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‘The charismatic problem’, by a repressed charismatic.
May 21, 2008 |
Posted by ben hind · Filed Under Denominations, Problems in the Church, Christian Life, Rants
Having been in charismatic/pentecostal circles all my life I have seen a lot of weird stuff. You wouldn’t believe some of the claims people have made about how God has moved; raising the dead, the blind being given new eyes (literally), legs growing back from amputations, I could go on. I didn’t believe them… that’s why I became an agnostic and turned away from Christianity. But having come back from agnosticism to believing in a God who is all-powerful, and who has performed many miracles in the past (as recorded in the bible), it has lead me to question my beliefs. Did all that stuff really happen as people said it did?
And here is my problem. I haven’t seen anything like it. I hear stories of things in the past. I read the bible and see God doing the impossible. I see it being a very normal part of being a Christian in the first century. I even hear about it happening today in distant countries that I can’t pronounce the name of. But I have never seen it happen first-hand to someone I know.
I believe that is a problem that many charismatics, like myself, have to face. We just don’t see it regularly with our own eyes. We just believe it as part of our denominations doctrinal statement and might get a sermon on it every so often. But no one that we know of is raising the dead! There doesn’t seem to be a regular occurrence of the Spiritual gifts like miracles, healing and signs. Tongues, yes. Alleged prophecy, words of wisdom and knowledge, yes. But nothing concrete. Nothing we can put to the test. Nothing we can see happen with our own eyes.
I have no problem with the spiritual gifts, by the way. I believe they are for today, that we should be using them, that we still have access to them… I believe we have the same Holy Spirit today that the apostles had. And I still think the other gifts, like tongues, prophecy, words of wisdom and knowledge, etc. still have a very important part to play.
I have come very very close a few times to seeing these things happen. I have been on mission trips to africa where they see a lot of healings and miracles. The problem is, after we’ve prayed for someone we don’t know whether the person is healed or not… simply because they don’t speak our language to tell us what the problem is or whether our prayer worked!
I have been to a pentecostal youth camp where an evangelist prayed for people to be healed and 300 people came forward claiming that God had healed them that day. I just didn’t know any of them to know whether they were telling the truth. A few of them came forward to share their testimony of how God healed them, but I didn’t know them to know for sure.
Visiting speakers have been in our church where people have claimed to have been healed. But then again I remember being prayed for once for a pain in the muscle in my leg. The pain disappeared and I thought I’d been healed. Only to find out the next day it had come back!
Maybe I’m just too skeptical for my own good and I should just trust the claims made by people when they believe they were healed. I believe that God can do these things… I even hope that these people are telling the truth. After all, not everyone can be lying, can they?
I just wish in my day we would see these Spiritual gifts again, not just in the past. I wish these gifts of miracles, healing and signs would happen in my local area, not just in distant lands. I wish I could see them happen in my life and to people I know, not just from a testimony of someone I’ve never met.
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ben these are common and crucial issues. i’m with you pretty much verbatim - i believe that god can do whatsoever ‘he’ wishes and have been at all the services you cite where these dramatic events are purported to have taken place.
the lack of medical attestation to many (all??!!) of these ‘miracles’ provides ripe fodder for those of an atheistic bent. (indeed many from bertrand russell through to hitchens, dawkins and harris have issued the challenge for religious people to produce one single solitary medically confirmed case of an amputee being full restored and they will renounce their atheism.
the challenge, of course, remains unanswered.
it leads me to another comment on this and your last post on apologetics. i too have spent many years reading, debating and lecturing on apologetics from aquinas, through descartes, pascal to plantinga (as well as the ‘lighter’ cs lewis and gk chesterton both of whom are HUGE heroes!)
however, having encountered the continental philosophers (kierkegaard, nietzsche, derrida, husserl, heidegger, marion et al) i am MUCH less convinced on the efficacy of the apologetic task.
