What are the Spiritual Gifts?

At the day of Pentecost in X2, God sent the Holy Spirit to empower a small gathering of Christ followers in Jerusalem. He empowered the apostles of Jesus with the gifts of tongues, healing, and prophecy. These gifts validated the message of the apostles as they preached throughout the city. Thousands came to Christ and the church was born. Two thousand years later, the master's seminary faculty believed the gifts of tongues, healing, and prophecy have ceased. Why is that? Where did they find that in Scripture? Dr. Abner Chow and Dr. Nathan Buznitz will answer those questions today, explaining why they are committed cessationists. To understand that term and why we believe it's biblical, stay tuned today for the next episode of the Legacy Room, a podcast that explores doctrines foundational to the Christian faith. Convictions the master's university and seminary has always taught and will always defend. To get the conversation started, here is Dr. Buznitz. Welcome back to another episode of the Legacy Room podcast. This is Nathan Buznitz. I'm joined by my co-host Abner Chow. And on today's episode, we're going to be talking about spiritual gifts and maybe waiting a little bit into some of the controversy surrounding the charismatic issue, the continuationist issue, continuationism versus cessationism. But before we get into some of those specifics, Dr. Chow, let's begin by simply defining what are spiritual gifts when we talk about this just broadly. What do we mean by that term? Spiritual gifts in some are the empowerment's enablement and resources given by the spirit in order for believers to uniquely perform the ministries within the church. So this isn't to say that they are your natural talents or something that an unbeliever may have. They are unique capacities given by God through the spirit so that believers can uphold all the life and ministry of the church. Simple enough, I think we understand that. We can see that from the list of spiritual gifts mentioned, say in 1 Corinthians 12, or 1 Peter 4, or the like. And there is a motivation, a heart, a ability in it all that is all packaged, all encompassed so that one does things for the glory of Christ. We understand that. But Nathan, I'm so glad you're here with us because one of your specialities is dealing with the issue of the charismatic movement of continuationism versus cessationism. Those are a lot of terms. Some of them are familiar with our people. Some of them may be less familiar. And people are often, if there's several issues that confuse our students, if they confuse our people, if they, if people are wrestling with these things, people talk about being open yet cautious in all these kinds of language, it is the issue on spiritual gifts. So Nathan, give us some clarity on spiritual gifts. Have they ceased? What has ceased? How do we know? How do we think through this? Yeah, well, that's a really big question that you just asked me, Abner. But maybe to get the conversation started, I think it's important to begin by simply acknowledging the fact that our desire is to honor the work of the Holy Spirit, the true work of the Holy Spirit. And we go to the scriptures in order to discover what the true work of the Holy Spirit is. And when we go to the scriptures, we're not bypassing the Holy Spirit. We're going to the very revelation that he inspired and inscripturated. And we see that, of course, in passages like 2 Peter chapter 1, that it was the Holy Spirit who moved men of God to produce the scriptures. So we want to be biblical in the way that we think about this. And we want to honor the true work of the Holy Spirit in all of this. And that really is at the heart of an issue like this is asking the question when we look around at what's happening in the modern charismatic movement, asking the question, is that a true work of the Holy Spirit? And in order to answer that question, we have to look at what's happening today and compare it to what we see in the scriptures. You mentioned 1 Corinthians 12. You mentioned 1 Peter 4. Another passage that gives us a list of gifts would be Romans chapter 12. In the first portion of that chapter. And those would be probably the three main texts that give us lists of gifts. You also have some of the gifts mentioned, for example, in Hebrews 2, verses 3 and 4. And then, of course, passages like 1 Corinthians 13 come into play. 1 Corinthians 12 to 14, that entire section is about spiritual gifts. And then you have examples of the gifts in action in both the gospels and in the book of Acts. When it comes to thinking about this particular question, the question of have the miraculous revelatory and extraordinary gifts continued. And I know you asked me a very broad question about sort of what we should expect in terms of what has continued and what has not. Sensationism, just to define some terms real quickly, cessationism is the view that the miraculous and revelatory gifts, what we would call the extraordinary gifts, that those were particularly for the apostolic age. And when the apostolic age ended, those gifts passed away. But most cessationists believe that the rest of the gifts, the auxiliary gifts, the helping gifts, the serving gifts, even certain speaking gifts like teaching and preaching, that those gifts have continued. And maybe we can talk about some of those things in a subsequent episode. Then you have other perspectives. The charismatic term is a term that's used to refer to those who believe that the extraordinary gifts have continued. But the term charismatic is so broad. It includes things even like the health, wealth, prosperity gospel, which is obviously a false gospel, that those who are evangelical in their assessment of the scriptures and of the gospel, but believe that the extraordinary gifts have continued, they tend to shy away from the term charismatic. And they prefer the term continuationist. So you have cessationist and continuationist, which I don't know that either of those terms are the most exciting, but those are the terms that define the basic positions when it