Tag: cessationism

Top 10 Books

I don’t know who asked me to jump on this top 10 books list, but I’ve finally gotten round to it.  Here goes:

  • Emma, by Jane Austin.  It’s a long story, but this is how I decided I was looking for love in all the wrong places.  I had a long discussion with the girl who became my wife, shortly after reading this book
  • The Way the World Works, by June Wannasiki.  I don’t know that this is the best economics book.  Wannasiki is kind of like Algernon – he doesn’t necessarily write accurately, but he writes with wonderful expression.   Anyway, this book opened my eyes to the sort of political shenanigans that are being done in the name of bad economics.
  • Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, by Mark DeverI had been looking for what exactly was going wrong in the sort of churches I was going to.  Even in the prosperous, well-populated churches, there was something rotten about their state.  9Marks pointed me in the right direction. Incidentally, I gave my copy to somebody, so if you’d like to help me replenish my library…
  • Humility: True Greatness, by CJ Mahaney.  It was a toss-up between this and The Cross-Centered Life.  Either way, what I really appreciate about Mahaney’s little books is their practicality: “XYZ is true.  Here are some habits you can build into your life so it will have an practical effect.”  Want to be humble?  Start by thanking God that you get tired at night.
  • The Bruised Reed, by Richard Sibbes.  Just… Wow.  I used to want to be Dennis Jernigan when I grew up.  Now I want to be Richard Sibbes.  So incredibly helpful to see how exactly the Spirit of God works in actual broken hearts.  As a happy side effect: the sweetest, most reassuring teaching of God’s selection in salvation you have ever heard.
  • Surprised by Joy, by CS Lewis.  This is a cheat.  It stands in for “The Complete Works of,” which I understand is against the rules.  I might have been CS Lewis, if my middle class lawyer dad had just sent me to a private tutor for my entire high school, where I studied classics in Latin and Greek for 12 hours a day.  Surprised by Joy is less biography and more a spiritual memoir in the style of Augustin’s Confession.  The picture he give of his conversion still sticks with me:  a lobster in a corset on a bus, I think.  Strangely, he falls on the side of free will in salvation, while describing a perfectly Calvinist conversion.
  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.  I wrote a paper on Gustave Flaubert my junior year in college. It kind of revolutionized my view on the world.  I got an A-.  My hard drive crashed, and now I have only the vaguest recollection of what my conclusions were.  Flaubert was set to be a fantasy author.  He had this blockbuster story he wrote about Saint Anthony in the tombs.  It was a colossal flop.  His friends urged him to quit writing about “Chimeras,” that is fantastical ideas, and to focus on realism.  So he wrote a story about a girl who wanted to have a truly great romance and ruined her life chasing it while ignoring the perfectly good romance right in her lap.  I was totally unable to relate to this concept.
  • Institutes of Christianity, by John Calvin.  This is kind of a cheat, since I never actually finished the book.  But he really knew how to pack ‘em in there. The one that comes up the most is his explanation of faith – not just confidence, but confidence in a person’s word in the face of very good reasons to doubt. We’ll skip past how much Calvin talks about the Spirit, and how I totally avoided him the first time I heard of him, because I knew he had nothing to say to me due to his ignorance of the Holy Spirit.
  • Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer.  More specifically, The Franklin’s Tale, which taught me about the complex overlay of loyalties that we would now call “Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.”  As a bonus, reading journal articles on The Franklin’s Tale taught me that Feminism is bunk, specifically because it can’t see those loyalties as anything other than systematic oppression
  • On the Cessation of the Charismata, by John Ruthven.  Specifically, the footnotes to the first chapter, which gave me references to a whirlwind tour of early church thought on spiritual gifts, and the supernatural.  I used it as the bibliographical launching point for a church history paper, and it inspired me for the thesis for my PhD, which I will probably never get to write.
(Yes, Tolkien is lovely, but he didn’t change my life.  I’m very fond of Luther, but I haven’t actually read any books by him. Paradise lost did nothing for me, other than give me some perspective when reading Middlemarch. Inferno was extremely interesting, but Purgatorio was distressingly Catholic.  Robinson Crusoe was a waste of time.)
There’s a strange lack of fiction titles in this list.  I went through a major theological shift about 15 years ago, so my top 10 list changed accordingly.  The books above are the ones that got me going in my current direction.  It just so happened that when I was grasping, very few of the branches that held were fiction.

