Spiritual Gifts

Before the dispute, the data. The New Testament gives five significant lists of gifts and they do not match. Romans 12:6-8 names prophecy, serving, teaching, encouraging, giving, leading and showing mercy. 1 Corinthians 12:8-10 names the message of wisdom, the message of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, the working of miracles, prophecy, distinguishing between spirits, various tongues and the interpretation of tongues. 1 Corinthians 12:28-30 has a different set in a numbered order, apostles, prophets, teachers, then workers of miracles, gifts of healing, helping, administration, various tongues. Ephesians 4:11 names apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers (the Greek word behind pastors is poimenas, shepherds), and it names people rather than abilities. 1 Peter 4:10-11 collapses the whole subject into two categories, speaking and serving.

Now notice what nobody in the argument disputes. No single item appears in all five. The lists overlap without agreeing, they are different lengths, they use different categories, and two of them include items that sound nothing like a miracle. Hospitality is a gift. Giving is a gift. Administration is a gift. Mercy is a gift. Any doctrine of spiritual gifts built only from 1 Corinthians 12 has quietly dropped more than half the evidence.

The inference both sides draw from this is the same, and it is worth stating plainly before the disagreement begins: the lists are illustrative rather than exhaustive, and they are not a taxonomy. Paul is not classifying; he is giving examples of a single thing, which the anchor verse names. To each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. The gift is the Spirit manifesting himself through a person for somebody else's benefit, and what the lists do is show the range.

Three further observations about the whole subject, all of them common ground. First, the purpose clause is repeated and is never about the person exercising the gift: for the common good in 12:7, that the church may be edified in 14:5 and built up in 14:12 and 14:26, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God in 1 Peter 4:10. Second, the distribution is sovereign. The Spirit apportions to each one as he determines, 12:11, and the seven rhetorical questions of 12:29-30 expect the answer no, so uniformity was never the goal. Third, and this is the argument of chapter 13, gifts are not evidence of spiritual maturity. The Corinthians do not lack any spiritual gift, 1:7, and they are also divided, litigious, tolerant of incest and disorderly at the Lord's table. Whatever the gifts prove, they do not prove that.

That common ground is larger than the dispute, and a student who learns it will already be more useful than most participants in the argument. What follows is the disagreement, and it is real, longstanding, and held by careful people on both sides who have read each other.

Cessationism is the position that the revelatory and miraculous gifts, chiefly apostleship, prophecy, tongues, and the working of miracles and healings as gifts residing in persons, were given for the founding of the church and ceased with the apostolic age, while the gifts of teaching, service, mercy, giving, leadership and the rest continue. Almost no cessationist holds that God no longer heals or acts miraculously in answer to prayer. The claim is about gifts distributed to persons, not about the power of God, and an argument that attacks the second has missed the position.

The first argument is from the foundation. Ephesians 2:20 says the household of God is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. A foundation is laid once and is not relaid; a building with a permanent foundation crew is a building that is never finished. If the apostles and prophets are foundational by Paul's own image, then the offices belong to the founding and not to the maintenance of the church. This is the argument Richard Gaffin presses in Perspectives on Pentecost and O. Palmer Robertson in The Final Word, and it does not depend on any reading of 1 Corinthians 13. The apostolate itself is conceded to have closed by nearly everyone, and Acts 1:21-22 and 1 Corinthians 9:1 give the reason: an apostle must have seen the risen Lord. Cessationists ask what principle closes the apostolate and leaves the prophets who are paired with them in the same sentence.

The second argument is from attestation. Hebrews 2:3-4 says the salvation first announced by the Lord was confirmed to us by those who heard him and affirmed by God through signs, wonders, various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit. 2 Corinthians 12:12 calls signs, wonders and miracles the marks of a true apostle. Miracles in scripture do not fall evenly across the centuries; they cluster at three or four points, Moses and the exodus, Elijah and Elisha, Christ, and the apostles, and each cluster accompanies a new deposit of revelation. On this reading the miraculous is not the normal weather of the people of God but the lightning that accompanies God speaking afresh. When the speaking is complete the lightning stops, and this is B. B. Warfield's argument in Counterfeit Miracles, the lectures he gave in 1917 and published in 1918, which cessationists still treat as the fullest statement of the historical case.

