Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. Today we’re going to take a look at the doctrine of cessationism and I’m going to make the case that this doctrine is true. This study is extremely topical and I much prefer expository studies, so to keep this simple to follow I’m not going to read through all the various passages which serve as proof-texts for my claim – rather I’m going to tell you what they say and why they support the argument I’m trying to make. If you want to read through the passages in context to check my understanding then I welcome your feedback. Before we begin there are two major points we need to establish in order to have a conversation. First is that I hold to a faith-based presupposition that the Bible is the sufficient word of God and the only means by which we can regulate our Christian worldview. This presupposition is called Sola Scriptura, which means by Scripture alone. The second point is to clarify what cessationism is specifically teaching versus what it’s not teaching. Cessationism is not teaching a stoppage in the works of the Holy Spirit.
As a cessationist, I believe God can do whatever He wants whenever He wants and this includes miracles. For example, it’s not outside the purview of cessationist doctrine to say God still heals people miraculously. So you could pray for someone’s healing and that person could be miraculously healed and this would not impeach the doctrine of cessation. Cessationism is merely teaching that individuals are no longer empowered with the miraculous spiritual gifts listed in the New Testament which were associated with the apostolic age. God can work miraculous healing when He wants to, but there are no individuals who are endowed with the gift of miraculous healing after the manner of Jesus or His apostles.
Cessationism also teaches that there are no longer individuals receiving direct revelation from God by way of prophecy, word-of-knowledge, or speaking in tongues. A cessationist understanding of modern-day prophecy would be more like analyzing patterns of the past and using this analysis to predict what might come next. You see this with historians who are able to roughly predict the future because of their familiarity with the cyclical patterns of the past. It’s also true of psychologists and data scientists who use patterns of behavior to predict a person’s thoughts or next moves. This kind of “prophesying” is opposed to biblical prophesying in the sense of having God’s inspired words given to you or being given some kind of vision of the future.
Part of our initial presupposition in Sola Scriptura means accepting we have a closed canon of Scripture – and that this closed canon is sufficient. A closed canon presents a problem for charismatics who claim to speak with God’s words because if they did then what they spoke would have to become Scripture as well. Every word of God is authoritative. Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation, said, “Let the man who would hear God speak read Holy Scripture.” In case appeal to authority or social proof matters to you when determining your beliefs, I’ll include a list of world-class theologians and church fathers who held to cessationism toward the end of this podcast. You can look up their quotes get a finer sense of what they believed.
Okay so we’ve established what cessationism teaches and what it doesn’t teach. Now I want to make the biblical case for why it’s true. Charismatics would claim that in order to practice any of the miraculous gifts you must first be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Being baptized in the Holy Spirit is the keystone of the Pentecostal tradition. Today Pentecostalism is one of the main denominations of Christianity – you’ve probably heard of Methodism, Presbyterianism, and so on.
Pentecostalism was made popular in the western world after the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, California which took place between 1906 and 1915. This movement was led by William J. Seymour and it became known around the world. There were accounts of people being knocked out of their chairs by the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues. There were also testimonies of people being physically healed. This was a movement which was springing up primarily outside of the Church but then made it’s way into virtually every mainline denomination until Pentecostalism itself just became known as one.
At this point I should say cessationists and charismatics both agree on the reality of baptism in the Holy Spirit, we just disagree about what it actually is. The first point of contention is that charismatics believe it is normal or normative for Christians to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit after their conversion. So charismatics believe some Christians have it and some Christians do not have it. In charismatic circles there are often two inflection points a person must respond to in their faith journey. The first and most important is a positive response for salvation. Confessing with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believing in your heart that God raised Him from the dead. This profession of faith is very normal for most mainline Christians whether charismatic or not. The second inflection point is where you choose to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. This is not the same practice as the symbolic baptism in water – rather it involves being prayed for and usually having hands laid on you with the positive result being that you receive the Holy Spirit.
