Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

APPENDIX 5 CHARISMATIC GIFTS IN THE CHURCH
In the days of the Apostles, miraculous signs and wonders were uniting influences among the
early Christians and drew many pagans to faith (Acts 5.12-16). Subsequently, the belief in
miraculous interventions, especially in healings, was kept alive throughout most centuries of
Christian history.
For Eusebius, the first historian of the Early Church, as for Bede writing the history of the
Anglo-Saxon Church, miracles were part and parcel of the Christian experience. Augustine,
in the 5 th Century, changed from doubting that miracles still happened after the days of the
Apostles to accepting that they did occur.
The cult of relics kept alive the belief in miracles throughout the Medieval period, but the
Protestant Reformation, in moving away from superstitions, disregarded the miraculous as a
vital element of the Christian faith. Even before the scepticism of the „Enlightenment‟,
mainstream Protestantism ruled that miraculous healings and gifts of the Spirit had died out
with the death of the Apostles.
In Calvin‟s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), 207 there are only a few references to
what can be termed the apostolic gift of healing (4.19.18-21 and 19.6). He sees the Roman
Catholic sacrament of extreme unction as originally introduced to bring healing to the very ill
(James 5.13-16), but concludes that miraculous healings passed away after the days of the
Apostles. He writes:
„...those miraculous powers and manifest workings, which were dispensed by the laying
on of hands, have ceased; and they have rightly lasted only for a time. For it was fitting
that the new preaching of the gospel and the new kingdom of Christ should be
illumined and magnified by unheard-of and extraordinary miracles. When the Lord
ceased from these, he did not utterly forsake his church, but declared that the
magnificence of the kingdom and the dignity of his word had been excellently enough
disclosed.‟
Calvin held that the Gospel of Jesus was of a different order after the days of the Apostles,
but gives no scriptural basis for this view. This cessionist view of miraculous gifts was to
become the settled view of Reformed Protestantism from then on.
The Puritans, 208 following Calvin, taught that the charismatic gifts of the Apostles were not
for the present day. John Owen (1616-1683), the great Puritan theologian of the
207 The Library of Christian Classics Volume XXI, Calvin: The Institutes of the Christian Religion
Books III.XX to IV.XX, ed John T McNeill, translated by Ford Lewis Battles, London, SCM Press
Ltd, 1961, 4.19.6.
208 I use the term „Puritan‟ not in the strictest sense to refer only to those established clergy of the 16 th
Century who opposed the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, but in the wider sense to mean those
Protestants, both Anglicans and Dissenters, who held to the main tenets of a „Calvinist‟ theology.
Such Puritans flourished up to a little after the Restoration of the Monarchy.
Page 175