Cessationist? Continuationist? Complicated.
For those unfamiliar, the debate is around the expression of certain obviously supernatural gifts and workings of God in the modern church. Are there modern prophets and apostles? Is there ongoing, authoritative revelation from God? Should tongues-speaking be a part of our regular experience in worship? I've spent time in churches all across this spectrum. I've had people pray in tongues over me and others insist that must have been a demon. I often get asked about it as a pastor, and I try to give helpful counsel. But I don't like the parameters I'm usually asked to operate within.
Even defining the terms of the debate is messy. There are absolute cessationists (although they’re rare) who hold God never does miracles today. There are others (the more common view) that are perfectly fine with miracles, but who hold that gifts likes healing and tongues are no longer operative, and still others (who I don’t think should be called cessationists at all) who hold that they might still be operative, but only in mission fields without established churches.
Likewise, what does it mean to be a continuationist? Pentecostals insist that not only is tongues-speaking for today but that it is essential for Christian maturity and the proof of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. New Apostolic charismatics argue we are in an age of revival where God is commissioning new apostles to rival Paul and Peter, but oddly, agree with cessationists that it is this apostolic link that explains miraculous gifts. Then there are the many theoretically-charismatic churches who will insist all gifts are for today but have never actually, you know, experienced them.
Why the mess? I think it’s because we’ve tried to boil the whole debate down to one question: are miracles/miraculous gifts for today? I instead want to complicate the discussion in two ways, both of which will hopefully help shed some light.
The First Complication: Not Just One Question
In the time I spent around Pentecostal and Charismatic believers, here’s what I’ve noticed. There are really three claims that together make up their view of gifts and supernatural occurrences. 1) They believe these things still happen today, 2) they believe these things should happen with the same frequency we see in the early chapters of Acts, and 3) they believe the reason many churches don’t experience them with this frequency is failure of faith or some other manifestation of sin (i.e. “quenching the Spirit,” “putting God in a box.”)
The theological debates around continuationism and cessationism are about question 1. That’s fine as far as it goes, but I think it is actually the least important and helpful debate to be had, at least in terms of ordinary Christian experience. I instead think discussing the other two questions, those of frequency and failure, often bears more fruit.
Let’s first consider frequency. Based largely on misapplying one passage (John 14:12, which is not about miracles but ministry as a whole), many Christians assume the baseline state for the church as Jesus intends is one where supernatural signs and wonders are happening at least as often as they were in the ministry of Christ and the early chapters of Acts. But is that justified?
First, let’s note something about the Old Testament and obvious supernatural signs. While there are plenty of miraculous events in the Old Testament, they tend to cluster around specific moments in redemptive history—most notably the Exodus and the beginning of the prophetic missions of Elijah and Elisha. Moses calls down plagues, promises manna, draws water from a rock, and parts an ocean. After his death we see such signs linger through the beginning of the conquest of Canaan, but by the time it is completed, we see much more ordinary providence at work than supernatural intervention.
I would suggest the same thing seems true in the New Testament. Jesus represents the climax of God’s work of redemption, and his ministry looks like Moses or Elijah turned up to eleven. In the early chapters of Acts, we see numerous obvious supernatural testimonies to the ministry of apostles, Jesus’s appointed witnesses. Peter’s shadow heals, prison doors keep coming open, and signs and wonders seem commonplace. As Acts progresses, these events become less frequent (see the chart below). That doesn’t mean they don’t happen, but Paul’s ministry in his final decade sure feels different than that of Peter immediately after Pentecost. Acts ends with people coming to Paul in prison in Rome to hear and discuss doctrine, not see signs and wonders.
And this pattern fits with the New Testament as a whole. The one epistle to discuss issues related to the charismatic/cessationist debate, 1 Corinthians, is one of the earliest of Paul’s letters. It is mentioned nowhere else and is never discussed as commonplace for believers.
So if we didn’t have a horse in the race and we were to carefully consider the shape of the New Testament canon, what would we expect to see as the apostolic age closes? It would be a world where God can and does still move in remarkable and supernatural ways, but that those movements will be rare, especially in places where the church is established. Instead of saying “God never works supernaturally” or “God constantly works supernaturally,” I think the right conclusion from Scripture is “God sometimes works supernaturally, but it is not ordinary, and we shouldn’t expect it to be.”