So charismatics separate conversion from Holy Spirit baptism. When it comes to Holy Spirit baptism, they believe some Christians have it and some Christians do not. Cessationists believe all Christians have it and that it is universally imparted to every individual at the moment of conversion – without exception. Why the difference? Charismatics need to account for the reality that some Christians claim supernatural gifts and some don’t. The major issue for charismatic theology is that God’s redemptive history has a progression. We aren’t living during the same period of redemptive history as some of the bible characters were. Consequently we aren’t living with the same realities.
Something you need to understand about the Bible is that not all of it is literal instruction aimed at you today. The most obvious example is the sacrificial system given by God to the people of Israel and carried out by the Levitical priests. The people had to make continual sacrifices to atone for their sins. The reason we don’t sacrifice goats, sheep, and other livestock at the altar to atone for our sins is because the sacrifice of Jesus is a once-for-all atonement. His sacrifice is sufficient to cover all sins of the past, present, and future. So when we read books like Leviticus we can infer important, unchanging truths about God and His people but we don’t use Leviticus as an instruction manual for how to properly carry out sacrifices. God does not change from age-to-age, but His plan does move forward in linear time. This idea of selective baptism would hold true if it weren’t for specific events in the New Testament which moved the timeline forward. We will cover these shortly.
Indeed we do see the charismatic endowment of power given to specific individuals (and not to others) throughout the Old Testament. The prophets and the judges are good examples of this. They had extraordinary gifts and power which were used to execute God’s plan on earth. So it’s true in the Old Testament that some individuals received the Holy Spirit and some did not – the ones who did were pivotal characters whom God used for His own purposes. The fundamental claim of cessationists is that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is universal to all who have faith in Jesus. In Scripture, one of the earliest examples of this universality is exhibited by Moses in the book of Numbers.
Moses, being filled with the Spirit, was still having a hard time governing all the people of Israel. To assist Moses in this struggle, God commands Moses to select 70 individuals among the elders so that they, too, may be filled with the Spirit. When Joshua witnessed these others prophesying and displaying gifts similar to those Moses had, he confused it for some kind of deceptive uprising. When Joshua took this concern to Moses, Moses rebuked him and declared that he wished all of God’s people would be filled with the Spirit. So we see an actual broadening of Holy Spirit baptism from Moses to the 70 elders – and then we see Moses himself advocate for universality of this baptism. Again that’s the just one of the earliest textual foreshadows of what I’m trying to claim here. This wish of Moses would become an actual prophecy when it’s repeated by the prophet Joel later in the story. Joel prophesied that the Holy Spirit would be poured out on all flesh.
This prophecy is fulfilled in the book of Acts with the event called the day of Pentecost. On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit of God filled the Jewish believers and they began to speak in foreign languages. The apostle Peter declared that this event was a fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel. Remember Joel’s prophecy was that the Spirit of God would be poured out on all flesh. On the day of Pentecost all of the Jewish believers received it. It was not selective. The universality of this baptism of the Spirit is further explicated three more times through the book of Acts. We see it happen to the God-fearers (these people were essentially Hellenistic Greeks who believed in the God of Israel), we see it happen to the Samaritans, and we see it happen to the Gentiles. So there’s not just one Pentecost experience in the book of Acts: there are actually four.
In Acts chapter 8 we see Peter and John visit Samaria because there was news the Samaritans received the Word of God from the evangelist Phillip. When Peter and John got there they saw that the Holy Spirit had fallen upon none of them. They prayed for the Samaritans and all of the Samaritans received the Holy Spirit. That event was the second Pentecost experience. The third experience occurred with Peter and Cornelius. Cornelius and his household were the God-fearers. Peter preached to them and while he was speaking the Holy Spirit fell upon Cornelius and all of his household.