even in his day jesus did not use miracles as evangelistic tools. in fact as his ministry progresses, the miracles decrease, rather than increase. same with peter’s ministry and that of paul. all through the first half of john’s gospel (even though it is called ‘the book of signs’) jesus is reluctant to allow people to use the miracles as reasons they follow him. indeed asking for evidence for faith seems to me to be utterly counter intuitive. sure we are rational beings, but that is not all we are! we walk by faith NOT sight. the “evidence” we have for our faith is only the world INTERPRETED through a hermeneutic of trust.
thus apologetics AT BEST is merely road sweeping, attempting to clear obstacles people have to investigating christianity. our faith is unprovable. (can you imagine a god who could be rationally proved anyway? what possible relation would such a creation have with yhwh??!!)
but back to the point: it seems to me that miracles are very much signs only for those who have the faith to see them - everyone else sees coincidence, confusion, and hysteria. thus they have little apologetic power in and of themselves.
mmmm
it’s a tricky one!!! :o)
Hey Ben, I enjoyed the post. Being a former Charismatic myself, I know the struggles. Having allegedly spoken in tongues and believing supposed words of prophecy, I just didn’t find them as something that was necessary in the normal course of the Christian life. After reading much on church history and finding nearly nothing with respect to the evidences or practices of these gifts, I began to question their modern usage. And after reading an article in John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God on miracles (the extraordinary gives way to the ordinary), it basically convinced me otherwise. Though that doesn’t mean that it still cannot be used today as “verification” of the preached (unheard) Gospel. Though it just seems that there is little in the way of use for our established church today. I stopped speaking in tongues in 2003 and I don’t believe my life is less empty nor has less impact for the Kingdom of God. I will say, that in general, cessation is difficult to argue on purely biblical grounds.
Wow, thanks for the candor on this. Like Damien, I too am a former charismatic, stopped speaking in supposed tongues 2 years ago and actually find my spiritual life more enriched now than ever…go figure.
I do not limit God and believe He can heal or perform any miracle and at anytime through anyone. However, I don’t think the need for miracles today, especially in civilized parts of the earth, exists today as it did when the gospel was brand new and needed authentisicating through the signs and wonders.
Having spent many years in pentecostal/charismatic circles, I think it is a somewhat dangerous precedent that is being set with the expectation of miracles as the foundation for how God moves. It can create an insatiable quest for more of what we already possess through our position in Christ, which is accessed through yielding, prayer and understanding what God is communicating to us through the divinely inspired scriptures. I have experienced folks more concerned about the gifts and miracles than about Christ himself and growing in the knowledge of Him.
Ben,
I too have been a Pentecostal for a long time and I have seen so much abuse that I really saddens me today. I have posted this before but I think it is important. So many focus on the gifts of the Holy Spirit and no one preaches on the Fruit of the Spirit. I wonder what God would do with the gifts He has given to the church if we would focus on the Fruit instead. But many think that they are mature Christians because they speak tongues on Sunday but yet treat their parents, sons, etc. with no love.
Guys and Gals,
It seems I might have touched a raw nerve here! I would agree with everyone on how the gifts are abused today. My main concern in this post is that although I don’t see any biblical reason why the gifts aren’t for today, I just don’t see any genuine usage of them. Especially miracles, signs and wonders.
I didn’t know we had so many ex-charismatics! I think this struggle of belief in the gifts but not seeing them being genuinely being used does cause huge doubts. People even start doubting God when He doesn’t heal them… because we think it should be the norm. Should it be? I don’t know. I just know I’m not seeing it nowadays. Though I hope we would see a genuine usage of them again someday.
- Ben
I was having a conversation with my dad about the very issue of healings and whether or not we should believe the accounts we hear. He pointed out that Jesus, after healing people, always told them to go show themselves to the priests. Why? Because, in that day and in that society, the priests were the ones who had the authority to pronounce someone clean.
In our day and society, the people with that authority are doctors. If every preacher who miraculously healed someone followed up by telling that person to go see the doctors for confirmation of healing, it would go a long way towards lending credibility to modern-day miracles.
David,
I think that’s a really good idea! And I think many people miss a trick by doing this… it would be great publicity! I have heard of one or two people only realizing they had been healed after been prayed for when they went to the doctors and found out they didn’t have the problem anymore. But this is quite a rarity today.
- Ben