Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

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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
Cromwellian period, in a treatise on the Holy Spirit, took the usual line that miraculous gifts in the Church had ceased with the death of the Apostles, but suggested that God might one day introduce them again. The teaching and example of George Fox inspired some of his followers (Quakers) to experience instant illuminations and demonstrations of the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives. The rationalist Latitudinarians of the 18 th Century, on the whole, rejected any claim to an immediate experience of the power of the Holy Spirit, and it was only with the Evangelical Revival in Britain in the 18 th Century that healings and manifestations of the power of the Holy Spirit were experienced in mainstream Protestantism. 209 Some attempt to restore the gifts of the days of the Apostles was made in the 19 th Century by the Irvingites, but in the 20 th Century the phenomenon of Pentecostalism, in its various forms, declared that the apostolic gifts had actually been restored to the Church. Although the question of healing and other charismatic phenomena as interventions of God can be divisive, it is taken seriously by groups within all the main denominations and so can be a factor furthering Christian Unity. The whole question is probably not so divisive now as it has been in the last few centuries. 209 Isolated movements, such as the 1625 Six Mile Water revival in Antrim, excepted. Page 176
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Digging Out the Embedded Church Dis
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The Maranatha Community comprises t
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Introduction CONTENTS Chapter 1 Chr
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ead, nicely browned on top. He plac
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HOW DO WE DIG OUT THE EMBEDDED CHUR
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That the Church should express this
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For Alfeyev, „Faith is a gift, th
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„heresies„ of the Early Church
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Traditionally, the Church has made
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CHAPTER 1 CHRISTIAN UNITY IN THE EA
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A certain Docetic teacher, often id
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Novatianism When the persecutions o
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The fortunes of the Arian party in
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An attempt was made in 482 AD (29 y
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was development in the interpretati
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CYPRIAN AND AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO The
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position would see baptism as not t
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The Eastern Church‟s relationship
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insisted from the second Lateran Co
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There is so much that Orthodoxy sha
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we do not talk to each other. Our t
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The question of heresy does not com
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They were missionary-minded and the
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Lollard ideas lingered in English r
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CHAPTER 4 THE SECOND GREAT SPLIT: W
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unity‟s sake in subsequent centur
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Erasmus wrote he asserts, through o
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attle-cry, is perhaps the most famo
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Regulations for the good ordering o
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Eucharist was not just a commemorat
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CHAPTER 5 QUOTATIONS ON THE THEME O
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How rare then it is to meet a man w
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are often much bigger divisions bet
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St Germanus of Constantinople - 8 t
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manner. He declared that men could
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S L Greenslade - 20 th Century: „
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CHAPTER 6 HOPES FOR CHRISTIAN UNITY
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imminent return of Christ (Komensky
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a concern that merchant adventurers
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also anti-Socinian. Calixtus himsel
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The Eastern Churches were not rent
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everyone - from outward forms to in
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Women were not usually members of t
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work in America, shows him, though
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The aim of the conference was to br
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From 1768 Harris‟s home at Talgar
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twice more to congregations of Whit
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denominations was not their distinc
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It was from the overseas Protestant
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THE OXFORD TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT Anot
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the Church of England‟s doctrinal
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„We pray that… all who desire t
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thereof, in prayer, in the remembra
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honours the Lord and his Word; the
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apostolic church enjoyed, and that
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episcopate were too radical for mos
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Denominations began to form their o
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In this Shanghai Conference‟s Rep
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With so much talk of unity and coop
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„The liturgical movement in weste
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• Sharing a corporate life of wit
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• Our acknowledgement of the Apos
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(h) The Evangelical Church in Germa
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It changed nothing in respect of do
Page 129 and 130: Some Evangelical Protestants want t
Page 131 and 132: • It is in continuity with the
Page 133 and 134: But things have changed. Richard Ma
Page 135 and 136: evangelism - (and) state what the r
Page 137 and 138: Repentance and faith are at the hea
Page 139 and 140: outcome of being justified. Agreeme
Page 141 and 142: Virgin‟s salutary influence on me
Page 143 and 144: h) Confession The sacrament of pena
Page 145 and 146: demanding way would be sin. The que
Page 147 and 148: If the opportunity for the Church t
Page 149 and 150: Ministers, priests and laypeople in
Page 151 and 152: West Kirby, near to my home, the Si
Page 153 and 154: n) Shared Study Courses There is a
Page 155 and 156: Even some Protestant churches today
Page 157 and 158: Vincent de Lérins spoke of a „pr
Page 159 and 160: It is not likely, in the foreseeabl
Page 161 and 162: Christ and are trying their best to
Page 163 and 164: upon the name of our Lord Jesus Chr
Page 165 and 166: Perhaps this dying process is now b
Page 167 and 168: economic factors giving rise to suc
Page 169 and 170: deeper ecumenism, one that does not
Page 171 and 172: APPENDIX 1 THE NICENO-CONSTANTINOPO
Page 173 and 174: APPENDIX 2 FOUR BIBLICAL TEXTS ON T
Page 175 and 176: The „apostles and elders‟ of th
Page 177 and 178: „The purpose of the Reformation C
Page 179: What all three traditions have in c
Page 183 and 184: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS
Page 185 and 186: Cullman, Oscar, The Earliest Christ
Page 187 and 188: McCarthy, Tim, The Catholic Traditi
Page 189 and 190: Letter concerning the civil princip
Page 191 and 192: Coptic Orthodox Church, 10 Council
Page 193 and 194: Parousia, 24, 68, 93 Paul VI, 10, 1
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