of the Praying in the Spirit Series, author Robert Graves examines the claim that tongues are not needed today. He argues convincingly that tongues are needed and will continue until the return of Jesus Christ.

Robert W. Graves wrote Praying in the Spirit (Chosen Books) in 1987, when it received great reviews from a number of Pentecostal/charismatic scholars and leaders including John Sherrill, Dr. Vinson Synan, Dr. Gordon Fee, Dr. William Menzies, Dr. Howard Ervin, Dr. Walter Martin, and Dr. Stanley Horton. It is the great privilege of the Pneuma Review to republish it here.

“Tongues shall cease.” More than 1,900 years have passed since the apostle Paul penned this prediction in a letter to the Corinthians (c. AD 54), and not a few cessationists have argued that the future tense of the verb (cease) is no longer warranted—the use of the past tense is now justifiable, or so the argument goes. Anti-charismatic Robert G. Gromacki concludes his book, “‘Tongues … shall cease’ (1 Corinthians 13:8). They have” (p. 143). And according to cessationist George Zeller, Paul’s injunction not to forbid tongues “no longer applies today” (p.104).

The Pentecostals and charismatics agree with cessationists that the charismata (spiritual gifts) as described by Paul and Luke are temporary. The disagreement arises when one attempts to determine the factor (and thus arrive at an approximate date) responsible for the cessation of these manifestations of the Spirit. For the charismatic, Scripture, Church history, and personal experience indicate that all of the gifts are to continue through the Church Age. But for the cessationist, the prophetic, miraculous “sign” gifts ceased with the early Church. Some say the cessation was immediate; others claim it occurred over several decades, tapering off gradually.

Cessationists’ Arguments

The anti-charismata cessationists use, for the most part, four arguments to prove the cessation of tongues: (1) Tongues were a sign; (2) Tongues were revelatory in nature therefore the completion of Scripture ended all revelation; (3) After Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth (AD 54), the New Testament is completely silent on tongues, therefore, they had ceased; (4) Historical writings of church leaders after AD 100 do not indicate a continuance of the charismata.

On October 17-19, 1994 the leadership of the essentially all white Pentecostal Fellowship of the North America (PFNA) met in Memphis to confront its racial past and to meet with African American Pentecostals to establish an integrated fellowship. The result was a new organization known as the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America (PCCNA). As part of that process those present from the PFNA confessed that they had practiced bigotry and exclusiveness in their preference for a congregation and administration of the same color. Five years have passed since this historic event, and it is time to look at the results of the “Memphis miracle” and to take further steps and longer strides to meet the challenge presented there.

I have lived in Honolulu for the past 13 years where white people like me are called “haoles”, and are in the minority—some thirty percent of us who live here have European ancestors. I am on the pastoral staff of the largest church in the State. Our congregation of 10,000 looks like it should for our area, seventy percent of the attendees and the staff are people of color and the rest are white.

Donald J. Evans washing the feet of Bishop Ithiel Clemmons during footwashing service at PCCNA at “The Miracle of Memphis” in October 1994.
Image: Flowers Pentecostal Heritage Center

The Memphis Manifesto challenges all believers to take a look at their own attitudes and pre-judgments regarding race. In light of this, the first point I want to make is that white is also a color, and that everyone in my church therefore is a person of color. I know too that everyone in your church is a person of color, hence the problem we face is not one of color but one of preference. Preference is sin.

My friend Helen W. was a missionary in Liberia for many many years. She left the field in the sixties and came back to Fort Washington, PA to work in the home office of her sending agency. Helen had malaria and could not stay any longer. She went to Liberia as a young single woman and while there met and fell in love with a local man. Her sending agency would not let them marry—he was black, she was white; it would not be good, they said.

I lived near Helen back then. I lived in a white neighborhood and was appalled to learn that Helen spent all her free time in the black areas of Philadelphia. I admonished her, she could get hurt down there. Helen said, “Oh no.” She explained that she had lived for twenty years as the only white woman in the bush of Liberia, a country where white people played a leading role in government. In those twenty years, Helen had learned that you were far safer in the black community than with the white ones who governed and could not be trusted. Helen found crowds of white people frightening. Back in the sixties, I found black people frightening.

