Posted on 03/21/2018 8:45:09 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Of all the theological squabbles that have plagued evangelical Christianity over the years, especially in the West, a particularly profound division centers on the power of the Holy Spirit and the ways in which He is at work today.
Charismatics and noncharismatics who spoke with The Christian Post all concurred that steps can be taken toward mending this division, even as differences remain.
Those who believe that the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit — such as prophecy, tongues, interpretation of tongues, the working of miracles, and the others listed in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 — have continued to this day, called continuationism, are often associated with Pentecostalism or the "charismatic movement," as it is often called.
Some say that at long last, Pentecostals and charismatics are finally maturing theologically, after many years of being regarded as Bible-lite emotionalists, and that the growing presence of the supernatural in Christian churches is part of a great, worldwide move of God's Spirit that is in keeping with the witness of Scripture.
Other believers are just beginning to explore the supernatural more deliberately, admitting that while they believe in the continuation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit they don't actively use them. Yet others continue to think such gifts were only intended for a specific time in biblical history and are no longer operational, a view known as cessationism.
Grappling With the 'Sufficiency of Scripture'
For the perspective of one such cessationist, CP reached out to Eric Bargerhuff, a professor of theology at Trinity College in Florida and author of the book, The Most Misused Stories in The Bible: Surprising Ways Popular Bible Stories Are Misunderstood.
Despite the deep divide in the Body of Christ over this topic, Bargerhuff said he believes some progress can be made when asked how continuationists and cessationists might get over their differences, particularly when their beliefs have significant implications for what ministry looks like.
Finding a mutually understood language is critical, he says.
"Often times the debate is fueled by people who are talking past each other by using common terminology with differing definitions," explains Bargerhuff, a Reformed Baptist who studied under Reformed theologian Wayne Grudem, a continuationist.
"Similarly, others may be saying the same thing but are using different phrases. For example, one may say 'supernatural gifts of knowledge,' whereas someone else may use the idea of 'the gift of discernment,' though they are intending to say the same thing."
Bargerhuff further stressed that the conversation can be assisted by each side discussing what they mean by "sufficiency of Scripture," and the role that experience has in the entire debate. He said he's often heard people say they used to believe something about God's Word until they had a particular experience and then read that experience back into the Scriptures to justify its validity.
"The role of experience must be clearly defined and put in its proper place. Scripture interprets experience, not the other way around," he said.
Bargerhuff added that extremes on either side are unhealthy, such as when continuationists present themselves as "more spiritual" or at the very least "a higher class of Christian" than those who have not experienced the same things they claim to have experienced; or by contrast, when cessationists minimize the "affectionate side of Christianity" and make it "into an academic, cold, intellectual exercise."
"Therefore, mutual humility, an agreed upon vocabulary, a commitment to the centrality of the Gospel and first order doctrines, a willingness to test our convictions and experiences through the sound exegetical practices, and a deep commitment to unity are key components of working together," he said.
"It is very possible that our differences may continue to keep some Christians from working intimately together on some ministry projects, but the overall ability to agree together on the essentials of the faith must be a stronger chord that keeps us together on mission."
When Pentecostals, Charismatics Fail
Michael Brown, a messianic Jewish scholar, charismatic theologian and host of the Line of Fire radio program, told CP that "the charismatic movement has done a poor job of policing itself. There's really no question about that."
"And so our critics have had a field day."
But those critics have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, he insists, noting that whenever God restores something important to the Church, such as the doctrine of justification in Martin Luther's day — which was not a new revelation but a truth that had been buried and lost under many layers of tradition — such recoveries are never smooth transitions.
Brown, who's also the author of the upcoming book, Playing with Holy Fire: A Wake-Up Call to the Pentecostal-Charismatic Church, where he chastises Pentecostal and charismatic churches for their spiritual gullibility, sexual sin in leadership, misuse of finances, doctrinal error, personal flakiness, and misuse of "prophetic" utterances, even as he maintains that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are for today.
"If you look through Church history in the centuries before that there was still prophecy, there were still healings, there were people being delivered from demons. So this whole idea that it all stopped at a certain point, be it the death of the Apostles or the completion of the canon [of Scripture], is a complete historical fiction," Brown said, referencing Asbury scholar Craig Keener's two-volume work, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, in which Keener highlights how rationalist philosophy influenced subsequent generations of Christians regarding the supernatural.
He explained that Augustine once believed that the death of the last Apostle meant the end of miracles but ultimately came to reject that view.
"It is true that with Augustine that the gifts of the Spirit were normative in New Testament times and then in less than a two-year period they recorded more than 70 miraculous healings and he said there were miracles just like they saw in the New Testament. So in City of God, his definitive work, he absolutely reiterates those things," Brown said.
