Over the years, I've come across more than a few Christians who believe that they cannot "move" in spiritual gifts or who even reject their operation today altogether. By the word "move," I mean speaking in tongues, prophesying, and healing, among other things. Meeting such Christians and engaging in conversation with them about this is not an uncommon experience. Just yesterday, for example, someone asked me if I thought spiritual gifts had or had not ceased. In the light of how Christianity has changed in the last ten years alone, especially with the spread of Pentecostalism and Charismatic Christianity, portrayed, for example, in the films of Darren Wilson, "Finger of God," "Furious Love," "Father of Lights," "Holy Ghost," and "Holy Ghost Reborn," I've come to realize that much of their objection and doubt lie in the fact that they have never experienced the miraculous through their own actions. In other words, the real cause of misbelief, shrouded in a cloak called "reason," is not objectivity, but rather inexperience, suspicion, and especially fear. In the reading below, I came across a stunning resource that reveals that most Christians are in fact missing out. Pentecostalism and Charismatic Christianity is on the rise around the world; this is an indisputable fact. People are being raised from the dead; Muslims are coming to Christ because of visions of Him; and the major regions of the global south (e.g., South America, Asia, and Africa) are seeing more and more supernatural miracles performed in the name of Jesus.
Historically, the possession and use of spiritual gifts were eventually relegated to simple acts of skill of the select few. The passage below cites that spiritual gifts of a supernatural nature never ceased, but instead did remain in operation. I hope you will read the following and give serious consideration of how you may or may not be participating in what is clearly happening in today's world:
The Montanist renewal movement of the period A.D. 185–212 represented an attempt to restore the charisms to the church. Despite some early successes, in which tongues and prophecy were restored among the followers of Montanus, the movement was ultimately condemned by the church. The major cause of this rejection was not the presence of the charismata, but Montanus's claim that the prophetic utterances were equal to the Scriptures. Many scholars now feel that the church overreacted to Montanism by asserting that the more sensational charisms, though experienced by the apostolic church, were withdrawn after the perfection of the accepted canon of Scripture. This opinion was expressed by Augustine and echoed by scholars in the centuries that followed. On the question of tongues as evidence of receiving the Holy Spirit, Augustine said:
"At the Church's beginning the Holy Spirit fell upon the believers, and they spoke with tongues unlearnt, as the Spirit gave them utterance. It was a sign, fitted to the time: all the world's tongues were a fitting signification of the Holy Spirit, because the gospel of God was to have its course through every tongue in all parts of the earth. The sign was given and then passed away. We no longer expect that those upon whom the hand is laid, that they may receive the Holy Spirit, will speak with tongues. When we laid our hands on these "infants," the Church's new-born members, none of you (I think) looked to see if they would speak with tongues, or seeing that they did not, had the perversity to argue that they had not received the Holy Spirit, for if they had received, they would have spoken in tongues as happened at the first."
As to all the other extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, Augustine's "cessation theory" was widely influential on generations of subsequent theologians. As he said:
"Why, it is asked, do no miracles occur nowadays, such as occurred in former times? I could reply that they were necessary then, before the world came to believe, in order to win the world's belief."
A footnote to Augustine's cessationist theory was the sudden appearance of supernatural healings in public services in his church.
The overreaction to Montanism, which led to a belief that the charismata ended with the apostolic age, continued until modern times. Although the Roman Catholic Church left the door open to miracles in the lives of certain saints (a few of whom were said to speak in tongues and produce miracles of healing), the church tended more and more to teach that the miracles of the apostolic age ended with the early church. With the institutionalization of the church, the less spectacular charisms of government, administration, and teaching came to the fore as the most acceptable gifts available to the hierarchy. The major exception to this acceptance of creeping cessationism was the Orthodox churches of the East. Although the spontaneous manifestation of the charismata also subsided in these churches, Orthodoxy never adopted a theory that the charismata had ceased. Cessationist theology was a creation of the Western church.
The view that the charismata had ceased after the days of the apostles was given classic expression by John Chrysostom in the fourth century in his homilies on 1 Corinthians 12. Confessing his ignorance on the subject, he wrote:
"This whole place is very obscure: but the obscurity is produced by our ignorance of the facts referred to and their cessation, being such as then used to occur but now no longer take place. And why do they not happen now? Why look now, the cause too of the obscurity hath produced us again another question: namely, why did they then happen, and now do so no more? … Well, what did happen then? Whoever was baptized he straightaway spoke with tongues and not with tongues only, but many also prophesied, and some performed many wonderful works … but more abundant than all was the gift of tongues among them."
The cessation of the charismata thus became part of the classical theology of the Western church. Augustine and Chrysostom were quoted by countless theologians and commentators in the centuries that followed.
Gifts such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues) became so rare that the church generally forgot their proper function in the Christian community. As the centuries rolled by, speaking in a language not learned by the speaker was seen as evidence of possession by an evil spirit rather than the Holy Spirit. In fact, by A.D. 1000 the Rituale Romanorum (Roman Ritual) defined glossolalia as prima facie evidence of demon possession. It might have been expected that Reformers such as Luther and Calvin would have restored the charismata to the church as the common heritage of all believers. Yet this was not to be.
One of the charges leveled against the Reformers by the Catholic authorities was that Protestantism lacked authenticating miracles confirming their beginnings. To Catholic theologians, miraculous charismata were seen as divine approval at the beginning of the church. Catholics demanded of Luther and Calvin signs and wonders to attest to their authenticity as true, orthodox Christian churches. Following the lead of Augustine and Chrysostom, Luther responded with the following view about the signs, wonders, and gifts of the Holy Spirit:
"The Holy Spirit is sent forth in two ways. In the primitive church he was sent forth in a manifest and visible form. Thus He descended upon Christ at the Jordan in the form of a dove (Mt. 3:16), and upon the apostles and other believers in the form of fire (Acts 2:3). This was the first sending forth of the Holy Spirit; it was necessary in the primitive church, which had to be established with visible signs on account of the unbelievers, as Paul testifies. 1 Cor. 14:22: "Tongues are for a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers." But later on, when the church had been gathered and confirmed by these signs, it was not necessary for this visible sending forth of the Holy Spirit to continue."
Through the centuries, then, Christendom, in its Roman Catholic and Protestant branches, adopted the view that the spectacular supernatural gifts of the Spirit had ended with the early church and that, with the completion of the inspired canon of Scripture, they would never be needed again. The Catholic mystical tradition continued to allow for a few saints possessed of "heroic holiness" to exercise some of the gifts, but such holiness was reserved, in the minds of most, for the clergy and religious (bishops, priests, monks, and nuns), not for the masses of ordinary Christians.
This view was the conventional wisdom of the church until the 19th century. Then historical and theological developments caused the beginning of a dramatic change of view in various quarters, notably in England and the United States.
Synan, Vinson (2012-01-30). The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal, 1901-2001 (Kindle Locations 396-449). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
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