comes to the continuation or non-continuation of the extraordinary gifts. And then you do have a middle ground view, as you mentioned. It's called open but cautious. And it's the idea that someone would say, "Well, in my own experience, I pretty much live as a cessationist, but I'm open to the possibility that perhaps somewhere else in the world these miraculous, extraordinary, revelatory gifts are still continuing, hence the name, open but cautious." So those would be the three main views that are held by evangelicals on this issue. When I talk with students about this particular issue, I generally frame it by organizing my thoughts around three main questions. And hopefully this will be helpful for our listeners. I think there's a tendency for cessationists to want to jump to a passage like 1 Corinthians 1310, that when the perfect comes, that which is imperfect will pass away, that which is temporal will pass away, or passages like that, and they try and prove, hey, look, this verse says that the gifts ceased at some point in church history. I don't actually think that's the most helpful way to frame the argument, especially because traditional penicostalism, for example, many penicostals would say, "Yeah, the gifts did cease at a certain time in church history, but they came back in 1901 with Charles Parham and Agnes Osman and those at the school there in Topeka, Kansas, and we don't have time right now to go into all of the history of it." But simply making the case that there perhaps was a pause at some point in church history on these extraordinary gifts or the expression of them isn't actually convincing to someone who views things through a continuationist lens. So those three questions, the first question would be the question, "What?" In other words, we need to start by actually defining what the gifts were. So I call that the what question. And when it comes to the extraordinary gifts, there's four main categories. There's the gift or office of apostleship. And then there's the gift of prophecy, which corresponded to the office of profit. And then there's the gift of tongues, and then there is the gift or gifts of healing, which would have corresponded to someone being a healer in the first century church. And when we look at the New Testament, if we start with the what question, we actually find many passages of scripture that define what it was to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, or to be a prophet, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, to be someone who utilized the gift of tongues, especially Acts 2, Acts 10 and Acts 19, it's implied in Acts 8. And then understanding the gift or gifts of healing, we see many examples from Christ and the ministry of the apostles, both in the gospels and in Acts, when it comes to those miraculous healings. When we start with that approach, when we define what these gifts were from the dozens, if not hundreds of biblical passages that inform us as to the what question, we find that apostleship and apostle of Jesus Christ had to meet three specific criteria. He had to be personally appointed by Christ. He had to be able to do the works of an apostle, and most importantly, he had to be a physical eyewitness of the risen Christ. And if you look at 1 Corinthians 15, you see that Paul there says he was the last to see the risen Christ with his own eyes, which means Paul by definition has to be the last apostle. And of course, all of church history until only the most recent decades, everyone in church history recognized that when the apostle John died, there were no more capital A apostles of Jesus Christ that was it. So that's what it means to be an apostle. And the reality that the apostolic age ends shows us that even in a list, like the list of gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, it actually there's two lists there, one at the beginning of the chapter, one at the end. Apostleship is listed first in both lists, the admission by even some like Wayne Grudom and other leading continuationists, that there are no more capital A apostles in the church today, is an acknowledgement that something in 1 Corinthians 12 that was present in the first century church is no longer present in the subsequent church. That's a significant point. And Sam Walgren in his book to be continued makes that argument very in a very compelling way. And then if you were to look at prophecy, biblically prophecy has to be 100% accurate. For you to stand up and say, thus says the Lord, whatever comes next has to be perfect because you are speaking words that come from God and God cannot lie. And if you look at the standard in Deuteronomy 18, for example, if a prophet gets it wrong, that prophet is actually executed in an Old Testament context. And I would argue that if you look at passages like 1 Thessalonians 5 and even Romans 12 6, that the early church was commanded to test prophets and to examine them carefully, 1 Thessalonians 5 says that if what they say is, if it doesn't pass the test of accuracy, then what they say is actually to be rejected. So it's 100% accuracy, authoritative, accurate revelation from God. That's biblical prophecy. And of course in a podcast like this, we don't have time to go into a lot of depth, defending all of these things. But I would argue that if you look at the scriptures that are relevant, they support this understanding of what apostleship was and what prophecy was. And then you look at tongues. Acts 2 is so very clear that it was the ability to speak a real foreign language that you had not learned before. And this idea that tongues represented some sort of nonsense language, the stringing together of meaningless syllables in sort of a private prayer language, that's just nowhere in the New Testament. Acts 2 is the clearest passage. It defines what tongues was. It was the ability to speak genuine foreign languages. And you see that reiterated by Paul in 1 Corinthians 14, when he talks about how tongues was assigned and actually quotes from Isaiah in a passage where foreign languages were clearly spoken. So tongues was the