Spirit of Prophecy

In my daily Bible reading, I’m coming up on Ezekiel, and he’s making me nervous.

Always in the back of my mind is a series of books that I want to write some day, about how people understand mystical experiences, the supernatural, prophecy, etc. I have in mind at least three books: The first one would cover the Old Testament and be titled, “Saul among the prophets,” referring to the two times that King Saul got distracted from whatever errand he was on because he ran into a group of prophets, had some kind of ecstatic experience, and ended up in a daze and naked. The second book would be called, “You may all prophesy,” from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and it would cover what the New Testament church thought about these things. The third book would be about the early Christian era, and I would call it, “With a loud voice,” which is a quote from Ignatius of Antioch. Around 100 AD, he wrote a letter to the church at Philadelphia, where he asserted that what he said during a church service had been a prophecy, because he said it, “with a loud voice, with God’s own voice.” (What grand aspirations he has for a soldier, you say. It’s all right. I know of a newspaper man who once wrote a tome on Biblical authority.)

Anyway, because I have this in the back of my head, I’m always asking the question, “What exactly was this experience like?” When God said to Samuel, Look not to his appearance, what exactly did Samuel experience? Was it an audible voice, a thought inside his head? How did he know it was God and not his own idea? Was there some sort of sense of dread?

Ezekiel is especially hard to answer these questions. He has these dramatic experiences, where he is taken to some place, shown some awesome thing, and it’s not always entirely clear if what happened was in some sort of trance, or if he physically saw it with his eyes. Did he go afterwards and see char marks on the ground along the paths of the four living creatures?

But more close to home is that Ezekiel, being one of the most dramatic of the prophets, sets the standard for people who want to prophesy today. I am not a cessationist, and I think cessationists make their job too easy when they simply say the canon is closed. People have always had experiences. In former times, some of these were from God and some were nonsense. What help is it to say that now we are confident that all of them are nonsense? It’s a great help to those who want to be materialists and Christians also. But it’s kind of a Tolkien view of the world: In a former age, the world was flat and boundless, but in our current age, God has bounded it by curving it in upon itself. The way to the land of the Valar is now closed to mortals. They don’t seem to notice that, in Tolkien, the new rounded earth is a smaller, dimmer world.

But as I say, slamming the door closed on spiritual experiences is a kindness to folks who don’t have those experiences, and wonder if they should. But it’s a great harshness to people who continue to dream dreams and see visions. Those people are forced to resign the brighter half of their lives to the stuff of mental institutions and illegal pharmaceuticals. Yet they keep on seeing things.

As I said, Ezekiel in a lot of ways sets the standard for people who want to see visions. I mean, boy did he see them. But how much did he see them, and how much was it merely a divinely blessed imagination? I suspect the Hebrew word would have been the same.

It’s not an academic question for folks like me, with highly… enhanced… imaginations. If I’m meditating on a thing, and a picture comes into my mind, and boy what a humdinger, and with it comes a sense of dread and awe, how do I report it? How did Ezekiel report his experiences? “And saw a picture in my mind of four living creatures; whether they were real and imagined, I do not know. But as I contemplated these creatures, my heart rate was highly accelerated, and my hair stood on end.” Therefore: the word of the Lord. The ancient saints didn’t have the advantage of writing off Ezekiel’s visions simply because they were visions. (Unless they were Sadducees, but then the Sadducees were no saints.) There wasn’t any value in waiting to see if Ezekiel’s vision of the four creatures “came true.” There was no predictive element. Like all scripture, there was a certain component of his experience that must be self-authenticating.