The third argument is from sufficiency. Hebrews 1:1-2 contrasts the many past occasions and different ways in which God spoke through the prophets with his speaking in these last days by his Son. Jude 3 speaks of the faith entrusted once for all to the saints. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says all scripture is God-breathed, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work. The Westminster Confession states the conclusion in its opening paragraph, that God's former ways of revealing his will to his people are now ceased, and in 1.6 that nothing is to be added to scripture whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men. The argument is a dilemma: a word that God genuinely speaks today either carries his authority, in which case it is functionally scripture and the canon is not closed, or it does not, in which case calling it prophecy is a confusion with pastoral consequences. Cessationists point to what those consequences look like in practice, in congregations where a claimed word from God has been used to direct a marriage, a move or a medical decision.

The fourth argument is from 1 Corinthians 13:8-12 read carefully rather than triumphantly, and here the best cessationist scholarship concedes more than its popular version does. Gaffin, Robertson, Sinclair Ferguson and Thomas Schreiner all take the perfect of verse 10 to be the second coming, not the completed canon. Their argument from the passage is therefore narrower: Paul's point is that prophecy and tongues belong to the partial and provisional, that they are of a lower order than love and than the knowledge that is coming, and that a church which treats them as marks of arrival has misread their nature. The cessation of such provisional gifts before the end is then established, they argue, from the foundation argument and the attestation argument, and 13:8-12 supplies the category rather than the date. Notice that this is a more modest use of the text than the one many students have heard preached.

The historical argument runs alongside all four. The extraordinary gifts, cessationists say, are not merely unattested but conspicuously absent from the mainstream of church life after the first generation, and where they reappear, in Montanism in the late second century, they reappear attached to claims the church judged and rejected. Warfield's survey of the patristic and medieval material, and of the Roman Catholic, Irvingite and faith-cure claims of his own century, was designed to show that the evidence thins exactly where the theory predicts. Calvin had answered the demand that the Reformers produce miracles of their own in the prefatory address of the Institutes, on the ground that a doctrine which only confirms the already attested gospel needs no fresh attestation. The position is held today by Gaffin, Robertson, Ferguson and Schreiner, each of whom has written a book on the Holy Spirit or the gifts.

Continuationism is the position that all the gifts listed in the New Testament remain available to the church until Christ returns, that the apostolate in its foundational sense is a separate question and may well have closed, and that the normal posture of a congregation should be the one Paul commands: eagerly desire the greater gifts (12:31), test all things, do not forbid. Almost no continuationist holds that contemporary prophecy stands on a level with scripture. The claim is that the New Testament itself describes a gift that is weighed, and an argument that assumes prophecy must mean canonical scripture has missed the position.

The first argument is from the terminus Paul actually names. 1 Corinthians 13:8-12 says prophecies, tongues and knowledge will each come to an end (the BSB's three different verbs for this are discussed in section 4), and then fixes the moment: when the perfect comes, the partial passes away. Verse 12 defines it beyond reasonable dispute. Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. No Christian claims to know as he is known, or to see face to face, on this side of the resurrection. If Paul names a single terminus for prophecy, tongues and knowledge together, and that terminus is the parousia, then the burden lies on anyone who wishes to remove two of the three earlier. D. A. Carson worked the passage at length in Showing the Spirit and concluded that the exegetical case for an earlier cessation cannot be sustained from this text, and Gordon Fee argued the same in his commentary on 1 Corinthians and in God's Empowering Presence.

The second argument is from the foundation text read in its own letter. Ephesians 2:20 is not the only place Paul pairs apostles and prophets. Ephesians 3:5 says the mystery has now been revealed by the Spirit to God's holy apostles and prophets, which are New Testament prophets, not Old Testament ones. Ephesians 4:11 lists apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers, and 4:13 gives them a stated duration: until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, as we mature to the full measure of the stature of Christ. That is plainly not the first century. Wayne Grudem argues in addition that the Greek construction in 2:20 most likely refers to one group, the apostles who are also prophets, so that the verse restricts nothing about ordinary congregational prophets. Continuationists ask why the same list that includes evangelists, pastors and teachers, which nobody thinks ceased, should be split in half at a point the text does not mark.

