Origins of the Controversy

                                                       

To find the root cause of this controversy, I believe that you have to go back hundreds of years. There was a time when a supernatural perspective of life was to be taken for granted. We believed in miracles and we believed that the Word of God was true, even if we did not know what it said. The gifts of the Spirit were not talked about, because the ability to perform miracles was primarily locked within the Catholic Church as the Bible was kept from the people. The Church was the holder of all truth and you had to go through the Church and the priest to get to God as a relationship with Him was not necessarily personal, but there was still an expectation of the supernatural.  God was everywhere and there was a great awareness of His activity in the world and His presence. This was considered the pre-Modern period, or the Middle Ages (500-1300 A.D.).

                

When the Protestant Reformation and Renaissance occurred (1300-1600), there was a renewal of learning and a new emphasis on humanity. When I traveled through Europe a couple of years ago, I could see this perspective first hand from the art. Byzantine Art from the Middle Ages (first picture) was flat and iconic and represented a purely spiritual view of life. Humanity and spiritual truth were shown through symbolic representations and there was no attempt at realistic depictions. True reality was what was unseen in the spiritual realm and it could only be represented.  When the Renaissance came, there was a greater awareness placed on humanity and a more realistic depiction of this world was shown (second picture). Accuracy, detail, and an exploration of this world and the human condition was seen to be more important than an exploration of just the spiritual world and we began to develop a more humanistic view, even in our religious depictions, as you see of Jesus below.

                                                            

What began in the arts surfaced in philosophy and politics. Humanism and the Enlightenment were the results of a greater focus on this world, our reason, and our ability to understand this world through exploration, observation, and science. The Medieval monarchies that were supported by the Divine Right of Kings gave way to experiments in Social Contracts with the people and the beginnings of democracy. A belief emerged that if everyone used their “Reason” we would all come to the same truth apart from any need for Divine Revelation. This view emerged in the 1600 and 1700’s and was a reaction against the religious wars of Europe after the Protestant Reformation. To be consistent, all limitations on the unaltered use of human reason to discover truth had to be eliminated.  One of these limitations was the idea of a fallen nature or original sin. Another was the idea that God was intimately involved with the affairs of man. He gave us Reason and he took His hands off the world and allowed it to run on it’s own. This view is commonly known as Deism, and many of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment subscribed to it.

                                                   

If truth could be learned through observation and exploration, then what could not be observed or explored was not in the realm of knowable truth. It was pushed to the realm of superstition.  Knowable truth was only what could be verified objectively.  Religion began to lose it’s sway on the minds of the West as the Catholic Church opposed the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, and as Protestants and Catholics continued to war against each other and fight amongst themselves. By the 1800’s most intellectuals still believed in God in some form or another because they had to answer origin questions, but He was a distant God who created the world but had not been very involved since.

                                                         

Concurrently, the Protestant Reformation took place and restored to the church the vital doctrines of justification by faith, the prominence of Scripture over tradition, faith over works, Christ over everything else, salvation by grace alone, and the priesthood of  believers. Some Protestants established state churches (Lutherans and Calvinists in Northern Europe and Anglicans in England) where they changed their theology, but replicated much of the power of the Catholic Church with the state and culture. Others read the Bible and saw that the only true church was the Believers Church where the only members were the remnant who truly confessed Christ as their Savior and were not influenced by tradition. The Bible was the basis for faith and everything else was discarded. Baptists come from this stream of history.

                                                      

By the 1600’s, the hearts of many had grown cold and there was need for a renewal. Instead of just believing the Bible and being a part of a church, there was a need shown for an experience of Christianity on par with what the Bible spoke of. Pietism emerged in Germany and it reflected a movement toward a more personal experience with Christ. It affected groups such as the Moravians and spread to England where it affected the Separatists, Anglicans and Puritans, and Baptists. By the 1700’s, this view helped to ignite the First Great Awakening in the American Colonies and England and led to the Second Great Awakening in the United States.

                                                                

However, this view was a corollary to the Enlightenment because it placed the emphasis on the individual and a sense of objective truth based on one foundation began to be lost, and you see Protestantism split into thousands of denominations.  Over time, in the larger culture, truth was based more heavily on what one experienced more than on anything objective.  While Reason and education was continually appealed to in the Enlightenment camp, the center did not hold and you had the chaos of the French Revolution, the wars of the nation states and revolutions in Europe in the 1800’s, and the demise of the child of the Enlightenment, Modernism, through the World Wars in the 20^th Century. Darwin hypothesized God out of the equation altogether with the Theory of Evolution and a purely secular worldview emerged with no need for God or religion. Reason as a unifying force evaporated because no one could agree on how to live, and even science was shown not to have the answers. Radical Individualism grew until it’s flowering in the 1960’s where any appeal to Reason or a unified reality was lost as each person began to live by their own view of truth and relativism emerged.