ability to speak a real foreign language you'd never gone to school to learn. It was like AI before there was AI. It was Google translate but fluent. And then you have finally healing or healings. In the New Testament, when you look at the healing ministry of Christ and the healing ministry of the apostles in the book of Acts, this was undeniable, instantaneous full healings from real diseases and real injuries. This wasn't cures for lower back pain. This was blind men seeing dead people now alive. People with limbs missing that are genuinely recreated. And I say all of that to say that when you look at the scriptures, the extraordinary gifts in scripture were truly extraordinary. They were truly miraculous for an apostle to have seen the risen Christ and be able to do miraculous signs for a prophet to speak with perfect accuracy and authority, for someone with a gift of tongues to speak in a language they'd never learned before and do it fluently. And for someone with a gift of healing to be able to heal someone through the power of God of a real disease in an undeniable and instantaneous way, that's incredible. Now you compare that with what's happening in the modern charismatic movement. And you can read even the continuationists and they'll acknowledge that they have created a second tier of each of these gifts. So for them, a apostleship is about lowercase A church planting and missionaries. And it's as prophecy is about spirit-led advice that can often be wrong and shouldn't be trusted and isn't authoritative. So it's errant and non-authoritative. And tongues is about this private prayer language that doesn't correspond to any language at any level, any real language. And healing is about, well, it's about praying for people and hoping that God answers that prayer over time. And my question is, when the continuationist acknowledges that for them, a apostleship is something akin to church planters and prophecy is something akin to errant spiritual advice. And tongues is something akin to gibberish and healing is something akin to praying for people who are sick, which is a good thing to do. It's just not the miraculous gift of healing. They are admitting that the real extraordinary gifts have passed away. They're not happening anymore. Well, I've been talking a long time, so I should probably take a breath. But that's the first of the three questions. And I think it's the most important because when you understand what the gifts were, it becomes so undeniably clear that what was happening in the first century is not still happening today. That was so helpful. Thank you for breaking down the questions 'cause I know there were a lot of them that I shot out at you. And I think that's the way people are gonna ask about it. That's the way students come up to me. And they just barrage you with tons of questions. And we can get lost in them. And so it's very helpful just to take a step back and say, wait a minute, we're not attacking the Spirit. Why don't we actually know what the Spirit told us he was doing as opposed to putting words in his mouth or ascribing actions to him that he never took. And then walking us through that first question or defining terms and walking us through that first question of what? Just knowing here are the details, the definitions of each of these miraculous, extraordinary spiritual gifts do they match with what we're seeing. And that people even acknowledge they have to create a second tier already proves that they know the first original true tier, which is really the true and only tier biblically speaking isn't happening right now. I think what might also help in the situation and maybe this dovetails into the two other questions which I'm eager to find out what they are is to remember that throughout redemptive history God has acted uniquely at specific times. What I often hear from people is, well, how am I supposed to apply that passage in my life if it's not about me? If it's not happening to me, the God's doing something miraculous here in the church. So that means it has to be happening to me too. And I remind students and I say, so do you have every day as a creation day? Every day the Exodus happens. Every day hill comes down from heaven and strikes down your enemies like in the conquest. Every day there's 10 plagues. Every day there are miraculous signs and wonders every single day. No, well, some of those things just happen one time in the Exodus. Some of those things happen one time in the conquest. Some of those things are prophesied for the future. Some of those things, well, creationally could only happen. but once at the beginning, exactly. Why do we have to have it so that it has to happen every single day in your personal life? There is a description that's taking place. There's a purpose behind that description. And as a result, you don't have to have this. That's not mandatory. You've never read any passage like that. And just because it even happened like this earlier in church history, does not require it to happen in your life. Now, in fact, if you look at the patterns of redemptive history, God acts in a very unique and supernatural way to authenticate his revelation to advance his plan to new stages, the Exodus with the Ten Commandments, the conquest with the period of history, the Davidic covenant, and all that God did with the kings and the prophets there to announce his plan, the gospels for the sake of the authentication of the gospel, which is where, as you wisely point out, Hebrews 2 comes in. These are signs and witnesses of exactly what God has been doing along. In fact, the phrase signs and wonders used in Hebrews 2 is used of the Exodus and the conquest of the past. Why? Because the idea is the same kind of activity, the same kind of authenticating activity, the same kind of unique and identifiable activity of authentication is happening once again with what we call these extraordinary, supernatural, spiritual gifts. Along that line, it is good and healthy, I think, for our listeners and for us to remember that Paul and others use multiple different terms for spiritual