Agreed. There are so many abuses and umbilical beliefs about spiritual gifts that many pastors and churches are not interested in this: some pastors have told me so. It doesn't matter to me.Many great men and women of God don't believe in the gifts. I do
Thinking that congregational 'singing or speaking in unknown language', is evidence that a church operates 'gifts of the spirit' or can be supposedly defined as 'charismatic', is foolish and ignorant. Thinking that The Lord would generously provide gifts to His church to enhance its ministry, then withold those same gifts while the church continued to minister without them would also be foolishly ignorant of The Lord's ways with, his church, his generosity and his constancy. I am convinced myself that a 'church' without 'gifts of the Spirit' is no church of Christ. Churches that appear to be 'giftless' are simply ignorant of what gifts of the Spirit LOOK like or simply one that thinks asking God for an egg they would receive a scorpion instead. If we have the Holy Spirit, we will also get the gifts of the Holy Spirit, all of us, severally, as we have need of them, always for the purpose of ministry to the world. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, going about his fathers business, can expect their ministry to be enhanced by gifts of the Holy Spirit. What other possible purpose would there be for any disciple of Christ to remain alive on earth, if not to serve with whatever 'talents' they have been given by The Holy Spirit, whenever they receive them, to perform the good works prepared beforehand for them to walk in? Cessationists seem to think The Lord must have become miserly with his gifts shortly after ecclesiastical clericism infected His church. It didn't have priests, prelates or a hierarchy to start with. They might have a point about the apparent historical timing but not about the miserlyness. Spiritual gifts for the average Joe or Josephine in the pews puts the willies up those who prefer a church controlled from above by a, top down, ecclesiatical hierarchy, rather than directly by The Holy Spirit. The very idea runs against the way they think the church should operate. It didn't bother the likes of St Paul though, he expected all the gifts of The Spirit to be in evidence throughout all of the congregations of followers of The Way, that he had established. His letters to them are the proof of that. .
Actually, thinking about it, how would you know they are speaking in Russian or Chinese if you 'heard' it in English? Surely you would simply assume they were speaking English, unless perhaps their lips were clealy out of sync like a badly dubbed movie with a faulty sound track. .
There are ways. A computer could tell you what language was being spoken, regardless of what you were hearing. Or you could simply know in advance that the speaker didn’t know English. The point is that if these abilities were present in the world, there would be objectively verifiable evidence of it, rather than counterfeit “miracles” buttressed by in-group peer pressure and the delusions of crowd psychology. If someone started doing what the Book of Acts actually describes, that would certainly get my attention, but so far I’m not aware of any such instances (and the scientific literature on xenoglossy is pretty negative in its assessment).
How does speaking in tongues build up the church in this present age? Do any Anglican parishes you attend incorporate speaking in tongues in their services? If so, how does it work?
As a public gift, speaking in tounges - glossolalia - does not make a lot of sense unless there is someone to interpret the utterance. As a public event, it would seem to draw more attention to the speaker rather than to the spoken. On the other hand in a private setting, it may have a faith-strengthening characteristic which might be helpful, in the same way that some contemplatives will find great solace in 0 days of deep silence. The point being is that we are not called to chase after signs, but rather simply to follow Jesus.
Is there actually anything in scripture which indicates that speaking in languages unintelligable to oneself is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit? What happened on that day of Pentecost might not actually be numbered among what the writers of scripure nominate as 'the gifts'. It may well have only been a 'one off', unique phenomenon, intended only for that particular occasion, and not to be expected as a gift of the Spirit as such. In Acts It is difficult to work out if the Pentecost phenomenon was a case of Galilean disciples speaking in languages other than their own, or the crowd understanding Galilean Aramaic in their own languages. If it was the latter then it was something other than a gift of the Spirit but rather more of a miracle experienced by the crowd. What is mentioned existing in the church in 1 Corinthians as a 'gift' is probably an entirely different phenomenon. Since scripture indicates that the gift of tongues is not by any means the most important of the gifts of the Spirit, I think it's manifestation is hugely overrated in its importance and should appropriately be restricted to private personal devotions. Guidance for the church should come from experienced members with prophetic gifts, not from ululations uttered in sounds unintellible even to the person vocalising them. .
