Resident Theologian
About the Blog
No true cessationist
A reflection on signs and wonders in the present and why it is that I’ve yet to find a real-life, flesh-and-blood cessationist willing to defend the doctrine.
I’ve never in my life knowingly met a bona fide cessationist. Cessationism, recall, is the doctrine that the signs and wonders performed by the Holy Spirit through baptized believers in the first century ceased with the passing of the apostles (whether gradually or abruptly, either way they stopped). So that, from about the year 100 to the present, the supernatural gifts of the Spirit—his charismata bestowed upon the faithful—no longer occur and/or have not occurred. These include:
Healings of the sick (through inexplicable, divinely wrought means)
Exorcisms (casting out demons from those possessed by them)
Dreams/visions from God (e.g., Saint Paul’s vision of the Macedonian man)
Foretellings of the future (whether prophecies, “words,” images, visions, or dreams)
Ecstatic heavenly rapture (e.g., Paul’s experience in the “third heaven”)
Suspension of natural laws (e.g., walking on water; levitation)
Spectacular miracles (e.g., feeding the five thousand; blood spilling from a consecrated host)
Relics of saints/martyrs charged with spiritual power (e.g., Paul in Ephesus)
Communication with or visions of the dead (e.g., Samuel and the witch of Endor; the souls of the martyrs beneath the altar in Revelation)
That’s far from an authoritative list; I can imagine alternative taxonomies. The point is that none of them are “natural” occurrences; all of them are “supernatural” happenings. The biblical point is that they are the work of God; that God’s word attests them; that no Christian disputes their occurrence in the first century; and that some or all of them were understood to be special gifts of the Holy Spirit, “signs and wonders” performed by him through the baptized as evidence of the power of Christ and the truth of the gospel.
Testimony of such “signs and wonders” continues throughout the church’s history. So far as I can tell, nobody disputes this either (with the possible exception of tongues). The question is whether the testimony is true.
As I understand it, cessationism rose to modest prominence in and after the Protestant Reformation and has been a durable minority strand of Christian teaching and practice since then, particularly in the last two or three centuries—before Pentecostalism, as a check on Roman superstition; after Pentecostalism, as an additional brake on charismatic enthusiasm run rampant.
Here’s the thing. I grew up in a (sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly) cessationist tradition. I know plenty of others who have similar experiences. I’m well aware that I can Google “arguments for cessationism” or “are tongues still spoken” and find plenty of websites and writers selling me on the doctrine.
And yet. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for: a flesh-and-blood cessationist. By which I mean, a Christian who is willing and able to defend actual cessationism as a principled and consistent doctrine.
Sure, I know plenty of folks who are put off by glossolalia, not to mention the peculiarities and sometime abuses of hyper-charismatic or fraudulent or prosperity preachers. But the moment I ask about the other nine signs and wonders listed above, they quickly fall into one of the following seven categories:
“Sure, I may not attend a charismatic church, but obviously some/all of those things have happened since the apostles’ passing and/or still happen today.”
“Well, I’ve not personally experienced/witnessed such things, but I don’t doubt they still happen.”
“Granted, I have trouble believing such things, but I’ll also admit that I have good friends whom I would trust with my life who swear that they have seen/experienced such things, and I can’t deny their credibility or honesty.”
“For myself, I’m extremely wary of any and all claims regarding miracles and supernatural happenings, and I take for granted that many (perhaps most) claims about them are false … but if I’m honest, since I believe they happened in the Bible, and the same God alive then is alive now, then yes, sometimes they really do happen here and now.”
“I’m a functioning cessationist, but I don’t actually have very good reasons to support it besides my own skepticism and disenchantment; in other words, I realize how weak my grounds are for disbelieving in any signs and wonders whatsoever performed through special gifts of the Spirit in the last two millennia—so I basically shrug my shoulders and admit that I’m probably wrong, though I wish I wasn’t and live that way too.”
“God is God and I am not; who am I to tell him that he’s not allowed to work wonders since the apostles? or that I know without a doubt that he hasn’t? or that it’s impossible?”
