Pastor, renewal leader, and scholar speaks with The Pneuma Review.

Pneuma Review: Tell us about where you come from, what God has done in your life, and what he has called you to be doing. 

Randy Clark:

I was raised in a Christian home as a Baptist, educated at a BaptistUniversity and Seminary, presently completing a doctor of ministry at a United Methodist seminary. I entered the ministry at 18 in 1970. I pastored for 30 years, and itinerated since 1994 while continuing to pastor until 2001 when I resigned to only itinerate. I have been married since July 1975. I have 4 adult children and three grandchildren.

I was healed at 18 and at 57, both times from serious conditions. I pastored in the General Baptist, United Church of Christ, American Baptist, Vineyard, and The Church of the Great Commission. I served on the council of the Association of Vineyard Churches. I founded the ministry called Global Awakening, then the Apostolic Network of Global Awakening. Also, founded the Global School of Supernatural Ministry, and the Christian Healing Certification Program. I was used by God to begin the Toronto Blessing revival in 1994. I started the Randy Clark scholars at United Theological seminary in Dayton, Ohio in 2013, where I am working on developing a Master of Divinity degree with a concentration in Renewal-Supernatural.

I am working around the world doing conferences, Schools of Healing and Impartation, and renewal meetings with a strong focus on healing and impartation.

PR: How has healing become a prominent part of your ministry?

Randy Clark:

When I was healed at 18, it kept me from losing my faith in the midst of liberal theological education. Healing led to experiencing revival. Healing and impartation for healing has created an opportunity for me to travel the world ministering. My doctoral dissertation is about healing, as are other dissertations by fellow students at the seminary.

PR: What kinds of healings have you seen take place?

Randy Clark:

Parkinson’s, MS, Paranoid Schizophrenia, bi-polar, cancers of many different kinds, strokes, blindness, deafness, couldn’t walk without crutches, scheduled amputations of leg below hip, below knee, and above ankle all healed and no amputations, loss of mobility and/or chronic pain from surgically implanted materials, many other types.

A minister writes about the importance of significant and intentional community for followers of Jesus.

Church-hopping Christians who flit from one congregation to another do have a problem—but it is not with the people they meet, as they think. It is with themselves, observes one veteran pastor who believes local church involvement is the true measure of someone’s faith.

“Let’s face it; following God is much easier when we are not being jostled by fellow travelers on the journey,” says Daniel Brown, pastor of The Coastlands in Aptos, Calif. “How sad that some believers imagine all the trouble with people in the church is with the people in church.

“Some Christians are like kids with slivers in their hands—God asks them to hold still so He can get at the slivers with as pair of tweezers, but they keep pulling away and squirming around, hopping from church to church, getting more and more infected by the very stuff that could be extracted in fellowship. God uses church to increase our love and to refine us.”

With these principles of the purpose of fellowship Brown urges committed church involvement for every believer. Drawing from his 20-plus years in ministry—during which he has founded 23 churches and helped start two overseas—Brown says church is “the perfect setting for us to experience and to offer the love that Jesus said would characterize His followers.”

But that is not always easy, and if someone does not have ongoing contact with other Christians they can be “fooled into thinking [they] are loving others” because they experience little frustration. “But until you spend meaningful time with others, you do not really have much occasion to love them in spite of what they do.”

“Learning the truths of His kingdom is not like learning facts from a textbook,” he writes. “It is more like hiking over the rise of a hill and, for the first time, catching a glimpse of a valley where you could gladly spend the rest of your life. With each new element of truth you grasp, you find yourself thinking, ‘This is the best.'”

Adapted from a Charisma News Service article and used with permission.

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.