Why? Other parts of Acts, one mention in the gospel of Mark, one mention in Galatians, and a fairly extensive discussion about regulating the practice in 1 Cor., are all there to be consulted, but only Acts 2 describes what it actually looked like. Paul’s account in 1 Cor. is - one might say characteristically - vague and imprecise. (Paul’s letters in general are notorious for providing answers without telling us what the questions were.) The account in Acts 2 is much clearer. If a fit of xenoglossy suddenly came over a group gathered in an urban home, it would not sound chaotic to the participants (because each person would be hearing what was said in only one language), but it would absolutely sound like a wild and out of control gathering to the family that lived next door. Better to interpret the unclear in light of the clear rather than the other way around. As canon, the narrative account in Acts can help make sense of the normative value of the discussion in 1 Cor. As historical documents, the account in Acts 2 was written much later than 1 Corinthians, which in turn never independently referred to the events of Acts 2. While the details are obscure, it seems that glossolalia was not unknown in the ancient Mediterranean world, and that Gentile converts with experience in any of the more mystical practices at that time could have brought such practices into the early Church with them, including glossolalia. As a matter of historical reconstruction, Paul may have been referring to this (rather than to the episode of xenoglossy from Acts 2) in 1 Cor. 14. The Church appeared to distance itself over time from these early memories of a more ‘ecstatic’ style of practice, leaving such in the province of those later deemed ‘heretics’. One can see evidence of such distancing in the commentaries of Chrysostom, for example. The ultimate problem with the ancient case for glossolalia - whether pagan or Christian - is that it rested on a number of mythological assumptions that are no longer tenable in the modern world. Nobody today would take Neoplatonist claims to spontaneously speak in unknown divine languages seriously; there’s no compelling reason to throw consistency out the window when it comes to evaluating similar claims from Christians. 1. That the NT phrase “speaking in tongues” was referring to xenoglossy (and not glossolalia) seems to have been the standard view among the Church Fathers. 2. That glossolalia isn’t in fact ‘language’ at all appears to be the dominant view in the modern scientific community. 3. It’s entirely possible that the post-1st cent. Church engaged in revisionism in order to alter the understanding of the genuine Pauline corpus, but any organized body based on such an assumption could not simultaneously claim to be founded on ‘the Fathers and Councils’ as well as ‘the Scriptures’, since for the Fathers such “revisionism” was tantamount to ‘orthodoxy’.
Great point. I don't know of any that specifically state that sign gifts were only part of the apostolic era.
Do you believe, as many pentecostals I've met do, that if you don't speak in tongues you aren't saved?
No. I think that is a non biblical teaching. I'm not a pentacostal, but I an Anglican and attend an Anglican church. I am a charismatic Christian .
I'm interested to know if your church services are recorded, and if so, would someone else give the same interpretation? Alternatively if you could get an old recording and get the same translator to retranslate the message, would it come out the same?
What indication is there anywhere in scripture that any gifts of the Spirit to the church are ever going to die out or wane before the parousia? WE may even assume that any church completely devoid of any gift of the Spirit cannot therefore be the church but merely an organisation pretending to be the church? Faith is itself a gift of the Spirit, has that died out too? If it has, then whatever that organisation IS, it can't be the church, because without that gift, without faith, it can't possibly be the church. A church devoid of all Spiritual gifts would therefore be a faithless church. So total cessationists can't be right, because if they are, then the church has already ceased to exist on earth but Christ had implied that it wouldn't. .
I would imagine not. To think that it should would be similar to insisting all translations of the Bible should be identical word for word, if they are to be assumed to be correct. We could expect the general meaning and sense to be the same though. .
Ok. Where does it stop? Why have a closed canon? Why have a fixed church hierarchy? There’s nothing inherently inconsistent about holding that a specific set of religious activities were only intended for a defined period. For a timeless God, any temporal effect is temporary by definition.
Jesus Christ said it wasn't going to stop, until everything had been accomplished. What do you think spiritual gifts are for unless to aid the accomplishment of God's purposes over all. Who closed the canon? The church did. Has everything the church has ever done been according to God's will? Perhaps not. Who decided to have fixed church hierarchy? The church did. Certainly St Paul never saw it that way in his day. Has everything the church has ever done been according to God's will and followed Apostolic practice? Perhaps not. True, but why chose to define that period dating from the time that the clergy took over during the reign of Contantine, with gifts of the Spirit being disdained from that period until now. Would that merely be to try to justify the church's waning faith in God's provision for his church on earth. Can the lack of evidence of gifts of the Spirit in todays church be simply put down to lack of expectation for their provision, due to lack of faith, itself a gift of The Spirit. .