"As God continues to do what He has always done but in greater intensity and in measure in these days then we're recognizing that, OK, the Spirit continues to do these things based on Scripture. And to me, that's always the test: 1) look at the Word, 2) go from the Word to the experience and then look at history, but always first and foremost look at the Word," Brown said.
He went on to stress that what is key is that followers of Jesus believe in "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not Father, Son, and Holy Bible."
"And when we speak of the sufficiency of Scripture we don't mean that we have a relationship with the Bible. We mean that God's Word is His one and only Word — that there is only one Bible and that nothing else can be called Scripture or claim to be the Word of God for all people."
Yet that Word does not tell us every experience we will or will not have, or how you meet with God in personal prayer, Brown said.
"What if you feel your heart burning?" he asked, referencing Cleopas and the words said on the road of Emmaus in Luke 24.
The questions that should be asked when engaging spiritual experiences, Brown insists, are, 'Is it God or not?' Is it contrary to Scripture? Is it in harmony with the larger testimony of Scripture? What kind of fruit does it bear?"
"So we use the creedal test and the moral test — what does it teach and what kind of fruit does it produce — and based on that we come to our respective conclusions," he explained.
Addressing Excesses, Serving the Whole Church
Author Jennifer Eivaz, whom CP interviewed in November about her book, Seeing the Supernatural: How to Sense, Discern and Battle in the Spiritual Realm, concurs that it's incumbent on believers who do believe in the continuation of the gifts and operate in them to recognize the places where theological messes have been made, and have the self-awareness and humility to repent.
"There have always been excesses with every movement [of the Spirit]," Eivaz said, mentioning the Azusa Street revival in 1906, long considered the birth of Pentecostalism in United States, where the gift of prophecy was notoriously abused.
"But we have to have a lot of humility; we have to be willing to say we're sorry," when people have been wounded by those excesses, she added.
When it comes to the gifts of the Spirit, remaining teachable and child-like is key, and maturity comes when you think about people, knowing their hearts and how they feel when we do mess up, "because we will mess up," she said.
Eivaz is based in Turlock, California, and her city is packed with churches, many of which in the past few decades were hostile to all things charismatic, she noted. But as her church, Harvest Christian Center — a "charismatic renewal" congregation she calls it — has sown into the city and served faithfully, relationships have been built and trust has been gained where fear once reigned. Today, she and her husband teach and equip spritually hungry Christians who hail from a variety of denominations how to move in the gifts of the Spirit with integrity.
She emphasizes that ministering in the supernatural is fundamentally about pointing people to Jesus, not the gifts themselves.Catholics, Protestants
"And we do not ask them to come to our church, we're not trying to offload anybody or tell them 'If you don't have the 'fire' of God in your church you should not be there.' We don't say that. I don't agree with that at all."
She made a point to mention that lately she has been studying the impact of stoicism on how Christians interact with God. When encumbered with a stoic mindset, spiritual experiences where people feel things tangibly, even feeling something as good and pure as God's love, are immediately viewed as suspect and unreasonable, and therefore should not be trusted. Such an approach shuts down the pathway to how the Holy Spirit might be communicating with people, she said.
"Acts Chapter 2 says that we are going to prophesy and going to have dreams. In other words, you get a set of eyes from the Holy Spirit that are distinctly spiritual. But too often people want to limit what you are and are not allowed to see according to their own comfort level."
Churches will often shut down supernatural-oriented themes because they have a very narrow view of how they think God can and should speak, she went on to say; the flip side is that some charismatics regrettably lack the discernment necessary to know when something is indeed outside of biblical boundaries.
'Functional Cessationists' Start Exploring the Supernatural
Meanwhile, the Reformed and other camps are somewhat divided on the issue. While some are admitting that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are indeed for today, they do not really know what to do about it practically and want to learn more.
Writing on the popular website Desiring God in October, Jason Meyer, pastor for preaching and vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church and associate professor of Preaching at Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minneapolis, outlined his "Confessions of Functional Cessationist." While he believes theoretically that the Holy Spirit's gifts have continued to the present, a "gap between theory and practice pricks my conscience."
Meyer argued that the passage most often employed by cessationists in defense of their stance, 1 Corinthians 13:8-10, which speaks of tongues, prophecies, and knowledge passing away "when the perfect comes" is a reference to the return of Christ, not the closing of the biblical canon.
"I have said things like 'I am open, but cautious' when it comes to sign gifts like prophecy, tongues, and interpretation of tongues. That statement about caution rightly stresses the need to "test everything" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Every experience must be examined by the searchlight of Scripture," he wrote.
But instead of "open, but cautious," Meyer noted that all too often he is "open, but overly suspicious," and has discovered that Scripture also tests our attitudes in addition to experiences.