So across these first three events we see universality in the baptism of the Holy Spirit – and this universality is also the main takeaway for Peter and the other apostles. They didn’t infer some kind of separation between conversion and Holy Spirit baptism – they inferred that if the Samaritans, God-fearers, and Gentiles were all subject to the same Pentecostal experience, then these groups of people had equal right to become members of the body of Christ. Again it’s happening to all of them, there is no separation on the basis of Holy-Spirit-empowered people over against non-empowered people. The fourth pentecostal experience happened when Paul came to Ephesus where there were Gentile disciples who had been baptized in water but who had never heard of the Holy Spirit. Paul laid hands on them and all of them received the Holy Spirit.
In making the case for cessationism the first fundamental truth is that every individual who has faith in Jesus is also indwelled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit. There are no Christians who are not spirit-filled which means the charismatic doctrine of being filled with the Spirit separate from conversion can’t be true. Charismatic theology depends on these four occurrences in the book of Acts because they use the occurrences to suggest there is a separation and there are some believers who are Spirit-filled and some who aren’t. But the apostolic conclusion of these four events was universality, not temporal separation.
You might be wondering why I said Holy Spirit baptism and conversion happen simultaneously and universally, while the events in Acts appear to show temporal separation between conversion and Holy Spirit baptism. We see converted people who do not yet have the Spirit – although we never see a mixed group of some who do and some who don’t. The reason we see separation between conversion and Holy Spirit baptism in these four events is because the Spirit had not yet been poured out on these people-groups. When you read the book of Acts your’e actually reading an advancement period of redemptive history. You’re seeing it move forward from one dispensation to another in real-time.
Jesus told His followers to be His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the outermost parts of the world. The four events in Acts follow exactly what Jesus said. The day of Pentecost was for Jews (or Jerusalem and Judea), the next pentecostal event is for Samaritans (or Samaria), the third and fourth ones are for God-fearers and Gentiles (or the outermost parts of the world). You can see it following the pattern of what Jesus commanded. The stories document both the gospel and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit expanding into the world at the same time. All four of these events are momentous, pentecostal points in history – that’s why they’re recorded in Scripture. One of the key differences between charismatics and cessationists is that charismatics believe these pentecostal events never stopped – in other words they believe Joel’s prophecy is still being fulfilled every day. Cessationists believe the events in Acts are recorded precisely because of their momentous nature and now that the events are complete the Holy Spirit by default indwells all believers who come to Jesus without exception.
Now that we’ve established the apostolic perspective that baptism of the Holy Spirit is complete with conversion of every individual believer, let’s take a look at seven more biblical reasons why cessationism is true. The first reason is because miracles in Scripture had a unique role and purpose. Popular belief might hold that the Bible is full of people performing miracles left and right and with no extraordinary significance. But this belief is false. Scripture actually only documents humans being empowered to perform miracles during 3 specific windows in history. The first window is the time of Moses and Joshua – a period of about 65 years. The second window is the time of Elijah and Elisha – another period of about 65 years. The third window is the time of Christ and His apostles which at the longest was a period of about 70 years. It’s true that there are other times when God Himself performs miracles – but the window of time for Him empowering humans to do it is only about 200 years. That’s 200 years out of thousands of years of human history.
The reason for the extreme rarity of miracles is because the purpose of miracles has always been to confirm the credentials of a divinely appointed messenger. When I say divinely appointed messenger I don’t mean just a preacher. I mean a prophet in the mouth of whom God has put His actual words which then became Scripture. This pattern of using miracles to confirm the authority of divinely appointed messengers began as far back as Moses and his exchanges with Pharaoh. Part of the problem for the biblical prophets was always whether or not the people would believe them to be authentic messengers of God. God gave them the power to work miracles for the sole purpose of glorifying Himself and confirming their credibility. Jesus Himself cited this as the reason He performed miracles.
