Posted on 04/21/2016 8:11:10 AM PDT by fishtank
Continuationism is not a non-essential doctrinal issue
Posted on April 19, 2016
By Fred Butler
I am becoming convinced more and more every day that continuationism/charismaticism is not just a non-essential doctrinal issue for Christians.
My thinking about this started shortly after the Strange Fire conference as I engaged continuationist critics on social media. ....
In fact, with what I was seeing, the TBN and Sid Roth style charismatic continuationists are the standard majority, whereas the ‘balanced,” sober-minded continuationists were the true fringe.
(Excerpt) Read more at hipandthigh.wordpress.com ...
Here we have, from left to right, John and Carol Arnott of Catch the Fire ministries, Brian Stiller of World Evangelical Alliance, Kenneth “X-men weather controller” Copeland, an antichrist, Thomas Schrrmacher, another guy from the World Evangelical Alliance, Geoff Tunniclife, a peace activist, again with the World Evangelical Alliance, James and Betty Robinson of Life Today ministries, and the now eternally judged, Bishop Tony Palmer.
Did he miss “Francis” in the caption?
Just checking!
He captioned Francis as “an antichrist”....
When Copeland started his ‘ministry’ he gave people the option of sending support or not. It is amazing how many well-meaning people were sucked into the devilish plot to enrich the Copeland family!
continuationism/charismaticism
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This is Greek to me. Can someone explain the doctrinal issue?
I think it’s certainly possible the occasional miracle is legitimate, however I think the evidence weighs very heavily against most of the claimed “miracles” of the charismatics, and the Catholics, and points to fraud instead.
They also provide ammunition to skeptics, since skeptics can easily point out their fakery, and then use it to attack all Christians as dishonest. For example, all a skeptic has to do is ask “if the Holy Spirit is healing all these people, why can’t the Holy Spirit ever grow back an amputee’s limb?”, and what can they answer in defense?
Continuationism is the belief that the “gifts of the Holy Spirit”, like healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy, continue to be poured out on the church to this day. This is contrasted with Cessationism, which is the belief that those gifts died out at some point in the past, usually posited to be around the time that the last of the first generation apostles and disciples died.
Charismaticism is the extreme form of continuationism, since it posits that these gifts not only continue to exist in the church, but that they are available to ANY believer, and charismatic churches encourage all members to freely exercise them, usually quite publicly and dramatically.
Thanks for the explanation. I would say, if one takes Jesus’ letters to the seven churches/assemblies as describing the history of the Church Age, more or less, one can see the gifts kind of taper off into lukewarmness, but there is always a remnant. There are indications that prophecy sort of spikes near the end of days, when things get more “Acts” like with the circumcised component of believers, Messianic Jews, increasing.
I looked at that picture, and I thought it was a picture of people who make money off leading the flock in circles, and will all go with the False Prophet on a one-world religion. Heck, the False Prophet could even be in that picture. ;-)
Maranatha!
Indeed, it would be quite easy to turn one’s flock to believe in the “miraculous” false prophet, if the flock is already primed to accept miracles without testing or skepticism...
Yep! I am pretty sure that is what the Bible says will happen to many. I just pray to be out of here before that happens.
The article itself might explain, and the blog author has also written on these issues, too.
I think someone here on FR posted a defn, too.
Best wishes!
I don’t know what’s worse, charismatics who are given a theological inch and take a yard, or fundies who are positive that said charismatics can’t go anywhere but hell.
Both represent self admiration.
You can go blind doing that.
“Purpose-ism” is something that would be germane here, if there is even such an -ism.
The proper theme of the story is the love of Christ in bearing sins and regenerating to righteousness.
The bible is clear about the main way that tongues make sense in this scheme — as a witness to an unbelieving speaker of the language. They still could, never say never, but the circumstances are much more rare than they used to be. If one wanted to call this cessation, one could.
Could they serve a decorative purpose too? Maybe... and much is made by certain charismatics about things like tongues of angels which would have normally have no earthly speaker... but it’s wrong to assign an excessive importance to such a role. The purpose they serve today would mostly be decorative.
Could one lose a reward by ascribing too much importance to such a gift? Possibly. It could distract from carrying out more important gospel affairs that would gain a reward. This isn’t loss of salvation or going to hell, however. This is losing a chance to earn a better circumstance in heaven. A risk that all Christians run.
We should judge as charitably as we would hope ourselves to be judged. Doing otherwise will make it look like it’s all about what we think, rather than all about what we know that God can do.