"It was a little shocking to see how much my attitude is actually rebuked by Scripture. Paul commands Christians, 'Earnestly desire the spiritual gifts' (1 Corinthians 14:1). He characterizes the Corinthians as 'eager for manifestations of the Spirit.'"
Meyer tells his cessationist friends that a day is coming when he, too, will be a cessationist: "the second coming."
Yet something else might be driving greater cooperation and conversation between continuationists and cessationists.
Brown told CP that the increasing visibility and overt presence of the demonic in popular culture will precipitate an even greater awareness of the reality of the spiritual realm. He has personally met people who were not even Christians who, after encountering the overwhelming darkness of the occult, said it was so intense and devastating they knew there had to be a God.
"But I also find it interesting that when [Christian] people begin experiencing these powerful demonic strongholds, and people have to deal with it in real life, they come to the charismatics for help."
Such people often soon reconsider their cessationist views, he said, maintaining that Pentecostals have matured significantly in recent decades.
"And if you go back 50 years, we didn't have the wealth of fine biblical scholars, theologians, apologists, and philosophers, who today, are charismatic."
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“Jewish people” are not all that ancient. Judaism came into being in the second temple period, after the Macabee revolt, but they never identified as “Jewish” until the term was created in Europe centuries later.
Most genetic Hebrews are definitely not “Jews.”
My apology that the link did not work, so here is different one with better explanation than I can give at bottom.
There is difference between “Gift of Tongues’, which must have an ‘Interpretation of Tongues’, and is for the CHURCH BODY...AND the prayer language of tongues, which is private prayer of the Holy Spirit (See Ephesians CH 6), to use ‘when we do not know how to pray as we ought’...it is HS praying thru us a perfect prayer for a situation.
https://www.bible-knowledge.com/different-kinds-of-tongues/
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>> “I think that’s a bit of an assumption.” <<
No kidding!
Most “tongue speakers” are plain charletans, possibly hosting demons.
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As mentioned above, the tongues spoken on the Day of Pentecost were human. There are also angelic tongues. We need to always err on the side of giving the benefit of the doubt. The alternative is unthinkable.
Here is my personal story. I was raised in a hardline cessationist denomination. I bought that line lock, stock and barrel.
When I was a junior in high school my best friend received the gift of a tongue. She demonstrated it for me, and it didn’t sound much more sophisticated than your ticka ticka version.
I told her I wanted to meet the pastor who had persuaded her she had a tongue. I was a young firebrand, and loaded for bear.
We went to the assembly. There were between 30 and 40 people in attendance. The pastor gave a short message, then they ALL started babbling in tongues at the same time.
My friend had given the pastor a heads up. [I.e.: she’d told him I was a cessationist, and was going to set him straight.] He strolled up to me and said, “Do you have any questions for me?”
How can I describe what happened next? I ***literally*** felt the Holy Spirit close off my faculty for speech. It was a physical sensation, and I didn’t need anyone to tell me what had happened; I KNEW. The Holy Spirit Himself had simply removed my capacity to speak.
I had rehearsed my entire argument, but that was useless. I couldn’t talk. But the pastor was looking at me, waiting patiently.
Finally I uttered a single word: “No.” The Spirit enabled me to say it, but that was all.
I left the room quickly. It was dark outside and the building was located in a dangerous part of town. Nevertheless, I walked for many blocks. The experience had been terrifying yet also awe-inspiring. It took quite a while to process it.
The knowledge part I had picked up on instantly. Namely, that those tongues were real gifts of the Spirit, and I was not to speak a word against them.
What took longer was grasping the fact that the Holy Spirit had touched me directly. I could write 5,000 words, and still come nowhere close to imparting what that was like. The short, literal version is that it was like nothing on earth. Direct contact with the supernatural/Divine is simply stunning. It changes you forever in an instant. To this day I remember both the fear and something else—something uplifting. The Holy Spirit didn’t shut off my speech to harm or punish me, but to save me. He, in that instant, prevented me from speaking a word against Him.
I know it doesn’t translate. There’s simply no way to convey in words an experience like that. Really all I can say is this: nothing on earth could induce me to say a word against tongues. Nothing. God taught me a dramatic, transcendent lesson, and it’s the kind you only have to learn once. Please believe me when I assure you, nothing, NOTHING is worth the risk of deriding a spiritual gift. If you’re 99% convinced it’s fake and 1% in doubt, side with the doubt. You’ll be eternally glad you did.
Romans 8:26-27 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
This is one of the most commonly misused verses to support the nonsense that passes for praying in tongues.
Scripture does NOT mention it any other time than once when Paul mentions himself doing it.
There is no reference as to what it is and how it is the be done.
And those verse say that the Spirit intercedes with groans TOO DEEP FOR WORDS TO EXPRESS.
Presuming that the gift of tongues is an actual language, that verse actually precludes it.