Miracles had the narrow purpose of confirming revelation and they weren’t even used as effective evangelism tools. That’s why the scriptures say seeing one raised from the dead would not be enough to cause a person to believe if Moses and the prophets were not enough – miracles are not sufficient for evangelism if Scripture is not sufficient. This just means that if a person doesn’t believe the Bible then no amount of miracles will bring them to saving faith in Jesus. The reason miracles were performed in the first century Church is because this was a period rich with revelation and such revelation needed to be confirmed. If you believe in a closed canon of Scripture then you also believe revelation has ceased and therefore no longer needs to be confirmed by way of miracles.
The second argument for cessationism is the end of the gift of apostleship. To be an apostle you had to meet three criteria. First was that you had to be a witness of the resurrected Christ. Second was that you had to be personally appointed by Christ. The third was that you had to be able to work miracles. Unless you believe there are people alive today equivalent to the apostle Paul or the apostle Peter in this regard, then you must admit the gift of apostleship has ceased.
What’s interesting is that nearly all Christians would agree that such apostles are no longer alive and yet the Scriptures never explicitly say that apostleship will cease. So charismatics claim to believe in the miraculous gifts because the Bible never explicitly says they ceased, and yet they don’t believe in people claiming to have the authority or equivalence of the apostle Paul even though Scripture never explicitly says the gift of apostleship will cease. Almost all charismatics are de facto cessationists in this regard. They admit a closure to the apostolic age and yet they import the miraculous spiritual gifts most commonly associated with apostles.
The third argument for cessationism is the foundational nature of the New Testament apostles and prophets. Ephesians says the church has been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ being the cornerstone. That foundation is complete. Our works become part of the superstructure of the Church and these works will be tested – but they do not make up the foundation of the Church. This goes back to our initial presupposition that Sola Scriptura is true and that Scripture is sufficient as being the only thing necessary to mediate a Christian worldview.
The fourth argument for cessationism is the nature of the New Testament miraculous gifts. If the Holy Spirit were still gifting believers with the miraculous gifts, then these gifts would be the same gifts we find in the New Testament – but they are not. Consider the gift of speaking in tongues. When the Spirit of God fell on the Jewish believers at Pentecost they spoke in tongues – but the Bible says this gift was the ability to speak in a known human language which was not their own. It would be like an English-speaking person switching to German while never having studied German.
We see this again when Cornelius and his household spoke in tongues upon their conversion – they spoke in actual foreign languages because Peter says the phenomenon was exactly the same as what happened at Pentecost. Later in Acts 19 we see the gift of tongues and there is nothing in the context which suggests it was any different here than at Pentecost or in the household of Cornelius. Luke (who wrote the book of Acts) already knew what Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians concerning tongues and still Luke specified tongues a speaking in a known foreign language. When Paul admonishes the Corinthian church to always have an interpreter if a person is going to speak in tongues, he’s saying have someone present who also speaks the language (like Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.)
The charismatic gift of prophecy does not match the gift of prophecy enumerated in the New Testament either. Both the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament prophets spoke the infallible words of God given to them by way of revelation. No one who believes in the infallibility of Scripture can also hold consistently to the idea that prophets are still alive at this moment. We can certainly see people practice something that looks like prophecy insofar as they may study patterns of history and if their knowledge is adept enough they can predict what’s coming in the future. But this kind of prophecy is simply not the same as speaking the actual words of God. Prophets in the Old and New Testaments were authoritative enough to preface their speech with Thus Saith the Lord, and nearly zero charismatics with any biblical sense today would agree that modern prophets are performing these same miracles.
Neither does the charismatic gift of healing match the gift of healing described in the New Testament. When Jesus healed someone, or when the apostles exercised their miraculous gift of healing, the results were complete, immediate, undeniable, and verifiable. They had the capacity to cure any kind of sickness and any kind of illness. Compare these miraculous gifts with faith-healers of today and you will see that modern results are often incomplete, usually temporary, and rarely if ever verifiable. So you can see the gifts of tongues, prophecy, and healing simply do not match the gifts on display in the New Testament. The reason these charismatic gifts do not match the New Testament gifts is because they are not the New Testament gifts because the New Testament gifts have ceased.