gifts. It isn't always just the word spiritual gifts, our gifts. You have a word that means gifts. You have a word that talks about the workings of God and their gaze. You have a work that talks about his powers, dunamis. You have a work that talks about extraordinary spiritual wonders. Carismata, where we get the word, charismatic from. When people talk about, oh, well, these gifts cease, those don't cease, things like that. And people wonder, isn't that so arbitrary? Well, how did you come up with one? Is it just based on experience? And the answer is, actually, if you sat down with Paul and you spoke Greek and you said, well, why do you say one thing ceased and the other thing doesn't cease and things of this nature? He might look at you pretty puzzled because in his mind, there are already categories. There are already different labels. He's put on it and he says, I don't just group them all into one big umbrella, even though, yeah, I guess there's some relationship. He's already made distinctions and differentiated linguistically and organizationally within what we would call spiritual gifts. We're just following the very categories and organization, the New Testament set up. Well, that being said, I want to hear about those two other questions. So what are the two other questions? Yeah, thanks, Abner. And just before we get to those two other questions, one thing more to say about the first question is that is once you define the gifts biblically in the passages that most clearly define them, then you take that definition and it helps you understand what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 12, 13 and 14. And so rather than taking a more obscure passage like 1 Corinthians 14 and demanding that that become the passage that we use to define prophecy, let's take the clearer passages on tongues and prophecy and use those to help us understand what Paul is talking about when he addresses the Corinthian confusion about these gifts in a passage like 1 Corinthians 14. I think that's very important. Especially for example with regard to the gift of tongues because you have, for example, in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul saying that he speaks in tongues more than any of the other Corinthians. And the continuation is to assumes that that means that Paul is using tongues as a private devotional speech outside of the church, whereas what we actually see in the book of Acts is tongues being used as an evangelistic tool where people are hearing the great things of God spoke in their own native language by people who shouldn't know that native language. And it makes far more sense based on that to conclude that Paul was using tongues in missionary context just as Acts 2 provides a precedent for rather than assuming that he was speaking in gibberish in some sort of attempt to, again, it really is the most important modern continuationist importing his "experience" into the text rather than allowing the text and all of the New Testament that speaks about these things to define the gifts for us in a way that's biblical. But to get to those other two questions, and I really double down on the what question because I think it is so fundamentally important. If we know what the gifts were and have an accurate and precise understanding of those things, it almost makes the rest of the argument totally moot because, again, it's so clear, even by their own admission that what continuationists are doing today in terms of practice does not actually match those, what we would call level one or tier one extraordinary gifts that we see in the Gospels and Acts. But that then raises a second question. That second question is when, the when question, if what was happening in the New Testament is no longer happening today, it raises the natural question of, well, when did it stop happening? And there's a number of biblical passages that I think help answer this question. We could look at Acts 2 where Peter quotes from Joel 2 on the day of Pentecost. I think their Peter is setting up book ends for church history and noting that the charismatic signs will mark the beginning of church history just as the cosmic signs will mark the end of church history. You could look at 1 Corinthians 13, 10 and the perfect. It's interesting, there's actually at least six major views on what the perfect is and cessationists, there are cessationists who hold each one of those views. I actually find the most convincing passage when it comes to the when question to be Ephesians 220 where the Apostle Paul talking about the church says that the church is founded on, the church, the foundation of the church is comprised, maybe that's better way to say it, of the testimony of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone. And in the context of Ephesians 220, Paul will go on in Ephesians 3 to make it clear that he's talking about New Testament prophets, there are apostles and New Testament prophets. He's linking them with a foundation stage of the church. He's actually using the metaphor of the temple, the temple only had one foundation. So it's not right to say, well, foundation gets laid again in every generation. No, he's using the metaphor of a temple to actually describe the church and he's saying that the foundation connected to that foundation is the revelation given through the apostles and the New Testament prophets that points to Christ. So Ephesians 220 would be the main text that I would look at to say this anticipates that the revelatory and miraculous work that accompanied the ministry of the apostles and the prophets of the first century was intended only for the foundation of the church and the rest of church history represents a superstructure that's built on top of it. That then takes us to the third question and the third question is why? Okay, if what was happening in the New Testament is no longer happening today, if the apostleship, prophecy, tongues, and healing of the gospels and acts of the first century church was truly extraordinary. And if those things, even though they're using the same labels, are not happening