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.

Jon Mark Ruthven, What’s Wrong with Protestant Theology? Tradition vs. Biblical Emphasis (Tulsa: Word and Spirit Press, 2013), 314 pages, ISBN 9780981952642.

Books on Christian theology are often written by academic types: persons of seminary and university training, but with only marginal pastoral experience. This is not true of this work.

Dr. Ruthven is both a scholar and a pastor. He was a pastor for twelve years, and then a professor at Regent University for 18, besides taking numerous missionary trips to the majority world. He wrote the definitive book critiquing cessationism, On the Cessation of the Charismata: The Protestant Polemic on Postbiblical Miracles (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), which is still in print. He has since written or co-authored a half dozen other works.

Dr. Ruthven’s thesis is that the Bible has an overwhelming emphasis as to what the believer is to do: hear the voice of God and obey. This is not just a command to the religious leaders and elites, but to every believer.

This book establishes this thesis after outlining the key features of Protestant theology, by showing that the central emphasis of scripture involves the process of the prophetic word of God coming to mankind, directly and immediately into individual hearts. This emphasis of scripture is proven by the recurring, central plot line of biblical narratives; the central temptation to mankind (Gen 3; Matt 4 and Luke 4); the essence of the New Covenant (the prophethood of believers); and the central, explicit mission of Jesus: to bestow the prophetic Spirit.

At the end of the work, Ruthven summarizes the answer to his title, “What’s Wrong with Protestant Theology.”

Christian Epistemology. For all the emphasis the Protestants placed upon scripture as their ultimate doctrinal authority, they tended to use the Bible as a source for proof texts against Rome on the nature of “salvation” rather than allowing it to speak with its own voice and emphasis.

Signs and wonders, the central way God (and his Son) revealed himself in the Bible, were rejected by Protestants as obsolete devices to “prove” doctrine—as “signs” with no value except as they pointed to an accredited Gospel creed. This misconception resulted in …

The loss of the big picture of Jesus’ mission. The Protestant emphasis was on the free gift of Christ’s sacrifice. By contrast, the New Testament portrays Jesus’ kingdom mission as introducing, modeling, ratifying, vindicating, commissioning, and bestowing the New Covenant charismatic Spirit––a synonym for the kingdom of God––a concept traditional theology largely ignored.

By denying Jesus’ central kingdom mission, traditional Protestantism seriously messed up New Testament discipleship, by denying the essential work of the Spirit in the life and mission of the believer. Protestantism generally ignored the significance of the early commissioning accounts, e.g., Mt 10; Mk 6; Lk 9-10, relegating those to the apostles only.

Instead, in traditional theology, the believer’s role is essentially that of a consumer: to receive salvation, meaning a place in heaven, and to “be good” until then.

Jon M. Ruthven in 2012.

It is Ruthven’s view that traditional religion avoids the central point of scripture: the ideal of a believer in full communication and communion via the empowering Spirit. Tradition puts the task of hearing God into the hands of the religious leadership. In Judaism this is through the institution of rabbinical commentaries, and in the Christianity it is via the role given priests and preachers of expounding the Word of God––to the exclusion of layperson’s input. For instance, it would be shocking in most churches in Christendom for a layperson to stand up at the end of the sermon and say: “I believe the Spirit of the Lord would add these words to what Pastor Smith has said…”

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.