Subversive Christian Unity

By Charles Marsh Recent conversations online and off have shown me something very curious. Some of what I believe to be Christian verity some other Christians take to be mere fantasy. They are cessationists and I am not . According to them, the things that I believe about tongues and prophecy and words of wisdom and of knowledge are sheer moonshine. So while in some churches I am thought orthodox enough, in others I am regarded as delusional or something rather like it. There are other matters in which, in like manner, some Christians view certain beliefs of other Christians as no better than free imagination, runaway fantasy or perhaps something worse: damaging falsehoods not harmless nuttiness. I admit to being somewhat dismayed by other Christians' newspaper novenas and Facebook prayer schemes. I do not think that is how prayer works. Their idea seems to be that if you repeat such and such a prayer x times, or republish it or "like" it or retweet it, then you w...

This is a duck. I, of course, as a Christian with Pentecostal leanings, am hard to sell on cessationism . It is like explaining to a duck farmer that ducks are extinct, like the dodo. So, what is that pudgy bird I just saw waddling by and quacking? The cessationist can only answer that what I saw isn't really a duck. On such a view, a word of knowledge that proves true and useful was just a really good hunch. Something similar is said of a prophetic utterance that brings clearer light to a situation--it was just really good extemporaneous preaching manufactured by the speaker's subconscious. Tongues in contemporary use are simply gibberish and interpretations are the same, or at best, like the so-called prophecy, a sensitive use of intuition. A great concern of cessationist theology is that new prophecy might somehow undermine the authority of scripture. But how can that be, when real deal Pentecostals and charismatics use scripture as their yardstick? The canon is clo...