And yet, charismatic though I am, I see in Ezekiel not only the authoritative word of God, but also the imaginative foundation of every two-bit quack and self-assured heretic in church history. Here is George Fox interrupting formal public meetings to ask why church houses are called churches. Here is William Blake writing vaguely seditious poetry, calling his acid-etched engravings visions of fire. Here is the hook for all the people Jude warned us about.

As the angel said to John, “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” As surely as there are antichrists, there are prophets who testify for them. Their visions must surely sound and feel quite a bit the same.

Here is scripture, both our model and our instructor. Let us handle and divide it carefully.

Prophecy

Bibliolatry:
When a person relies on the authority of scripture to undermine what the text actually teaches.

This definition pops up for me whenever I hear a cessationist argument. Here we have a summary by Nathan Busenitz of a debate between Wayne Grudem and Ian Hamilton over the idea of “fallible prophecy” in the New Testament.

For my purposes, we’ll leave aside the question of fallibility for a minute. Let’s just look at authority, or urgency. Does scripture portray any kind of prophecy, in the Old Testament or New, which has less authority than the full weight of Biblical law? Is Saul also among the prophets? If all true prophecy has the full weight of scripture behind it, how is it possible for Paul to instruct the Corinthians that “spirits of prophets are subject to prophets”? Can you imagine someone saying that the text of Jeremiah was subject to Jeremiah, that if someone had interrupted him, he would have done best to sit down and shut up? Of course not. “there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

Scripture itself presents prophecy as being a thing that has different levels of urgency and precariousness. Who then are you to argue that the nature of scripture requires prophecy to be sealed off like scripture? The implication then would be that all prophecy necessarily has the same weight as scripture, and therefore becomes scripture the minute it is written down and preserved. But that simply isn’t the case at all. There are references in scripture to literally thousands of prophetic events of various levels, that nobody thought even worth writing down. An entire school of prophets in Elijah’s time was able to come up with only a single message worth writing down – for dramatic effect. Most prophecy in ancient times never ascended to the level of being considered scripture, so why should it be disturbing to think that, though there may still be prophecy today, none of it reaches the same level of authority as scripture?

Brothers, we are not Platonists. Neither scripture nor prophecy come down like a mathematical proof, with all the edges carefully sealed. If we are to obey scripture, we must obey it as it is, both in what it says and in the characteristics that it models. What you mustn’t do is determine what it ought to model, based on what it necessary for the formula, and use that to determine what the text must mean.

Busenitz lists 5 dangers of prophecy. They strike me more as 5 inconveniences. The possibility of modern prophecy creates scenarios where people might be subject to influences that can’t be shot down with a cannonade from scripture. But scripture wasn’t given us so that we might have confidence in the teachers of the law. It was given us that we might have confidence in Christ. God forbid that we should build up a confidence in the text in such a way that we fail to perceive what the text actually says, about itself, and about how we relate to Christ and each other.

So I Shouldn’t Hear Voices?

Alexander Jordan and I have been having a discussion about how to know God’s will for your life, in which he has been proving himself to be pleasant, helpful, humble, and above all, thorough, while I have shown myself to be reactionary and emotional, responding to the feeling I get about the whole idea, rather than the actual arguments in his posts.

In my defense, I have only to say that he has been the blogger, carefully planning his series, and I have been the commenter, responding in the moment. He also seems to have the advantage of a great deal more time in which to structure highly advanced explanations of his position while I am limited to responding quickly in slap-dash fashion. Nevertheless, I wanted to bring the discussion to the attention of my readers and see if I could get some opinion.

Jordan has been describing his view of knowing God’s will as contra writers like John Eldridge, which puts me at a bit of a disadvantage, because I’ve only read a little of John Eldridge, and usually I tend to agree with the general vicinity of where he’s going, but very little with how he gets there. So there’s a danger, I think, on both our parts, of shooting past each other. This is especially true since I have already confessed to not reading Jordan’s posts as thoroughly as I ought. Nevertheless, here’s what I believe is the position he’s advocating: Continue reading “So I Shouldn’t Hear Voices?”