What is cessationism and is it biblical? This may not seem like a very important question, but it is the topic of Tom Pennington’s 2023 book entitled A Biblical Case for Cessationism: Why the Miraculous Gifts of the Spirit Have Ended. Pennington delivered a lecture on this topic in 2013 at the Strange Fire Conference at Grace Community Church in Los Angeles, CA, and has since developed the material into a brief book. In it he argues that the ten miraculous gifts were given as signs by the Holy Spirit, and those gifts ceased to operate within the church with the completion of the NT Scriptures.
Definitions & The History of the Movement
He begins with some basic definitions, noting first of all what cessationism does not mean. It does not say that the Holy Spirit is no longer working at all, or that He doesn’t have the power to perform miracles today. Cessationists do not hold to an antisupernatural worldview, nor do they worship the Bible in place of the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. On the contrary, Pennington says, “Everything of eternal significance that happens in the church or in the life of any Christian is due to the powerful work of the Holy Spirit” (3).
Cessationism, according to Pennington, is the view that the Holy Spirit no longer gives the miraculous gifts to believers. On the other hand, continuationists believe that these miraculous gifts either have continued since the beginning of the church or revived during the early twentieth century after disappearing (or nearly so) after the days of the early church. The charismatic movement is a subset of the broader Christian church which says that believers today should expect their experience “to mimic all the Spirit’s ministry in Acts” (6).
After giving these definitions, Pennington surveys the history of modern Pentecostalism (so named because its adherents believe the events of the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2 can happen now). He points out that those who first began to speak in tongues in Topeka and Los Angeles believed they were speaking foreign human languages previously unknown to the speakers. Even after it became clear that they were not speaking in any known language, the practice spread across all denominations including the Roman Catholic church and liberal, mainline Protestant churches. “Today, there are over 667 million charismatics world-wide,” says the author, citing a 2022 study on global Christianity.
He closes the first chapter by offering four primary arguments continuationists use to defend their position and returning to some of the ways that the cessationist position has been misrepresented and misunderstood. Here are the four main arguments for continuationism:
- The New Testament doesn’t explicitly state that the miraculous gifts will cease during the church age.
- Some New Testament passages imply the miraculous gifts will continue until Christ returns.
- The New Testament speaks only of the church age and the age to come, not a unique apostolic era in the 1st century AD.
- 500 million professing Christians who have experienced charismatic phenomena cannot all be wrong.
“But we must make a clear distinction between God’s ability to perform a miracle directly, completely without a human instrument, as it pleases Him,” says Pennington, “and His assigning to believers the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit” (17-18). No one on either side of the debate questions the Holy Spirit’s power to do great wonders; the issue has to do with the Spirit’s plan for the church.
Miracles in the Bible
Pennington then gives two chapters to discuss the role of miracles in the Old and New Testaments. Among the more striking observations in these chapters is that “Scripture records only three brief periods in which God worked miracles through uniquely gifted men” (23). The first period was during the ministries of Moses and Joshua in the 14th and 15th centuries BC, and it covered only about 65 years’ time (28). The second period was during the prophetic ministries of Elijah and Elisha in the 8th and 9th centuries, and it, too, only covered about 65 years in total (31). The final period was during the lives of Jesus and the apostles in the 1st century AD spanning at most 70 years (50).
This means that during the entire history of mankind, there have only been about 200 years during which men were given the ability to perform miracles on God’s behalf. The miracles themselves were for the purpose of authenticating the messages spoken by these prophets and apostles, so Pennington concludes these chapters saying, “With the close of the biblical canon of Scripture, God’s primary purpose for miracle-working men became unnecessary and obsolete” (59).
The End of Apostleship?
In chapter 4 Pennington argues that the gift of apostle ended near the end of the 1st century. He bases his argument on the New Testament qualifications for an apostle, which are three:
- He had to be an eyewitness of Jesus after his resurrection.
- He had to be appointed by Jesus himself.
- He had to have the ability to work miracles.
“Those three criteria distinguished a true apostle from other Christians,” says the author. “After He ascended to the Father, the apostles were to be His legal spokespersons in the early church and the chosen authors of the New Testament” (66-67). If these were the necessary conditions for apostleship, then it is impossible for anyone after the 1st century to legitimately claim the gift.
So the author observes, “it is significant that the gift and office of apostleship disappear without a clear, explicit New Testament statement it would happen” (69). Why is this important? Because the first argument in favor of the continuation of miraculous gifts is that the New Testament never plainly states that the gifts would cease during the church age. If one gift has come to an end without a direct statement that it would, then there is no reason to think that the others cannot also have ceased sometime after the founding of the church.
In fact, Pennington argues that the New Testament prophets and apostles were part of the once-for-all foundation of the church. Ephesians 3:5 says the Holy Spirit revealed to them that Gentiles would share in the promise of Christ by becoming members of the the church on equal footing with believing Jews. “They are described as the foundation of the church because God revealed His truth to them first, and they then taught that truth to the early church” (82). In Ephesians 2:20 Paul says the church has been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone. And in 1 Corinthians 3:11, he maintains that this one foundation, “which is Jesus Christ,” is the only thing on which the church can rightly be built. “Once God finished giving His revelation to and through them,” concludes Pennington, “their work was complete and their role was no longer necessary for the subsequent generations of the church. That is why we shouldn’t expect new prophets, apostles, or divine revelation today. The foundation is completely finished and has been for 2000 years” (85).
What about gifts like speaking in tongues and healing? Continuationists claim they are still being given to the church. In the second half of the book, Pennington discusses the real nature of those gifts and the rules that govern their use in the NT. We will consider those arguments next.