“You’d think I’m a cessationist, and yeah, I attend a cessationist church, and sure, I’m not evangelistic about this, but … [begins to whisper] … I’ve never told anyone this … [whispering quickens] … I’ve actually [seen/experienced/performed] a miracle, and I’ll go to my grave knowing in my bones that [X supernatural event] happened; you could never convince me otherwise.”
I’m not exaggerating when I say I have never encountered another type of response from a purported cessationist, at least not “in real life.” I’ve also known plenty of non-cessationists—there are a lot of Pentecostals and Catholics in the world!—and it’s a given that their response to this conversation is one long eye-roll.
So where are they hiding? Or why does it seem like once you start poking and prodding, the cessationist shell is hiding an inner charismatic—or, to be more precise, a thoughtful Christian unwilling to deny either charismatic gifts or signs and wonders in the present? I’ve speculated elsewhere that this is part of a broader American evangelical loosening. I’ve also seen, more and more, both pastors and normies falling back on one of four things:
awareness of miracles in Christian history;
awareness of miracles in the contemporary global south;
awareness of the paucity of biblical arguments for hard cessationism;
a profound respect for divine power and freedom.
Put those together, and they form a strong allergy to anything like doctrinaire denial of signs and wonders. And in the decline or absence of thick denominational identity with recognized teachers who authoritatively denounce charismatic belief, you can see why cessationism would be on the wane—if it is.
The metaphysics of historical criticism
Fifty metaphysical propositions that underwrite the practice of “historical-critical” biblical scholarship.
I, the historical critic, exist.
That is to say, my mind exists.
My mind is not deceived by a demon.
My mind is not self-deceived.
My mind has access to external reality.
External reality exists.
External reality is apt to be known by a mind like mine (and by other rational beings, should they exist).
I am a rational being, in virtue of my mind’s existence and capacity to know external reality.
My mind’s access to external reality via my rational nature is epistemically reliable.
Natural languages are, likewise, a reliable vehicle of rational pursuit of knowledge of external reality.
Natural languages are a reliable vehicle of communication between rational beings.
At least, that is, between rational beings of a shared nature.
There are rational beings of a shared nature; other minds exist besides my own.
(I can know this—I am in a position to know it, with something like certainty or at least confidence—just as I can know the foregoing propositions and many others like them.)
Mental life is linguistic and vice versa; human minds, or rational persons, communicate through natural languages.
I can (come to) know what other persons think, believe, intend, hope, or love.
I can (come to) know such things through many means, one of which is the use of a natural language.
Natural languages can be translated without substantial loss of meaning.
Rational users of natural languages are capable of mastering more than one such language.
Such mastery is possible not only of living languages but of dead languages.
Such mastery is possible not only through speaking but also through reading and writing.
Written language is not different in kind than spoken language.
The living word can be written down and understood through the eyes alone, without use of the ears or of spoken language.
The written word offers reliable access to the life—norms, beliefs, hopes, fears, behaviors, expectations, habits, virtues, vices, and more—of a culture or civilization.
This truth obtains for ancient, or long dead, cultures as for living, or contemporary, ones.
(“Truth” is a meaningful category.)
(Truth is objective, knowable, and not reducible merely to the perspective of a particular person’s mind or thought.)
(There are truths that both antedate my mind’s existence and exist independently of it.)
(The principle of non-contradiction is itself true.)
(The prior four propositions are true irrespective of any one individual’s affirmation or awareness of them, including my own.)
Records of ancient peoples’ and regions’ artifacts offer a limited but nevertheless reliable window onto their respective cultures.
Through accumulation, comparison, and interpretation of evidence, probabilities of likelihood regarding both historical events and certain cultural beliefs and practices can be reliably achieved.
The space-time continuum in which ancient peoples lived (“then and there”) is one and the same as mine (“here and now”).
The sort of events, experiences, and happenings that mark my life or the life of my culture (“here and now”) likewise marked theirs (“then and there”).
These include occurrences commonly labeled “religious” or “spiritual” or “numinous.”
Such occurrences, however labeled, are knowable and thus (re)describable without remainder in wholly natural terms.
They can be so described because religion is, without remainder, a natural phenomenon.
That is to say, as an artifact of human social life, religion is “natural” inasmuch as it is a thing that humans do, just as dancing, gambling, and wrestling are natural, inasmuch as they are things humans do.