The third argument is from the shape of Acts and the letters. Signs are not confined to apostles. Stephen, one of the seven, performs great wonders and signs, Acts 6:8. Philip's ministry in Samaria includes unclean spirits coming out and the paralysed and lame being healed, Acts 8:6-7. Ananias, described only as a disciple at Damascus, lays hands on Saul and his sight is restored. Galatians 3:5 asks the Galatians whether God lavishes his Spirit on them and works miracles among them because they practice the law or because they hear and believe, which assumes miracles were then occurring in ordinary Galatian congregations. James 5:14-16 instructs any sick person in any church to call the elders. And 1 Corinthians 12 to 14 is not a description of an apostolic ministry but a set of standing instructions for the ordering of a local church meeting, which is an odd thing to give a congregation about practices due to expire. Craig Keener assembles the wider historical and contemporary evidence at length in the two volumes of Miracles.

The fourth argument concerns sufficiency, and it is a distinction rather than a denial. Continuationists affirm the closed canon and the sufficiency of scripture as the rule of faith and life. What they deny is that sufficiency entails divine silence, and they argue that the New Testament itself supplies the category: 1 Corinthians 14:29 says two or three prophets should speak and the others should weigh carefully what is said, and 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21 says do not extinguish the Spirit, do not treat prophecies with contempt, but test all things and hold fast to what is good. A word that must be weighed and may be partly discarded is by definition not being treated as scripture by the apostle who commands the weighing. Max Turner and Sam Storms both press the point that the burden of proof sits with the reading which makes Paul's instructions about testing unintelligible.

The fifth argument is from the standing commands, which continuationists regard as the most practically decisive and the least answered. 1 Corinthians 14:1 says earnestly pursue love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy. 14:39 says be eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. 1 Thessalonians 5:20 says do not treat prophecies with contempt. These are apostolic imperatives addressed to congregations, not descriptions, and no New Testament text withdraws them. The continuationist asks what warrant a teacher has for instructing a church to do the opposite of what the text instructs it to do, and holds that a cumulative theological inference, however respectable, is a thin basis for reversing a plain command.

First the weakness continuationists have to face, stated by their opponents at full strength. It is the gap between the New Testament phenomena and what is commonly claimed. The healings in the Gospels and Acts are immediate, public, complete, done on organic and congenital conditions and on strangers, and include the dead raised; they are not a raised percentage of recoveries among people who were going to get better. The prophecy in Acts is specific and verifiable. Much of what is now offered under these names is neither, and the honest writers on that side concede it: Grudem, Storms and Keener all write at length about abuse, manipulation, false claims and the pastoral damage done by unweighed words, and Carson, who does not take the label, writes the same way. Related to this is a second problem. If contemporary prophecy may be partly mistaken, is it the same gift the New Testament names, given that scripture nowhere calls prophecy fallible and Deuteronomy 18:20-22 makes accuracy the test of a prophet? Grudem's answer, that the New Testament describes a congregational prophecy of lower authority than the Old Testament office or the apostolic word, is the standard continuationist move and it is contested from both directions, by cessationists who deny the two tiers exist and by continuationists who think New Testament prophecy was authoritative and that the problem lies elsewhere.

Now the weakness cessationists have to face, stated by their opponents at full strength. No text of scripture says that any gift will cease before the return of Christ. The position is a cumulative inference from the purpose of miracles, the foundational role of the apostolate and the closure of the canon, every step of which is a theological judgement rather than a statement the Bible makes, and its own best scholars concede that the one passage which does discuss cessation puts the terminus at the second coming. Alongside this is the historical problem. Irenaeus, writing around 180 in Against Heresies 2.32.4, says that in his own time people in the church cast out demons, foretell things, heal the sick and that the dead have even been raised. Augustine wrote early in his career, in On True Religion, that miracles were no longer permitted to continue; he then catalogued contemporary miracles at Hippo and elsewhere in City of God 22.8 and corrected his earlier statement in the Retractations. The evidence does not thin as cleanly as the theory predicts, and the cessationist has to argue about the reliability of the reports rather than about their absence. There is a third pressure. No creed or confession of the church before the Reformation era teaches cessation, so the appeal to the consent of the whole church that supports other doctrines in this module is not available for this one.