“We should judge as charitably as we would hope ourselves to be judged. Doing otherwise will make it look like it’s all about what we think, rather than all about what we know that God can do.”
Well, it’s hard for me to judge the phenomenon charitably when it’s clearly riddled with fraud. I can judge the people who participate charitably, certainly, but the movement/theology behind it merits no charity, if it can be seen to serve deceptive purposes. After all, God does not practice deception, so if this phenomenon produces deception, my logic tells me that God is not the author of it.
What a poor article. the author is judging the truthfulness of biblical doctrine by frauds. Frauds have always existed in the church. It would be easy for an athiest to write a mirror article saying Christ is a myth because of same frauds.
You mean like John MacArthur's broad brush,
"there are people within that movement that preach the gospel, that believe in the authority of Scripture, that want to honor the Lord, that pursue Godly living and sanctification...so we need to say that we don't lump everybody into that movement at the same degree of error. But the movement itself is fraught with error." "..you have the birth of the charismatic movement., its theology is both heterodox and heretical...everything is defined by experience..and therefore has a weak view of Scripture, that's the charismatic movement."
In 1967 a bunch of Jesus freak people in the beach areas of Southern California go to Calvary Chapel..and for the first time, the church, that i know of in history, the church lets the very defined subculture dictate what it will be. Out go the ties, out go the hymns, out go all the normal and formal things...and the hippie culture, you know, kids coming out of drugs, communal living, free sex, and all that kind of casual thing, and that's a charismatic church, that's a four-square church. That's were the movement becomes what we know as Calvary Chapel." "The first Calvary Chapel was essentially the church saying well let the culture tell us what we need to be." The charismatic movement has developed...its comfortable in Roman Catholicism, its comfortable in dead denominationalism...I thinks its a false form of Christianity." - John MacArthur "What has happened after the 'Strange Fire' Conference;" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYulTGso804
The writer of hipandthigh, Fred Butler, a graduate of MacArthur "Master’s Seminary," is condemning those whose "primary claim was to say the Strange Fire participants wrongly attributed the bizarre, wild-eyed antics and paranormal stories witnessed at a typical health and wealth style mega-church, to [while ignoring] faithful continuationists who never display any of that ridiculous conduct or claim any of those types of otherworldly experiences," asserting "I don’t see anything representing [among the protests] the balanced, non-crack-pot continuationist. Say for instance, Wayne Grudem, or even Michael Brown," even though he reviewed the 400 page book by Brown (who defends the continuationists too much) written in response to "Strange Fire." And thus states, "continuationism maligns the doctrine of God, specifically the work of the Holy Spirit."
As typically represented he is correct, as is your argument that judging the truthfulness of biblical doctrine by frauds is itself fraudulent. Fraud predominates in continuationism, yet Pentecostalism testifies overall being among most committed to holiness and basic doctrines and evangelicalism*, and are more unified in basic beliefs than basically cessationist denominations, and in which liberalism and "sterility" is more likely to be the reality.
The rampant fraud in continuationism is inexcusable, as is the liberalism and overall spiritual deadness among those who claim to be Protestant and deny the perpetuity of personal supernatural gifts, and Caths (ignoring the liberalism and variegated beliefs in Catholicism) invoke the divisions in both as evidence that Protestantism is itself heretical, but as with the rejection of continuationism as a whole, this is throwing the baby ouyt with the bathwater.
Too often it is the pot that boils over that is seen as the evil, versus the pot that hardly simmers. Missing btwn the extremes is an objective examination of the issue of whether personal supernatural gifts are available today, which I believe Scripture supports, but not the aberrations. The devil certainly does not subscribe to cessationism any more than when his magicians duplicated the first 3 miracles of Moses. What is needed is more genuine evidences of the resurrection power of Christ, not only in the profound transformative effects of true regeneration, but in other miracles (which have strong testimonies, thanks to be God), including via personal spiritual gifts.
*
81% of Pentecostal/Foursquare believers strongly agree that the Bible is totally accurate in all that it teaches , followed by 77% of Assemblies of God believers, and ending with 26% of Catholics and 22% of Episcopalians. ^
But which due to the subject matter, while even in the last chapter of Acts Paul is healing.
I think some of the wholesale rejection of the Biblical sign gifts is due to the desire to control, and such prefer that the supernatural gifts were not in Scripture, and imagine the church did not need such for its scope of establishment, and does not now.
As soon as a miracle is over we're asking God for the next one. Miracles are overrated. An adulteress generation seeks after miracles. Instead we are told to simply trust God's Word. God has a plan for our welfare and not for evil, to give us a future and a hope. We should trust His plan.
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