I don’t know. Paul acknowledged their temporary nature, but also seemed to expect that they would persist until the parousia: “But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end” (1 Cor. 13). On the other hand, Paul also believed that the heavenly Jesus would return in his own lifetime: “For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thessalonians 4). Given that the parousia didn’t happen in the 1st cent. and that Christians would have had to shift from a provisional ethics and mindset to something more long-term oriented, an open-ended charismatic community would be inherently corrosive to any institutional framework that evolved to preserve, unite, and give structure to the scattered Christian communities. The local bishop couldn’t really be in charge if any member of the community could spontaneously claim to speak for the Holy Spirit, as Montanus and others did. (The succession of the bishops was originally a ‘teaching’ succession rather than a sacerdotal one, after all. Their ordination certified that the teaching they received had been authorized by a chain of teachers that went back to the 1st cent.) The subsequent history of ‘orthodox’ reactions to charismatic groups in the patristic era was no accident and was entirely to be expected. To maintain the same institutional commitments today as were assumed in the Church of the first millennium, is inherently incompatible with a ‘charismatic’ approach, just as it was in the 2nd/3rd cent., and afterward. A ‘charismatic’ praxis is fundamentally incompatible with Anglicanism.
That was why I worded things that way. Clearly St Paul realised that beyond the parousia there would be no essential need for gifts of the spirit in their current form to continue on earth. Not essentially because they were withheld by God but because the distance between ourselves and God had been eliminated completely, by Christ's physical proximity, rendering the necessity for gifts completely redundant. Paul and the churches he wrote to and served within clearly were of the opinion that a parousia was immanent, yet we can't accurately estimate exactly how immanent that estimate might have actually have been in Paul's mind. Even if his estimation might have been a couple of millennium, what he wrote and you just quoted would still hold true because the point of his writing it was to quell concerns in the believing community, that some who had already died might 'miss' the second return of Christ, or even the living might have 'missed it', by not noticing it had already happened. Paul's advice is more of a description of what would happen when the parousia actually does take place, than a prediction that it will actually take place while he and his readers are still actually alive. I think Paul was never convinced he would certainly see Christ return himself. I think his eschatological understanding was more refined than that. He was daily engulfed in insecurity and constantly at the point of losing his life and therefore had little expectation of being suddenly 'snatched away from all this', like some enthusiastic rapture believers seem to get by on today, as a supposed tenet of their faith. What we have in the communications of Paul to his church plants is the impression that gifts of the Spirit are essential to the proper functioning of the church, so also an assumption that they would continue until no longer necessary. That would obviously be (1) At the death of the individual believer. (2) At the end of the aeon, when all is accomplished. All this convinces me that charismata are still extant in the church. I believe I and others, in the Anglican denomination, and others, continue to occasionally experience them. Most of them are not overtly obvious to others or easily identified even by the person experiencing them at the time. Take the gifts of faith, knowledge or healing for instance. How would one know if one has them? Are they permanent possessions of any individual or are they visited upon us only when we need them for the purpose of ministry? All these 'gifts' according to scripture are distributed at God's disgression, not man's ordination. In a denomination that does not encourage 'lay ministry' in any spiritual sense, but restricts it to only those who are ordained, and in some cases even further, only to those male members of the ordained, is it surprising that there is often little evidence of spiritual gifts, and great ignorance of how they should operate, in our congregations? This state of affairs, I would contend, hamstrings and weakens the church. I have even heard it said by an experienced lay leader in my current congregation, to the priest in charge, during a series of Lent discussions on our joint responsibility to preach and communicate the gospel, "It's alright for you to do that, you've got your collar on back to front." This was a person who offloaded ALL responsibility for evangelism, and presumably any other spiritual task in the church, to the ordained priesthood, so clearly considered she would have no need whatever herself for spiritual gifts, along with no requirement from Christ, to use them responsibly in his service. .