Each side has also given up an argument it once leaned on, and knowing which is a good test of whether you are reading the current literature or repeating an old tract. The cessationist side has largely abandoned two. The first is the claim that the perfect in 1 Corinthians 13:10 is the completed New Testament canon, a reading that requires the Corinthians to have been told about a book they had no way of anticipating and that makes verse 12 say we see God face to face when we finish reading; Gaffin, Robertson, Ferguson and Schreiner all reject it. The second is the argument from the middle voice of the verb in 13:8, that tongues will cease of themselves at some earlier point while prophecy and knowledge are passively abolished later; the middle and active forms of that verb are not reliably distinguished in Hellenistic Greek, the argument was answered in detail by Carson and others, and careful cessationists no longer use it. A student reading the BSB meets the argument on the page without being told. At 13:8 it prints prophecies, they will cease; tongues, they will be restrained; knowledge, it will be dismissed. The Greek has two verbs, not three: katargeo for prophecies and knowledge, and pauo, in a middle form, for tongues. The King James Version, which is public domain, prints they shall fail, they shall cease and it shall vanish away. Setting tongues apart in English is the very move the middle-voice argument made, so a cessationist who still wants that argument can point to the BSB for support. But restrained suggests a stopping imposed from outside, not a stopping of themselves, which is the opposite of what the middle-voice argument needs, and the BSB has no footnote at 13:8 to say why it chose the word. A continuationist will add that, however the three verbs are worded, it is verse 10 that fixes the terminus, when the perfect comes. The English cannot settle it; the Greek verbs and verse 10 are what to weigh.

The continuationist side has also abandoned two. The first is the original Pentecostal doctrine, taught by Charles Parham at the beginning of the movement, that tongues were given as real foreign languages so that missionaries could go out without language study; missionaries went out on that basis in the first years after 1906, found that it did not work, and the teaching was quietly dropped within the movement itself. The second is the broader claim that modern glossolalia can be shown to be identifiable human languages. The linguist William Samarin, who studied recorded samples across a range of groups and published Tongues of Men and Angels in 1972, concluded that glossolalia is not a natural human language, and careful continuationists now argue instead from 1 Corinthians 13:1 and 14:2 that the gift is not required to be one. A caution about the BSB at 14:2: it prints utters mysteries in the Spirit with a capital S, reading the Holy Spirit, while at 14:14-15 it prints my spirit with a small s, and at 14:16 its footnote offers Or in the Spirit for the phrase it prints as in spirit. Greek has no capitals. The King James Version prints in the spirit at 14:2, meaning the speaker's own spirit. Whether Paul means the Holy Spirit's enabling or the speaker's own spirit at prayer is open, and the capital letter does not decide it.

The framing of the whole argument should also be widened, because as posed it is a Protestant family quarrel. Neither Roman Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox theology has ever taught cessationism. Lumen Gentium 12 at the Second Vatican Council speaks of the Spirit distributing special graces among the faithful of every rank, directs that such charisms be received with thanksgiving, and reserves judgement on them to those who preside; the same constitution speaks at Lumen Gentium 4 of the hierarchical and charismatic gifts of the Spirit together. The Catholic process of canonization still requires attested miracles. Orthodox tradition has always assumed healings, prophecy and discernment in the lives of its saints and startsy, and would regard the question of whether such things have ceased as answered by the continuous experience of the church. Between them these communions account for well over half the Christians alive.

The middle positions are real and are not fence-sitting. The 1996 Zondervan volume Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? Four Views, edited by Wayne Grudem, set out four: cessationist, argued by Richard Gaffin; open but cautious, argued by Robert Saucy; third wave, argued by C. Samuel Storms; and Pentecostal and charismatic, argued by Douglas Oss. Open but cautious is the one most often misdescribed, so state it properly. Its holders find no convincing scriptural case for cessation and therefore will not forbid anything, and they also find that the New Testament's teaching on the extraordinary gifts is thinner and more qualified than either party's programme assumes, that many contemporary claims do not survive examination, and that the church's health does not depend on settling the question. They pray for the sick, do not seek tongues, do not organise ministries around the gifts, and decline to make the issue a test of fellowship. A second middle position is cessationism of degree, holding that the revelatory gifts closed with the canon while healings and miracles as God's free acts continue, which is roughly where Sinclair Ferguson stands.

Tongues. The New Testament describes the phenomenon twice in ways that are not obviously the same. In Acts 2 the hearers are the ones who understand: each one heard them speaking his own language, and Luke lists the nations. In 1 Corinthians 14 nobody understands. The speaker addresses God and not men, 14:2, edifies himself, 14:4, and must keep silent unless someone interprets, 14:27-28. Paul thanks God that he speaks in tongues more than all of them, 14:18, and in the next breath says that in church he would rather speak five coherent words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue, 14:19. Whether Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 describe one gift or two is disputed, and the dispute does not run along party lines: there are cessationists and continuationists on each side of it.

