In part
1 of this article I argued that the Bible most naturally suggests that the
gift of prophecy is one that God will give until Jesus returns. And I argued too that all Christians should therefore
certainly choose to obey the commands in 1 Corinthians 14:1, 39 to eagerly
desire this gift.
In this second part I will move on to look at objections that
cessationists often make to the continuist position on prophecy. I am confident that each objection can be answered
adequately.
OBJECTIONS ANSWERED
Prophecy today is no
threat to the supremacy of the Bible
One of the main reasons why some Christians deny that we should
seek the gift of prophecy today is because they think that if prophesying
existed, it would threaten the supremacy of Scripture.
There is a big misunderstanding here. Prophecy today is a kind of revelation that
exists on a far, far lower level than biblical revelation. It is communication, subordinate to Scripture
and never contradicting it, by which God guides individual Christians or
churches in their everyday walk with Him.
It is true that in the early church some of the prophecies were
much more important. At that time, God
spoke some things through prophets that He designed to end up in the Bible. But today God never gives revelation in
prophecy that is remotely on a par with the authority of biblical revelation.
It is worth noting that even in the first century there must have
been many other prophecies from God that are not recorded in Scripture. For example, 1 Corinthians 14:26-33 implies
that prophecies would normally have been given when the Corinthian church met
together. And the vast majority of these
– probably all of them – do not appear in the New Testament.
Prophecy today is the same sort of thing as this. No genuine prophecies today even come close
to threatening the supremacy of the Bible.
The usefulness of
prophecy
Cessationists also often claim that there is no need for the gift
of prophecy now that we have the New Testament.
There is another huge mistake here. The New Testament gives us crucial, general
principles about how we should live. But
it should be obvious that in the course of our Christian lives, we encounter
numerous situations, sometimes complex ones, in which only reading the Bible
will not give us full insight into how we should act. And when important decisions are involved, we
need other direction from God.
For example, take the following situations:
(1) A Christian man is wondering whether to take a job he has been
offered or to keep the one he has. Despite
praying and asking advice, he finds that the pros and cons are evenly balanced.
(2) A Christian couple are very unsure whether they should move to
a different town or continue to live where they are. And, again, the pros and cons seem to cancel
each other out.
(3) A church is considering doing some evangelism. An opportunity opens up for them to do some
outreach to older people. And another
opportunity arises for them to reach out to teenagers. But they feel that they can’t manage both. So they have to choose.
I could give a multitude of similar examples. For individual Christians, Christian families
and churches, situations will often arise where reading the Bible doesn’t give
enough insight to know what the will of God is.
The Bible is not designed to give us direct and specific information
about how to decide in situations like these.
Instead, it gives us general principles about how to live and what to do.
It should be an undeniable fact, then, that Christians and
churches often have to choose between various courses of action that seem to
fit equally well with the Bible. And
some of these decisions are very big ones.
What is more, it makes sense to think that God is almost never neutral
about big decisions we make. Almost
always He will want us to take one course of action instead of other
alternatives.
So Christians and churches often find themselves in situations
where they need to be able to hear God speaking to them about what He
specifically wants them to do.
There are some who will readily accept this, but who still argue
against prophecy today. They say that God
is able to speak to us in other ways than by prophecy, and so there is no need
to seek the gift of prophecy.
This argument is completely misguided. Of course God can and does give specific
insight to Christians other than through prophecy. But it is wrong to think in terms of
either-or here. It should be both-and. Prophecy is one major way in which God gives
insight to Christians. And this should
be allowed to take its place alongside other ways He speaks.
I should also note that the most common way in which I have seen
the gift of prophecy used is to cite Scripture itself! Either a prophet gives a word to a person or
church that a particular passage of the Bible is especially relevant to a
situation they are facing. Or a prophet
says that a certain passage applies in a special way to a Christian’s life. I will give one example of this below.
We must also bear in mind that no Christian knows the Bible
perfectly. And young Christians often
don’t know it at all well. Those
cessationists who say that we have no need of prophecy now that we have the
Bible often seem almost to assume that we all know the Bible perfectly. But we don’t.
And prophecy – whether a quotation from Scripture or something else – helps
to fill in our gaps in knowledge. That a
loving God would choose to act in this way should not be a surprise.
In conclusion, then, the idea that we should not seek to prophesy
because we have the Bible is completely mistaken. It is far too simplistic.
The Reformation and
prophecy
Another argument that is sometimes made by cessationists appeals
to the Reformation. One of the
principles of the Reformation is sola scriptura, ‘by Scripture alone’, which
means that Christians should be led by Scripture alone. It is sometimes claimed that this principle
means that we should not expect to hear from God at all except through the
Bible.
There are two points to make here.
Firstly, I admit that I am not an authority on the Reformation. But I think those cessationists who argue in
this way have misunderstood what the Reformers meant by sola scriptura. At least as it seems to me, when they said
that we should be led by Scripture alone, they were not saying that God never
speaks other than through Scripture. Rather,
they were rejecting what Roman Catholics taught.
Catholics said, and still say, that there are two major
authoritative sources of instruction for Christians: the Bible and the teaching
of the Catholic Church. When the
Reformers said that Christians should be led by Scripture alone, they were
denying – rightly – that Catholic teaching is authoritative. That is the context in which they were
speaking. And I don’t think they were saying
that God never speaks to a Christian other than through the Bible.