Seeing grace and mercy in the Old Testament story of Cain and Abel.

“For I am the Lord, I change not” (Malachi 3:6).

God has changed. Or at least that seems to be what many are teaching in our day. There are denominations that teach that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament holding that the old God was mean and wrathful, but the new God is loving and full of mercy. One theory goes so far as to state that God has matured from a juvenile attitude to having a more adult disposition.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

It is certainly true that God demonstrates awesome power in the Old Testament. Yet it’s fair to say what happened in ancient days will be mild compared to what He is going to do in the end of days, when the wrath of God is poured out and entire segments of the world’s population will cease to exist! This demonstrates either a God who cannot make up his mind, or a changeless God of perfect continuity.

I will assume that if you are reading the Pneuma Review, you agree with Scripture that God is changeless. This conjecture being true, then the grace, mercy, and compassion “others” claim are absent from in the Old Testament must, in fact, be there. Such is the case in the story of Cain and Abel.

“And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord (Gen.. 4:2).” This sounds reasonable. It even sounds like Cain had a good head on his shoulders to have decided to bring an offering to the Creator.

Yet the key to understanding the sibling rivalry between Cain and Abel is found in the next verse.

And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering.

The Hebrew word for offering is minchah. It is not merely any offering, but a specific offering. This comes to a fuller understanding in the tabernacle period, but there are elements we can appreciate in Cain and Abel’s offering (See Pneuma Review Vol 2 No 2 Spring 1999 for more explanation on this and all the Levitical sacrifices).

Jon Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Postbiblical Miracles, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 3 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993 and 1997), 271 pages.

Those who are involved in friendly debates with cessationists should seriously consider this book as a gift in order to further conversation on the topic. Let me briefly identify the book’s highlights.

First, Ruthven provides a valuable overview of the history of cessationism, beginning with Jewish sect of the Pharisees in the period of the early church and continuing through the Reformers’ debate against the Radical Reformation and Roman Catholicism, Hume’s criticism of all supernatural miracles, and the emergence of Deism.

Jon Mark Ruthven

Second, against this background, the cessationist polemic of Princeton theologian, Benjamin B. Warfield (1855-1921), is critically assessed. An outstanding example of contextualizing a theologian’s ideas, Ruthven’s discussion not only establishes the internal inconsistency of Warfield’s concept of miracle in the latter’s Counterfeit Miracles (1918), but also reveals a clear irony in his methodology. In his zeal to uphold the authority of Scripture, Warfield actually misread the biblical data on the charismata even according to his own hermeneutical principles. Further, his a priori cessationism led him to discredit miracles documented in the history of Christianity by applying to this record the same historical method that Hume and the deists used to undermine biblical miracles themselves. In short, Ruthven demonstrates that Warfield’s ‘bibliolatry’ (my term) actually blinded him to the continuities manifest between Scripture and ongoing biblical revelation, thus motivating his polemic.

Cover from the 2011 revised and expanded edition from Word & Spirit Press.

Third, Ruthven challenges the ‘evidentialist’ doctrine of miracles and the charismata that claims these served only to accredit the foundations of Christian faith in the first century. He provides us with a thorough exegetical investigation of all texts related to the function and duration of the charismata, and argues convincingly the thesis that they are edificatory for the Church. The charismata concretely express and make relevant the Gospel, and equip the Church for mission. If in fact the Church’s mission continues until the end of this age, then cessationism is wrong.

Finally, Ruthven provides hints for extending the biblical theology of the charismata that he has developed into a systematic theology of charismata. These involve other areas of theological study such as pneumatology, eschatology and the Kingdom of God, ecclesiology and theology of ministry, and the doctrines of grace and revelation. The book includes an exhaustive bibliography that researchers on cessationism cannot afford to ignore.

Ruthven’s writing style is lucid and his argument persuasive. The book is informative for scholar, pastor and layperson alike. I highly recommend it.

Reviewed by Amos Yong