God is still giving gifts

Whether we like it or not

I was praying fervently for a man in a church outside Havana, Cuba. Years before he had suffered a head injury playing soccer, and as a result his vision was impaired. When I finished praying, there was no difference in his vision. As far as either of us could tell, nothing had happened.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. I’ve prayed for healing over many people both in the U.S. and abroad. Some experienced improvement, and some did not. I don’t know why it happens this way. I don’t know the mind of God. What I do know is that I’ve seen people healed, so I keep praying.

About twenty minutes after I had finished praying for this man, I was talking to my students, who were sitting in the first two pews of the church. Our translator tapped me on the shoulder. The man for whom I prayed was standing with her in tears. His vision was restored, he said. He didn’t need his glasses. He was healed.

I asked him to give a testimony of healing, and he agreed. As he spoke, his wife ran to the front of the church and fell at his feet crying. Apparently his vision had been bad enough to have a significant effect on their lives. Praise and thanksgiving rose up in loud shouts of Halelujah! Gloria a Dios! Amén!

Several of my students were struck with suprise, even amazement. They had never witnessed anything like this before. Their churches don’t practice the laying on of hands and healing prayer. In many churches I’ve been to, it’s not clear the congregation believes God will do anything, much less perform visible miracles. God is essentially an idea, a concept that provides some heft for our ethical imperatives. Any sense of divine agency was lost long ago.

What is divine agency? Simply put, it’s the idea that God does things. Deism, a philosophy that holds that a creator god set the universe in motion and then checked out, denies any subsequent divine agency. I can’t imagine why anyone would be a Deist except as a way of explaining why there is something instead of nothing. Once you get there, though, why bother thinking about this god anymore? Why would we worship an absentee landlord? This god cannot save you, and has no interest in doing so. If we can properly call Deism a religion, it is an utterly boring one. The culinary equivalent would be a gelatinous blob of uncooked tofu.

Theological liberalism is not Deism, but it does involve a very limited notion of divine agency. Like Deism, this tradition is a response to the Enlightenment and the rise of modernity. We don’t think about the world in the way the ancients did anymore, so this line of thought goes. We have a scientific worldview. Ancient people had a superstitious worldview. We’re smarter than they were, and we shouldn’t burden ourselves with the weight of beliefs that are implausible to the modern mind. The notion of a God who would become human, heal the sick, cast out demons (which don’t exist), and rise from the dead is no more plausible than a flat earth. We Christians need to grow up. (See, for example, Marcus Borg’s Embracing and Adult Faith). When we do, we can have an experience of God that will lead us to a sense of radical depence, or allow us to develop our God-consciousness, or make us moral people, or something else inoffensive to modernist sensibilities. Historic Christian claims such as the virginal conception of Christ, the incarnation, sacrificial atonement, and the resurrection of the body are road kill on the modernist highway.

Encouragingly, I notice a marked decline in the skepticism students bring to questions of divine agency since the time I started teaching. They don’t have all the modernist presuppositions that plagued earlier generations. It’s not unreasonable to them that God raised Jesus from the dead, nor that God would heal the sick or give gifts such as tongues or prophecy. Nevertheless many have little experience moving in the gifts of the Spirit.

Another approach to divine agency is cessationism. This perspective, popular in some Reformed circles, affirms that God does exercise agency and the events narrated in the Bible are true. For some reason, however, God has withdrawn certain gifts such as prophecy, healing, and tongues. Cessationists may also reject the apostolic office (the idea that God calls people to be apostles today). John MacΑrthur and Grace Community Church recently hosted a cessationism conference, which appeals to me at the same level as having to sit through season 2 of The Golden Bachelor.

I see no clear scriptural evidence that these gifts ceased, say, with the death of the last apostle or the closing of the canon of Scripture (the common end-points for these gifts according to many cessationists). There are passages one could read in this way, such as 1 Corinthians 13:8-10: “Love never ends. 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.” There’s just no compelling reason one should read it this way. A more exegetically appropriate reading is that these gifts will cease in the eschatological new age, the time after the return of Christ. This interpretation fits readily with v. 12: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” In the age to come, when God has made all things new, we will not need prophecy or tongues or words of knowledge because we will see God face to face and know in full. Our existence will be wholly defined by the love of God, which will never end. In the meantime, however, we have these gifts for the building up of our faith and the strengthening of the church.

Love is the greatest of all gifts. The greatest miracle that God works is the miracle of sanctification, which means the cultivation of love. He has taken all of our sin upon himself on the cross, and now he is making us new. We can love as Christ loved. We are becoming different people. That is Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 13. Love is the greatest gift that God gives to us. If we speak in human tongues or angelic tongues, but we don’t have love, we’re just making noise. God is love, and we have the great privilege of being taken up into his nature (2 Peter 1:4). Everything else is gravy.

It’s no surprise that Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world. It is spreading rapidly across the globe. I expect that the next major revival in North America (and yes, there will be one) to be a charismatic revival. The First Great Awakening certainly was. The Wesleyan revival in England was a part of that move of God. Wesley himself records instances of healing, prophecy, and deliverance, among other charismatic events. Those of us who are his spiritual sons and daughters can expect the same things.