There’s a lively discussion going on over at Christ and Covenant on prophecy and tongues.
I’ve commented that I'd quite like to be a cessationist. It seems more conservative (and therefore sound) and less crazy charismaniac to me.
I'm confused about how we fit together the sufficiency of scripture and continuation of prophecy (if there be any). Do we say to people "live according to the Bible and you can be sure you'll live a life according to God's will for you" or do we say "part of living according to the Bible is to listen out for the voice of God telling you his will for your life in a way that you couldn't have worked out with precision or confidence by thinking about the Bible and circumstances"? It seems to me like a question that matters.
I guess unless we think 2 Tim is the last bit of the Bible to be written and 3:16f needs to be read especially in the light of that, the sufficiency of Scripture (for the recipients of 2 Timothy) certainly does not rule out God giving extra additional (Scriptural) revelation later on that could not have been inferred from the previously given but then sufficient Scriptural revelation?
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Though it wouldn't prove anything conclusively, of course, it would be interesting to know the history of tongues and prophesy (with footnotes!).
In his work on John Owen on spiritual gifts, Packer comments that:
"Seventeenth-century England did not, to my knowledge, produce anyone who claimed the gift of tongues, and though claimants to prophetic and healing powers were not unknown, particularly in the wild days of the forties and fifties, the signs of 'enthusiasm' (fanatical delusion) and mental unbalance were all too evident." (Among God's Giants, p290)
For John Owen "gifts which in their own nature exceed the whole power of all our faculties" [tongues, prophecy, healing powers] belong to "that dispensation of the Spirit [which] is long since ceased, and where it is now pretended unto by any, it may justly be suspected as an enthusiastical delusion" (Owen, Works, IV:518)
If New Testament gifts of prophecy, healing-powers and tongues are for today it is weird (though I grant not impossible) that they went away for so long in so many places and that so many otherwise fairly biblical Christians fail to receive them today.
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