The Reformers would certainly have been clear that any revelation
about anything that God gives to a Christian would need to fit with Scripture
and in a sense be subordinate to it. But
I find it very hard to believe that they would have denied that God might give specific
leading to Christians in areas such as what job they should do etc.
Secondly, even if – as I very much doubt – the Reformers did take the
extreme view that God never speaks other than through the Bible, that doesn’t
have to mean that they were right. There
are unfortunately many evangelicals today who follow certain people in church
history without questioning their beliefs nearly enough. Lutherans are often too quick to accept Martin
Luther’s teachings without properly weighing them. The same can be said for Calvinists and John
Calvin, and for Wesleyans and John Wesley.
Even if the Reformers did hold an extreme view on God speaking
through the Bible, then, there is no good reason why we should follow suit. But, from what I have read on the subject, I
very much doubt that their beliefs were so extreme.
Examples of false
prophecy do not mean that prophecy is wrong in itself
Sometimes cessationists point to situations in which supposed
prophecies were obviously not from God. And
they then claim that these situations show that the gift of prophecy is not one
that God is using at the present time.
It is certainly true that many false prophecies are given in
Jesus’ name today. The gift is often
abused, and there should be no denying that.
It is also true that devout Christians will often make mistakes in
prophesying, despite trying hard to hear God’s voice.
But to say that abuse and mistakes show that all prophecy is invalid
today makes no sense at all. By the same
logic, we should avoid anything that is abused or about which mistakes are
sometimes made.
For example, teaching from the Bible is something that is
massively abused in our day. Every
Sunday there are thousands of so-called Christian pastors worldwide who say
they are teaching from the Bible, but who are actually promoting heresy in one
way or another.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, claim that the Bible does not
teach that Jesus is divine. Those in the
so-called Free Grace movement claim that Scripture teaches that people don’t
need to turn away from their sins in order to be saved. And so-called liberal Protestants often claim
that the Bible doesn’t teach that all homosexual practice is a sin.
These are just a few of many examples that I could give. Bible teaching is something that is often
abused. But this doesn’t mean that all teaching
from the Bible is false! It doesn’t mean
that pastors on a Sunday should abandon giving biblical instruction to their
flocks! And the same applies to prophecy. To say that abuses and mistakes mean that
prophecy itself should be avoided is illogical.
Wherever there is something that is from God, Satan will almost
always try to counterfeit it. He will
also tempt Christians into using gifts, including prophecy, in ways that are
less than edifying. And part of what it
means to be a fallen human being is to make mistakes. So even Christians with good intentions and
motivations can get things wrong at times.
Therefore, bad reports surrounding the gift of prophecy in no way have
to mean that this gift is not available today.
Church history
Cessationists often argue that it must be wrong to claim that the
gift of prophecy exists today, because it is only since the beginning of the
20th century that any orthodox (i.e., non-heretical) Christians have claimed to
be able to prophesy.
Again, I acknowledge that I am not an expert on church history. However, I am sure that there were claims of
prophetic experiences by orthodox Christians between the 1st and 19th centuries.
Even if there were no claims using the words ‘prophecy’ or
‘prophesy’ – which I very much doubt – we must be careful not to fall into what
we could call ‘the word – concept fallacy’.
This is the mistake of thinking that if a word that is commonly used to
refer to a concept is not present, then that concept itself cannot be present.
The concept of prophecy or prophesying can be present even if the
words ‘prophecy’ or ‘prophesy’ are not. Orthodox
Christians between the 1st and 19th centuries could have referred to
experiences as ‘divine leading’ or as ‘an impression from God’ etc., when in
fact these experiences fitted with what Paul refers to as prophecy in 1 Corinthians
12-14.
Another, similar, argument used by cessationists is that if
prophecy continued throughout the church age, it would surely have been widely
used in every century of the church.
Regardless of what words were used to describe it, I do agree that
there have been many more claims of prophecy since the beginning of the 20th
century than there were previously. However,
there are two important points to make here.
First, the Bible often makes receiving things from God conditional
upon believing. The believing is very
important. So when a Christian doesn’t
believe that God wants to give a gift of some sort, it seems that God would
almost certainly not give that gift, even if He wanted to. I would suggest that part of the reason why there
has been a lack of prophecy throughout church history is because most
Christians wrongly believed that God had no desire to speak prophetically at
that time.
Second, and in my view even more importantly, we need to recognise
that the Holy Spirit is thoroughly mysterious.
And it is a mistake to claim that He must have chosen to do things in
more or less the same amounts in each century of the church.
In 1 Samuel 3:1 we are told that when Samuel was a boy, ‘the word
of the LORD was rare in those days’. Similarly,
I think that even under post-Pentecost, New Covenant conditions, it is not all
that surprising if there is considerable variation in how much the Spirit operates
supernaturally from time to time.
Summing up
There are other arguments too that cessationists sometimes make to
support their view that God is not using the gift of prophecy today. But I have listed the most important of them. In short, none of their objections convinces.
In part 3 I will move on to give some personal testimony of how I
have seen God use the gift of prophecy.
See also:
