The editor, Robert W. Graves is a Pentecostal scholar and president of The Foundation for Pentecostal Scholarship. This non-profit encourages Pentecostal/Charismatic authors, with awards for excellent new works. Mr. Graves has had a long-standing passion to defend Charismatic and Pentecostal claims of the present-day activity and gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The topic of the book, a rebuttal of cessationism, is both important and sad. It is sad because many good Christians still dispute the reality of the gifts of the Spirit (1 Cor 12–14) in the life of the contemporary church. This is over a hundred years after the Azusa Street revival and over sixty years after the Charismatic renewal burst among mainline churches. The suspicion and resistance to the operation of these gifts came under renewed attack in recent decades by the popular and influential ministry of the Rev. John MacArthur. His radio ministry and multiple books have lambasted gifts of the Spirit as bogus and their practice as heretical. This reviewer has had the honor of being the object of his critical comments with an entire chapter criticizing my work.[1] In fact Mr. Graves edited an earlier volume of essays dedicated to responding to MacArthur’s cessationist best-seller, Strange Fire.[2]

The Kingdom Case against Cessationism has a forward by Dr. Craig Keener, currently the most well-known and distinguished Charismatic New Testament scholar. The book is made up of 12 chapters by various authors, several of which are widely known and respected, such as Randy Clark and Michael Brown. But all are distinguished scholars in their fields.

The articles are uniformly excellent, and I found Randy Clark’s contribution, “The Inaugurated Kingdom of God–Now and Not Yet,” particularly useful. The same for Mr. Graves’s contribution, “Cessationism and the Struggle for the Promises and Commands of Jesus.”

The Kingdom Case against Cessationism contains three essays by Jon Ruthven, whose death has been a serious loss to Pentecostal scholarship (and to whom this book is dedicated). They were taken from his PhD masterpiece that also produced On the Cessation of the Charismata.[3]

The Kingdom Case against Cessationism has an index of persons as well as an index of biblical citations and ancient church sources. It is especially valuable to pastors and church leaders who have people in their congregations who still hold to the cessationist view. It is a handy source of biblical answers to the folly and “heresy” of cessationism. Mr. Graves is to be commended for his scholarly and useful work for the Charismatic/Pentecostal churches.

Reviewed by William De Arteaga

Notes

[1] John MacArthur, Reckless Faith (Crossway, 1994).

[2] (Nashville Thomas Nelson, 2013) See Strangers to Fire: When Tradition Trumps Scripture (Tulsa: Empowered Life Academic-Harrison House, 2014). [Editor’s note: See the Strange Fire roundup at PneumaReview.com: “Are Pentecostals offering Strange Fire?” See also the PneumaReview.com interview with Strangers To Fire editor Robert Graves and reviews by Tony Richie, John Lathrop, and further reflections by Jon Ruthven.]

[3] Jon Ruthven, On the Cessation of the Charismata (Tulsa: Word and Spirit, 2010). [Editor’s note: See Amos Yong’s review of Jon Ruthven: On the Cessation of the Charismata.]

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

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

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.