If the groanings are too deep for words, and tongues is words, then the groaning of the Holy Spirit cannot be uttered even in a *tongue*.
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Lots of “post scriptural” lore sneaks in.
Wise to give it a wide berth when possible.
A common trait among cults is an attempt to deny the Jewish people’s identity and future.
PS: I have no gift of tongues and have never had one. But again, no power on earth could induce me to speak against them. The Spirit showed me infinite mercy once. With His help, there will be no second time.
FWIW, I am NOT a cessationist, and I am not in any hurry to accuse someone who is speaking in tongues that they are doing it by a demonic source.
However, much teaching about it is wrong and I have been in meetings where someone started speaking in tongues and I got a really bad feeling about it, as did someone else in the same meeting.
Mostly I reserve judgment on the personal level.
However, the guy that I worked with who said that anyone who spoke in tongues was demon possessed is the one who crossed that line.
BTW, I have also been filled with the Holy Spirit and did NOT speak in tongues either, so I can certainly understand the difficulty in explaining the experience.
And yet, I’ve run into this as well, that the charismatics do not and will not accept that I have been really filled with the Holy Spirit simply because tongues did not accompany it.
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You are confused!
Judaism’s “future” as declared by Yeshua is hellfire. Judaism is the totally man made ‘religion’ of the Pharisees. It is the following of their false law of commandments and ordinances that defied the covenant in Torah that Yeshua came to restore.
Did you mean Israel?
Israel is Yeshua’s Kehillah. This is the bride, from the time of Adam to the last Trump at the end of the trib. (often mistakenly called “the church.)
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I have no idea what that means?
There are scripture references in the link, and written in easy to understand english. Also original Biblical text reference included.
There is ‘no lore’ in the Baptism of Holy Spirit.
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You’ve nailed it, but don’t expect broad acceptance.
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The lore is the stretching of the giving of the Holy Spirit at Shavuot at Solomon’s Porch on the temple mount (the “upper room”) in the presence of thousands of on-lookers, to the giving of the Holy Spirit to individual believers subsequent thereto, up to the present.
Apples and Oranges for sure.
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Is your sect called “A Rood Awakening?”
Thank you for those replies. Just to be clear, this was *not* a case of being filled with the Spirit. It was much more like what happened to Zacharias in the temple. He entered with an unimpeded ability to speak, and exited mute. My muteness was shorter lived, and as I said, after a certain passage of time I did manage to say, ‘no’. [That being, imo, a gift/indulgence from God, rather than the sudden restoration of speech per se.]
However, what I recall most is the sensation of being touched inside. There was a physical feeling in my throat/vocal chord region. It was very sudden and powerful. As I think back over it now, one word keeps surfacing: indescribable. It was simply indescribable.
I would never, ever want to experience it again. I think of Isaiah, who cried out, ‘Woe is me.’ I can relate. It was an instant that literally bridged the divide between our finite existence and the Infinite. Very awe-inducing, and very thought provoking. The foremost thought in my mind then and now being that I never again want to come that close to speaking a word against the Spirit.
Metmom, idk where your name went, but post 77 was meant for you.
:)
YES!
And it’s a cult, not a sect.
Rood is not even a Christian but a guy playing dress up as a rabbi.
That interpretation is “Wrong”. Intercessors are called to a deeper prayer in the Spirit as explained by that reference to groaning and weeping, and is the HS praying through that individual to accomplish his purpose... Miracles have come from that type of prayer.
I referenced not Romans but Ephesians 6: “Praying in the Spirit is praying in tongues.” See below:
Ephesians 6:18 18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the LORD’s people.
I read a book in 1980s called “Nine O’clock in Morning’ by Episcopal? Priest: Dennis Bennett. It can still be bought, and his experience is priceless/biblical.
I will NOT argue about Scripture, as one can pray asking the HS to “teach them the deep things of God”- See below:
John 14:26 26 But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.
ALSO, Jesus said in Luke 11:11
11 If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? 12Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? 13If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? UNQUOTE
At the time Jesus was casting out spirit for man who could not speak...’ONE OF NINE GIFTS of the Spirit’
All Christians are equal in God’s eyes, whether they are filled with Holy Spirit w Speaking in tongues, and gifts of the Holy Spirit or NOT. All that is required is to believe in Jesus/be Baptized. We go to Heaven by Grace, not Works!
I’ve been an Intecessor/Prayer Warrior for 37 years (God got me young), and witnessed miracles unprecedented. There is nothing that could convince me the POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT doesn’t do, what scripture says HE will do! Charismatics in Catholic Church, Pentecostals in Protestant, Church of God, Assemblies of God, or whatever denomination have the same Holy Spirit and Gifts operating in their meetings.
Thanks for comment, prayers UP!
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