in the church today, the question is, well, when did they stop happening after the foundation of the church was laid after the apostolic age was complete? And then the question is, well, why? Why would God give temporary, extraordinary miraculous gifts to the apostles and to even Christians in the first century church and not see fit to continue those miraculous gifts for the rest of church history? And I think the answer, if you look at key passages of scripture like Hebrews two, verses three and four, is that God gave those gifts to authenticate his messengers at a time when he was giving new revelation to his people. I mean, you can see that in the Old Testament, Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elijah, there are times when God uses miracles to authenticate his messengers at a time when he's giving new revelation to his people. And that's certainly true in the ministry of his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the apostles and prophets and that first generation church that was specially commissioned by Christ and authenticated by God validated so that the message that came through the apostles and prosper. it's would be demonstrated to genuinely be from God. Now, did those miracles and did that revelation? Did it have a secondary purpose? Well, yes. It edified those who use their gift. I mean, Paul talks a lot about that in 1 Corinthians. Don't use your gift for self edification. Use it to edify other believers in the body of Christ. That's the whole point of 1 Corinthians 12 to 14. If you use your gift without love, it's meaningless and useless. And even in the healing ministries of the Lord Jesus Christ, we see this. A blind man gets healed of his blindness. Was the blind man edified? Of course. But that's a secondary purpose. The primary purpose was to demonstrate to everyone else watching that Jesus Christ is God in human flesh. And when Peter raises Tabitha from the dead or when Paul raises Uticus from the dead, was Tabitha blessed by that? Of course, was Uticus blessed by that? Absolutely. Probably a little embarrassed too, because he had fallen asleep and fallen out of the window. But in both cases, the point of that is to authenticate that Peter is an apostle of Jesus Christ who has received delegated authority from Christ himself and same for Paul. So the fact that the secondary purpose was edifying doesn't mean that that gift is necessarily going to continue. The reality is once the primary purpose was accomplished to authenticate the messenger so that the message would be established as a foundation for the rest of church history. Those gifts no longer were necessary and God's off it for them not to continue. So it's the what? The when and the why. And I think when we put them in that order, we can make a very solid case that doesn't just come from one verse in 1 Corinthians or one verse in Ephesians, but actually comes from dozens, if not hundreds of texts of scripture, and becomes a very strong argument to make the case that what God accomplished and did through his spirit in the first century was truly extraordinary. And why I get somewhat exercised about this is it offends me that there would be those who would, for example, claim that errant prophecy is somehow coming from the Holy Spirit or that speaking in gibberish is somehow coming from the Holy Spirit. When 1 Corinthians 14 is so clear that God is a God of order and not of disorder and Matthew 6 Jesus says that we are not to pray like the pagans who speak in meaningless repetitions. So for the sake of the, yeah, for the sake of the glory of the third member of the Trinity who points us, of course, to the second member of the Trinity, but for the sake of the glory of the Holy Spirit, I just find it offensive to offer cheap substitutes using the same labels when it's clearly not the same thing. And that is so helpful. I love those three questions. I think people working through them carefully can see exactly what you're saying that we're not just cherry picking verses, rather we're taking the totality of what scripture says on the subject and bringing it to bear to subject our experience to the scriptures as opposed to subjecting scripture to our experience. Just as we think about this and wrap up, I often go back to Deuteronomy 13, where there is a warning against idolatry and a warning to go against the Word of God and an warning against false prophets. And it says this even in the text, even if there's a false prophet among you, and he says, I'm going to perform a sign and wonder. And it even happens. But if he does not abide by the Word of God, he is still a false prophet. But we have seen in the modern charismatic movement are not even legitimate signs and wonders on the level of the extraordinary gifts that we observe in Acts. But even if for the sake of argument one occurred, but it doesn't match the what that scripture describes. It doesn't match the win that scripture describes it, even with the nature of being an apostle and when that commenced and when that had to have ended with Paul as you so astutely observed. And it doesn't match the why of scripture. Then we have to say no matter what, even if you have this experience for the sake of argument and it was legitimate, your experience never trumps the Word of God, the Word of God defines what the spiritual gifts are. It defines when they operate and God's purpose behind that and we need to honor the spirit in what he claims to do and what he has uniquely accomplished which gives him all the glory. Thanks for listening to the Legacy Room. In our next episode, Microcardi, a theology professor at the Master's Seminary joins Dr. Chow and Dr. Buzinitz to talk about the Trinity. That's the next time on the Legacy Room. And if you'd like more information about the Master's University where Dr. Chow serves as president, go to master's.edu. And if you're considering pastoral ministry, there is no better place to train than the Master's Seminary. For more information about our institution and programs, go to tms.edu. We'll see you next time on the Legacy Room. [Music]