Michael L. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, Vols. 1-3 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000 and 2003).

When you encounter a Jewish man or woman willing to enter into a dialogue about Jesus, and you face the inevitable hurdles many Jewish people can raise, would it not be nice to have resources that could provide you an easy-to-read, well-researched, yet comprehensive view on countering those objections?

Michael Brown has compiled three such books. Volume One tackles the General and Historical Objections; Volume Two examines the Theological Objections; and Volume Three offers an in depth examination of Messianic Prophecy Objections. The three volumes bring together a wealth of knowledge without parallel in the marketplace.

Brown brings Jewish understanding to the fore, tracing centuries of Hebrew thought, theology, and history that developed through interaction in predominately Christian and Muslim communities, demonstrating how the rabbis came to reach some of the conclusions they reached about the Messiah. He helps you understand the Jewish perspective, and then equips you with solid, biblical—and usually thoroughly Jewish—answers.

Moishe Rosen, founder of Jews for Jesus writes, “Michael Brown’s thinking is incisive and to the point. His ability to explain so that anyone can understand is amazing. He will surely be acclaimed as the new expert in Jewish Christian apologetics.”

Each volume includes extensive notes, a glossary of Hebrew terms, as well as subject and Scripture indexes. You don’t have to be a rabbi to enter into a meaningful dialogue about the Jewish Messiah. Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus has done all the work for you. Highly recommended.

Reviewed by Kevin M. Williams

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