Sometimes a writer will make an argument that inadvertently undermines his position and leads him to attack others who would be natural allies. This is the case in the otherwise helpful book The Charismatics and the Word of God by Victor Budgen. Throughout it the author makes the biblical and historical case that certain spiritual gifts have ceased to be given by the Holy Spirit to the church. He gives two chapters to discussing the gift of prophecy in the Old and New Testaments, two chapters dealing with tongues-speaking in the early church and the tongues as spoken in the church today, and two addressing the cessation of gifts and especially apostleship with the completion of the New Testament and the deaths of the Twelve (and Paul). The rest of the book, chapters 7 through 13, examine the claims of various groups to the charismatic gifts through church history to the present time.1 Finally, he closes with a summary chapter and an appendix answering the widely-held scholarly arguments of Wayne Grudem concerning the NT gift of prophecy.2
Overall, Budgen’s arguments are sound and the book helpful, but there is one major unforced error that stood out as I read it. It is in the sixth chapter which deals with the question of apostleship and the claims of some modern charismatics to the gift of apostle. The central idea of the chapter is that the NT gives very clear guidelines for apostles, which make it easy to recognize the Twelve as having the gift and also to see that no one today has it. According to Budgen there are five markers of apostleship:
- They had great authority
- They were infallible spokesmen and interpreters of God’s word
- They were eyewitnesses of the resurrection
- They were directly called and commissioned by Jesus
- They were given the power to work wonders
Now these points are all fairly standard thinking among non-charismatics (and most charismatics, too, at least as they would define them), but I want to push back a little on point #2.
Were the Apostles Infallible?
Budgen claims that the apostles were infallible as God’s spokesmen and as interpreters of Scripture. If we see these as distinct roles, then I think it is possible to affirm the former. After all, the apostles were responsible for producing the bulk of the New Testament Scriptures, and in this ministry they were carried along by the Holy Spirit in such a way that their writings were “God-breathed.”3 But this does not mean that the apostles themselves, by virtue of their office or gift, were incapable of making mistakes. Yet the author believes they were, at least in some circumstances: “As men the apostles could fall. As men they could sometimes clash with each other.4 Yet when they stood up as spokesmen for the Lord they were infallible” (95). This is demonstrated by how they used Psalms 2, 16, 110, and 118 in their sermons and prayers in Acts 2-4, about which Budgen says, “without the unerring guidance of the apostles, these truths would not have been apparent either to their contemporaries or to ourselves.”
Is it true that no one would imagine that Psalm 2:1-2 refers to Messiah or could be seen in the Jewish leaders’ opposition to Jesus in partnership with Herod and Pilate, if the apostles had not said as much in their prayer in Acts 4:24-30? I’m not sure that infallibility was required to produce this interpretation or to see that Psalm 16:9-11b is fulfilled by Jesus in his resurrection rather than by David, whose body remains in the grave to this day, as Peter explained in Acts 2:26-29. The same could be said about Peter using Psalm 110:1 to teach about Jesus’ ascension in Acts 2:34, or Psalm 118:22 to describe Jesus being rejected by the Jewish leaders but chosen by God in Acts 4:11. In spite of Budgen’s claims, no infallible interpretation is necessary.
“A vivid example,” according to Budgen, “of this message of ‘knowledge,’ this inspired God-given ability to apply Old Testament Scripture in a binding and conclusive way, is, of course, the summing-up speech of James at the Jerusalem Council.”5 He continues, “After the accounts of Paul and Barnabas about God working so powerfully among the Gentiles through them, and after Peter’s reminder that God chose him to make known the good news of salvation to Gentiles, James stood up and gave the clinching word. He simply quoted Amos 9:11,12 as a prediction of the way in which God intended to join Jew and Gentile together in one church” (95). To Budgen, James’ choice of Scripture is unexpected – “not a scripture which I would readily have used” – apparently because no one could have guessed that Amos had Gentile conversion in mind. But again, is this really unexpected? Does it require an infallible interpreter to see Gentile conversion in the promise of Amos 9:12? I don’t think so, and the theme of Gentile conversion is readily seen throughout the Old Testament, even by a fallible interpreter such as myself.
Those Troublesome Dispensationalists?
There are some, of course, who take a different view of James’ use of the OT prophets, choosing to believe that he saw the promise of Gentile conversion in them in much the same way as you or I could. He cites Presbyterian W. J. Grier6 as saying, “It would also appear from Acts 15 that James had not travelled much farther (than the Old Testament writers to whom the mystery of Christ was not revealed) and thus quotes Amos as covering prophetically the opening of the door of faith to the Gentiles” (96). In Budgen’s eyes, this represents a “total disregard to the authoritative New Testament interpretation,” and is akin to “reapply[ing] the passage to the ‘Jewish situation’” of which “writers of similar dispensationalist persuasion” are guilty. He boldly asserts that “Such an approach stems from disobedience to the Word of God and in particular from failure to submit to apostolic rules of biblical interpretation.”
Unfortunately, Budgen and others have bought into the old notion that the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is properly revealed only in the New. This requires, according to Budgen, “that, before the New Testament was completed, we should have proper guide-lines for interpretation” (96). In other words, we cannot rightly understand the Bible without a divinely-appointed, infallible interpreter – not the Holy Spirit, mind you, but the apostles! Budgen closes the case with this astounding statement: “many charismatics and Pentecostals can blithely assert many false things about ‘speaking in other languages.’ They can only do this by ignoring the apostolic interpretation of certain key words in the chapter in question…or by using them in a sense other than that of the New Testament” [emphasis added]. Imagine using the apostles’ words in a different way than they themselves did! But that is precisely what Budgen claims the apostles were enabled to do to the words of the OT prophets, and that this is a defining mark of their apostleship.
Budgen is correct when he says that the gift of apostleship was given for a limited duration during the founding of the NT church. He is right to say that the marks of an apostle were unique to that era and exclude any and all modern claims to the gift. The apostles did indeed speak for God, and infallibly so, as have all the writers of the Bible, yet there is no evidence that they had an inspired interpretation of otherwise obscure passages from the Old Testament. In his zeal to attack dispensationalists for rightly believing that the NT writers read the Old in the same way as believing Jews had for centuries, Budgen pushes away the very interpreters who would be most likely to support his own position on the sufficiency of Scripture and the cessation of miraculous spiritual gifts. Still The Charismatics and the Word of God is a worthy survey and response to the pentecostalization of the modern church.
1Budgen wrote this book in the 1980s, so it doesn’t deal with any of the charismatic groups that have risen to prominence in the 21st century.
2Grudem argues that NT prophets were not the same as those in the OT, who spoke infallibly and were subject to the death penalty if any of their prophecies fell short of absolute truth in every detail. Charismatics of all kinds have relied on Grudem’s arguments to defend the gift when the vast majority of prophets and prophecies have proven to be false.
3Compare 2 Peter 1:21, where the process of inspiration is described, with 2 Timothy 3:16, which discusses the product of inspiration.
4See Paul’s words about confronting Peter over the issue of Jew-Gentile separation and the role of the law in light of the gospel in Galatians 2:11-14. Clearly, he believed that Peter was wrong even to the point of obscuring the gospel!
5Ironically, James was not one of the twelve apostles, so even if we take his speech as an example of an inspired-and-therefore-infallible interpretation, it would weaken rather than strengthen Budgen’s claim that infallibility was a unique mark of apostleship.
6He prefaces this quotation by calling Grier a “Brethren writer,” and implying that he was a dispensationalist. I find this hard to believe, since the book cited is a case for amillennialism, a view at odds with dispensationalism, and Grier remained a loyal Presbyterian all his life.