The fifth argument for cessationism is the testament of church history. When you arrange Paul’s letters in chronological order you can see that after his fourth letter which was 1 Corinthians, Paul wrote 9 other letters to 6 different churches and never once did he mention the gift of tongues. In the pastoral epistles, written at the end of Paul’s ministry and designed to be permanent directives for the post-apostolic Church (which is the era you and I are living in now) there is no mention of the miraculous gifts. Hebrews says that God’s last word to us is His Son and those whom His Son appointed. So that’s Jesus and the apostles. Hebrews delineates the deliverance of the gospel into three generations. First is Christ; second is the apostles; third is us in the church age. Hebrews also points out that God worked with this second generation (the apostles) and confirmed the gospel by way of signs and miracles. Hebrews was written in 70 A.D. and already at this time the miraculous gifts were in decline if not completely ceased.
At the beginning of this episode I promised you a list of famous theologians going all the way back to the early Church who held to the doctrine of cessationism. I will now supply that list: Origen (who was an early Christian scholar known for his brilliance – he once dictated seven separate books simultaneously to his scribes), Athanasius (who was an early church father, the 20th pope of Alexandria, and the chief defender of Christian orthodoxy against Arianism), John Chrysostom (who was an early church father and archbishop of Constantinople), Augustine (who was a theologian and philosopher of the early church and who attained sainthood), Martin Luther (who was the father of the Reformation), John Calvin (who was known as the most preeminent theologian of the Reformation), Jonathan Edwards (who Encyclopedia Britannica voted as the foremost scholar ever produced by America), Matthew Henry (whose biblical commentaries are the most widely used in churches today), Charles Haddon Spurgeon (who was a baptist preacher so influential he’s become known as the “Prince of Preachers”), George Whitefield (who was an Anglican evangelist and one of the founders of Methodism), and B. B. Warfield (who was a professor of theology at Princeton and served as the last principal of Princeton Theological Seminary).
So you can see it’s not just me and not just some unimaginative reformed Christians making these claims. Cessationism is a rock-solid, biblical doctrine well-defended by the most brilliant Christian minds in history.
The sixth argument for cessationism is the sufficiency of Scripture. The New Testament teaches that the result of God’s completed revelation is an all-sufficient Scripture. Psalm 19, Psalm 119, and 2 Timothy 3 are just three of many passages in Scripture which uphold its sufficiency. Scripture is sufficient to transform your heart and turn you into the likeness of Jesus. Scripture is the only vehicle by which the Holy Spirit does this work in your life. Martin Luther, when commenting on Psalm 119 said, “God wants to give you His Spirit only through the external word.”
The seventh argument for cessationism is the New Testament rules laid out for the miraculous gifts. Paul gives extended directives for the gift of tongues and the gift of prophecy and how they should be conducted within church services. We’ve already established that he’s speaking specifically to the church in Corinth during the apostolic age because we’ve established that these miraculous gifts have ceased. But even if he wasn’t, most charismatic congregations disregard Paul’s directives for these gifts. If your exercising of the gifts isn’t in keeping with Paul’s directives for the gifts, then it can’t be the Holy Spirit working through you because your expression is in clear disobedience of the Holy Spirit.
All of that is the case for cessationism. I hope you’ve found this content edifying and that it doesn’t tear you down. Truth matters. If we drift away from the truth then we can do nothing. I don’t love doing episodes which are primarily polemic in quality because they can feel like vicious takedowns – but understand this kind of thing is not directed at the people themselves who identify as charismatics. It’s directed at the theology which supports the movement. We need the word of God, and we need it so much that we fall into great peril when our attention is focused elsewhere for too long. Don’t allow your Christianity to be defined by the miraculous gifts or lack thereof. Keep your eyes on Jesus and love your neighbor as yourself. God is with you and He will help direct you on your paths.
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