This clarification about frequency is important because of how it links to the third question, about the failure of such signs to manifest in our communities. Expectation of the miraculous becomes destructive when we blame ourselves or others when it doesn’t occur. If God has promised to regularly work in this way, the only explanation for why he isn’t must be us, some failure of faith or fidelity on our part. I know many Christians who find themselves enormously discouraged in their faiths from this belief. I also know a few who have fabricated supernatural stories to deal with the doubt they feel. But these emotional struggles are unnecessary if we are open to such workings but expect them to be rare. There is simply no failure to explain.
The Second Complication: What Even Are The Gifts?
Let’s complicate the debate even further. Behind the cessationist/continuationist argument is often a strange agreement about the nature of the gifts in question, a level of agreement I don’t think I share.
I first noticed this years ago with tongues-speaking. What is it, actually? In Acts 2, tongues accompany the initial coming of the Holy Spirit and function as missionary languages, communicating across cultural barriers to make the gospel known. In Acts 10 and 19, tongues accompany the initial coming of the Holy Spirit to Gentiles and disciples of John the Baptist, but there is no indication they are missionary languages. Instead, they function as signs of inclusion of outsiders to the believers. In 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, tongues are an ongoing gift some exercise in the church, are definitely not being used as missionary languages (since they require an interpreter), and aren’t (according to Paul) benefitting anybody except the person talking.
So what actually is the gift of tongues? Which one of those three defines the gift? Well, what if they all do? There are multiple lists of spiritual gifts in the New Testament, and they are all substantially different. Those differences highlight the fact that gifts aren’t rigid categories but rather ways of summing up the underlying reality that God is building up His church by His Spirit, and that we are a diverse group of people who get to be a part of that in diverse ways.
Let me keep complicating the discussion. One possibility I’ve become quite open to is that Scripture talks about multiple gifts using analogous language differentiated by role.
A case in point is prophecy. Again, what is it? Is prophecy inerrant, authoritative revelation to be received unquestioningly? Is it a supernatural insight into something which should nonetheless be tested and examined? Is it a gifting of applying God’s revelation to peoples’ lives?
What if it can mean all of these things, based on who is doing it? There is an underlying structure to God’s working in the New Testament. At the top is Jesus, the head of all things. Beneath him are the apostles and prophets, those immediately commissioned by God as His witnesses and the foundation of the church. Beneath them are the commissioned leaders we find appointed for the continuing church—evangelists and teachers, elders and deacons. They have a special responsibility within the body as a whole. And lastly there are all believers. All of us are ministers of Christ, a kingdom of priests, a set-apart nation.
What is prophecy? In Scripture, it means communicating God’s truth to God’s people. But that looks different depending on who is doing the communicating. Jesus is a prophet—indeed, the Prophet. He is God’s Word itself made flesh. When He speaks, creation itself moves. The apostles are also prophets, which is especially expressed in their authority over the formation of Scripture. They have an authority to speak on behalf of God, just like their Old Testament prophetic forebears. Within the leadership of the church, preachers and teachers also deliver God’s Word, but now the locus of authority rests with that apostolic word and the task is to safeguard the deposit entrusted to us. Indeed, historically “prophesying” was used by Christians to talk about the act of preaching. And lastly, we are all called to speak the truth in love to one another—to prophetically speak into each others’ lives.
The danger both for continuationists and cessationists is that, by not acknowledging that complexity, we oversimplify questions or arrive at unbiblical assumptions. I often feel like my Pentecostal friend and my John-Macarthur-obsessed one are equally in danger of putting things in boxes.
Is the gift of prophesy for today? Well, if by prophesy you mean what John does when he writes his gospel, absolutely not. If you mean what I do on Sunday when I open John’s gospel and seek to apply it to my congregation, then sure. Are tongues for the modern church? Well, what do you mean by tongues? Authoritative revelation in a foreign language? (No.) Ecstatic, spirit-filled utterances in prayer? (Maybe.) A gift with translation and cross-cultural ministry? (Absolutely.)
So what do we say, after all of that? For me, it simply means that instead of trying to have all the answers, I sort things into a few broad categories. There are certain things I am absolutely against (modern apostles, ongoing revelation). There are also things I am deeply skeptical of (anyone claiming regular, normalized supernatural events in their ministry). However, there are lots of other things I am open to (various expressions of God’s moving and gifting). And there are some things I am convinced of, and they are the most important things—that Jesus Christ is building up His church, that every believer is beautifully gifted by the Holy Spirit to be a part of that, and that God is doing it both through the miraculous and, even more importantly, through the mundane.