                                                         

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Protestant Christianity tried to counter the scientific claims of modernism by showing that Christianity was a reasonable and verifiable faith. On the one hand, you had Liberalism, which rejected the miracles of the Bible and began to find perceived errors in Scripture. The hard teachings of Scripture were ignored and a faith that was more compatible with the scientific advance of Western culture was advocated. On the other hand, you had Fundamentalism, which was a reaction against the Liberal acquiescence to the Enlightenment, but it employed the same tactics. Instead of appealing to Reason and the Individual, Fundamentalism appealed to the Bible as a foundation, which was an excellent retort, but they ultimately failed, because their appeal used scientific means.

                                                                   

The Bible was analyzed through observation and the science of Biblical Hermenuetics (Interpretation) until it was broken into thousands of little pieces. Systematic Theologies and new teachings like Dispensationalism emerged that categorized the Bible in the same way that science categorized mosquitoes and plant life. The miracles of the Bible were believed because they were in the Bible, but the experience of miracles today was disavowed, in essence, because it wasn’t reasonable or verifiable. The Fundamentalists started at a different place than the Liberals, were faithful to uphold the cardinal doctrines of the faith and fought valiantly against the encroaching heresy of Liberalism, but ultimately capitulated to the culture because they employed the same means as the Secular Humanists. The means led them down the road of losing the larger meaning of Scripture while they broke it down into a thousand observable pieces.  While faithfully pointing to the greatest miracle of all, which is salvation, fundamentalist/cessationists disregarded other miracles and supernatural interventions as being forays into emotionalism. Those who ascribed to such practices were considered unsafe and unsound theologically.  They treated those who believed in the continuing work of the Holy Spirit through gifts and miracles in much the same way as the Liberals treated them when it came to their view of the Bible: With dismissal and thinly vieled contempt.

                                                            

All approaches of trying to get to truth apart from God's original intent, which is through a relationship with Him through faith in Jesus Christ, has led Western culture into a quagmire. We seem to be running out of gas spiritually and intellectually. Meanwhile, there is the emergence of Islamic Fundamentalism, the rise of China and India on the world scene, and the tightening grip of American Hegemony around the world to hold on to our safety and wealth. Globalization through technology and economics makes the world smaller and we are all learning from one another and conversing on a far more rapid and in depth scale than ever before. We are learning some amazing things.

                                                                  

One of these things, is that while we have been fighting battles with Liberals over the Bible and our interpretations of it (and rightfully so, I might add), God has also been at work around the world revealing Himself, leading multitudes to Christ, and performing miracles. The miracles that we have discounted from our scientific view of Scripture are happening and are being verified. Every continent on the planet is experiencing revival and a mighty movement of the Holy Spirit, except for North America and Western Europe, the home of Enlightenment/Modernistic thought. Groups such as Pentecostals and Charismatics, while they have engaged in excess and error at times, have restored to the church a reading of Scripture that expects God to work and move in the same way that He did during Bible times. This view of the direct involvement of God in the lives of people in a Supernatural way is very appealing to the masses of the unevangelized world, because the vast majority of this planet still lives with a pre-modern worldview. It just makes sense to them that God, if He is all powerful, can and does perform miracles. Consistent with this worldview are teachings that affirm gifts of healing, miracles, prophecy, and speaking in unknown tongues (1 Corinthians 12-14). 

                                                          

If you engage in a clear reading of Scripture apart from a cultural, anti-supernatural bias, and if you read the Bible as it was intended instead of as a science book from which to glean information, I believe that you are far more likely to come to the conclusion that God is working today in the same way that He was 2000 years ago. I am a continualist. I believe that God still gives supernatural gifts to His children and that He is working today, just as He worked in the 1^st Century Church in the Book of Acts. I do not believe in a separate baptism in the Holy Spirit with tongues as the sign, as Pentecostals do, but I do believe that God gives the gift of speaking/praying in unknown tongues to believers in Him and performs powerful miracles as a sign of the inbreaking of His Kingdom.

                                                         

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you why.