In a second sense, too, religion is “natural”: it is a thing wholly constructed by human beings and thus without “reference” beyond the human lives that give rise to it.
There are, in a word, no gods; God does not exist.
Neither are there spirits, angels, demons, ghosts, jinn, souls, astral beings, or any other entities, living or dead, beyond this universe or however many universes there may be.
Accordingly, there are no interactions with or experiences of such beings, divine or celestial or otherwise.
Accordingly, such “beings” do not act in the world at all, for what does not exist cannot act; a nonexistent cause has nonexistent effects.
Accordingly, miracles, signs, and wonders are a figment of human imagination or an error of human memory and experience.
What happens, happens in accordance with the laws of nature recognized and tested by contemporary scientific methods and experiments.
Claims to the contrary are knowable as false in advance, prior to investigation; they are rightly ruled out without discussion.
There are always, therefore, alternative explanations in natural terms.
This principle applies to every other form of mystical or transcendent experience, whether dreams or visions or foreknowledge or prophecy or glossolalia.
The fact that many contemporary people continue both to believe in religious/spiritual realities and to claim to experience them is immaterial.
Any attempt to undertake any form of epistemic inquiry based on any other set of principles besides the foregoing ones is ipso facto unserious, unscientific, irrational, and to be dismissed with prejudice as unnecessarily metaphysical, unduly influenced by philosophical commitments, biased by metaphysics, prejudiced by religious belief, and ultimately built on unprovable assumptions rather than common sense, natural reason, and truths self-evident to all.
Christianity is a conspiracy theory
Christianity professes some bizarre things, at least according to certain standards. That doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable; it means what’s reasonable is up for debate. Let the reader understand.
Christians are people who believe in a God they cannot see, in a man who rose from the dead after being publicly executed, in countless phenomena denied by modern science (walking on water, passing through walls, stilling a storm with a word, healing a disease with a touch, hearing a message spoken in a foreign language as if it were in one’s own, and much more), in unseen and immaterial inimical intelligent powers constantly assaulting and accusing and harassing and possessing human beings, in a world beyond this world that cannot be measured or accessed through empirical or other typical instruments of knowledge, in an ongoing contest or battle between that world and this world (carried out chiefly by the aforesaid intelligent powers, some of whom are good, some of whom are evil), in the real presence of a once-dead man’s bodily elements—his very flesh and blood!—available in bread and wine that, Christians readily admit, are chemically and constitutionally identical to ordinary bread and wine, the sole difference being the words spoken over them, words that mediate the omnipotent power of, again, the invisible Creator with whom we began.
Christians are weird. Our beliefs are bizarre. Our doctrines are wacky. We are not ordinary people, if by “ordinary” you mean adherents of the reputable epistemology of the secular West as defined by scientism, empiricism, and Enlightenment.
Being an orthodox Christian, attending a traditional church, will only ensure that you are a spookier person, in all the ways outlined above, and thus less “normal” in your beliefs. You’re bound to become the kind of person who believes that exorcisms happen. Who believes that angels and demons are rampant. That our enemy is not flesh and blood but the principalities and powers and rulers of this present darkness.
Going to church, you’ll come to take for granted that this world of ours is headed somewhere, that it is governed by an all-knowing and all-powerful Intelligence, that despite the charnel house that is this earth and its history the secret heart of the cosmos is infinite Love, that in the end all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. Also that, more than occasionally, saints levitate.
You’re weird! You’re a Christian! The blood spilled on a tree by a Galilean Jew two millennia ago saves you from the wrongs you’ve committed against the Creator of the universe! Right? It makes perfect sense to me, but then again, I’m a Christian. Maybe common sense isn’t our forte.
If others suspect of us of a grand delusion, a sort of mass psychosis or hypnosis, who can blame them? Christianity is a conspiracy theory. There are devils hiding around every corner. None of this can be studied in a lab. All of it is taken on trust.
Whether that means they are crazy for not believing it, or we are crazy for buying it, one of us is right and one of us is wrong. More to the point, “what’s reasonable” isn’t the criterion for deciding. We don’t as a general matter know in advance what counts as reasonable. “What’s reasonable” is the question.
And by definition, it’s question-begging to suppose otherwise.