What the traditions do with the texts. Classical Pentecostals distinguish tongues as the initial evidence of baptism in the Spirit, available to all, from tongues as a gift for public use with interpretation, which 12:30 indicates not all have. Cessationists commonly read 14:20-22, with its quotation of Isaiah 28:11-12, as making tongues a sign of judgement on unbelieving Israel, discharged in the events of the first century; O. Palmer Robertson argued this case in detail. Continuationists reply that 14:39 issues a standing command not to forbid the practice and that a sign discharged in AD 70 sits oddly in a chapter regulating next Sunday's meeting. Both sides agree on 14:40, that everything must be done in a proper and orderly manner, and both agree that a meeting in which no one understands anything has failed by Paul's own standard.

Prophecy. The texts are more restrictive than either popular usage suggests. 1 Corinthians 14:29 says two or three prophets should speak and the others should weigh carefully what is said. 14:31 says you can all prophesy in turn so that everyone may be instructed and encouraged. 14:32 says the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets, which rules out the ecstatic defence that the speaker could not help himself. 14:3 gives the purpose: edification, encouragement and comfort. Acts gives examples, Agabus predicting a famine in Acts 11:28 and Paul's binding in Acts 21:10-11, and Philip's four unmarried daughters who prophesied in Acts 21:9.

The disputed point is the authority such speech carries. Grudem's proposal of two levels, an infallible prophecy belonging to the Old Testament prophets and the apostles and a fallible congregational prophecy that must be weighed, is the hinge of the modern argument. In its favour is the plain command to weigh, which makes no sense if the utterance is already God's unqualified word. Against it is the absence of any explicit New Testament distinction between two kinds of prophet, and the weakness of Grudem's main supporting example, which you can check for yourself in three verses. Agabus says at Acts 21:11 that the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the owner of the belt and hand him over to the Gentiles; at 21:33 it is the Roman commander who orders him bound with two chains; and at 28:17 Paul himself says he was taken prisoner in Jerusalem and handed over to the Romans. Grudem's critics take that to be a thin divergence, since the substance came true and Paul himself reports it in Agabus's own vocabulary. Grudem's reply is that a prophecy right in substance and wrong in its details is precisely what a lower-authority prophecy would look like, which is his whole point. Read the three verses and decide. What is not in dispute is that a congregation is commanded to test, that Deuteronomy 13 makes doctrinal fidelity a test as well as accuracy, and that 1 John 4:1 tells believers not to believe every spirit.

Healing. The gift is named twice, at 1 Corinthians 12:9 and 12:28, and in both places the Greek has two plurals, gifts of healings (the BSB prints gifts of healing, which hides the second plural), which is why a number of writers on both sides argue that scripture describes particular acts of healing given as occasion requires rather than a power lodged permanently in a person. Set alongside that the four texts the inquiry asked you to find: Epaphroditus nearly dies and Paul calls his recovery God's mercy rather than a healing he performed, Timothy is told to take a little wine for his stomach, Trophimus is left ill at Miletus, and Paul's own thorn is refused three times with an answer about grace and weakness. The apostolic age did not have healing on demand, and any teaching that makes continued illness a verdict on the sufferer's faith is contradicted by the New Testament before it is contradicted by anyone's theology.

What the traditions do here is instructive because it cuts across the argument of this lesson. James 5:14-16, with its elders, its oil and its prayer of faith, is the scriptural basis of the Catholic sacrament of the anointing of the sick and of the Orthodox sacrament of holy unction, both of which have been practised continuously and neither of which depends on the continuation of a charism of healing. Reformed and Lutheran churches that hold to cessation nonetheless pray for the sick, and the historic Reformed confessions contain nothing against it. Pentecostal and charismatic churches pray for healing expectantly and, in their more careful teaching, without promising outcomes. The practical distance between a cessationist congregation and a continuationist one praying for a sick member is often smaller than the printed positions suggest, and a student who has grasped that will do less damage than one who has learned only the arguments.

Close with what this lesson asks of you. Be able to state both cases from their own texts, name a real scholar on each side who has read the other, name the weakness your own side has to live with, and name the argument your side has given up. If you cannot do the last two for the position you hold, you are not yet in a position to hold it responsibly. And notice which of the two cases you found it harder to write out fairly, because that is the more useful piece of self-knowledge this module will give you.