A few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of about thirty believers from various fellowships in our area who came together to hear a woman teach about her experiences with deliverance. Most of these people attend churches where deliverance is not practiced and, in some cases, not permitted. My sense was that most assumed that their churches did not exercise all the gifts of the spirit nor consider deliverance from demons to be needed or legitimate because they simply had no experience in those spiritual arenas. To some degree that is true, but it actually goes much deeper than that.
What many believers in mainline evangelical churches (Baptist, Church of Christ, Bible Church, Methodists, Nazarenes, Christian Church, etc.) don’t understand is that there is a formal theology that flatly rejects the notion that God still performs miracles, speaks to men directly, and operates through all the gifts of the Holy Spirit. That theology is called Cessationism, which holds that the miraculous works of God and especially the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased to operate somewhere around the end of the 1stCentury. Most of their pastors will have been trained in that theology in their seminaries. Not only were they taught that this view of scripture is the truthbut there is also a great deal of pressure in denominational circles to maintain that “orthodoxy” in the churches they lead.
I think it might be helpful for many believers who read this blog to be given a thumbnail sketch of this theology and a biblical response to it, so I want to do that in this blog and, one or two to follow.
Let me start with some historical context. This theology began to immerge around the time of Martin Luther and the Reformation (1500 -1600). This was a time when many felt that the Catholic Church was abusing its power, which was immense throughout Europe. Nations and individuals were beginning to push back against the church’s control and break away from it. As an individual and priest in the Catholic Church, Martin Luther led the way.
The initial idea was not to break away from the Catholic Church but to reform some of its practices. However, the Catholics were unbending so that men and nations, such as England, began to break away. At the same time, it was an age of exploration, discovery, and invention. Science was beginning to make its mark and the intellect of man was beginning to be exalted. By the 1700’s, the “Age of Reason” or “Enlightenment” was in full bloom. Reason and logic, were the foundations of science and began to be seen as the hope and salvation of mankind. Some began to believe that science was the new Savior and that scientific truth was the only real truth that could direct the affairs of men.
You need to remember that in that age, nearly every university in the western world was established to educate pastors and church leaders and to take the gospel into the entire world. The earliest scientists and philosophers were intellectuals in those seminaries. Whatever influenced those university leaders would eventually influence the church because they trained and ordained those who would lead their churches.
In that cultural, intellectual environment, many men began to question the miraculous events of the Bible that did not seem reasonable or scientifically plausible,as if God could not or would not act outside of his own created natural laws. Some historians believe that Luther and others denied that God still manifested himself in miraculous ways because the Catholic Church claimed to be stewards of the miracles of God. If miracles were authentic, then God was with the Catholic Church and breaking from the Catholics would seem to be the same as abandoning God.
More than likely, the greatest impulse behind a denial that God still works miracles among men was the fact that the most influential men of that age had not personally seen any miracles. If you are a church leader, and you have not seen or experienced any of the miracles recorded all over the pages of the Bible, you have a dilemma. If God is still in the business of doing miracles and you aren’t seeing any…there may be something wrong with you or your doctrine or your denomination that displeases God.
In an age where being scientific and rational was more culturally applauded than having faith in the impossible, the leading religious scholars of the day, opted to find a theology that declared that God was no longer in the business of miracles. They simply declared that the Age of Miracles had ceased, because God’s purposes for his miracles had been fulfilled. That same theology has been passed down to most mainline churches in the 21stCentury.
In my next blog, we will discuss the purposes the Cessationists have assigned to God’s miracles in the New Testament and why they say miracles or miraculous gifts are no longer needed by the church today. Then we will talk about that! By the way, I was trained and ordained in a Cessationist fellowship and held those positions for a number of years before God led me to a church that embraces the supernatural works of God.
