Spiritual gifts: A nuanced position worth learning from?

This is the third in a series of articles written by Adam Ramsey of Liberti Church, Gold Coast, Australia, exploring what we can learn from Martyn Lloyd-Jones today in relation to the Reformed faith and a Scriptural understanding of spiritual experience. The essays, of which there are five in total, need to be taken together. They are taken from original, yet-to-be published research undertaken by Ramsey for his Doctor of Philosophy thesis. They also, we hope, represent something of the generous-hearted, thoughtful, Biblical approach that en was founded 40 years ago in 1986 to embody. Read Ramsey's first article here and his second article here. Next month: “Why Martyn Lloyd-Jones was not a charismatic.”

Martyn Lloyd-Jones did not categorise himself as a cessationist, at least not in the sense articulated by evangelicals like B.B. Warfield, whose reading of the New Testament and church history excluded the continuation of the gifts of the Spirit beyond the apostolic age.

The only sense in which the cessationist label might accurately be used of Lloyd-Jones, is in his enduring belief that the offices of apostle, prophet, and evangelist listed in Ephesians 4v11 were foundational offices of the church, and therefore unrepeatable, as has already been established. Yet as the evidence presented in previous articles has shown, he believed in the continuation of the charismata, asserting that God sovereignly bestows these gifts when He chooses, and that history attests He has done this ^[1], and will continue to do so. “What astonished his family,” writes his grandson Christopher Catherwood, “is that there was ever any misunderstanding at all.” He elaborates on the Doctor’s position on spiritual gifts and supernatural phenomena, as his family understood them: “What he taught was there, plain as a pikestaff… Yes, he did believe in the continuation of spiritual gifts. But, no, he did not believe that they could be claimed, on demand as it were, nor did he believe that the gift of tongues was the necessary evidence of baptism with the Spirit. As for whether something was genuine, we have seen that he believed all phenomena must be tested.” ^[2]

While he expressed significant cautions for some of the beliefs and practices within the Charismatic Movement – in particular, warning against what he labelled as the danger of “fanaticism” – he nonetheless argued that there was an even greater threat to the church at the present time. That real danger, in his view, was that of “being satisfied with very much less than what is being offered in the Scripture, and the danger of interpreting Scripture by our experiences and reducing its teaching to the level of what we know and experience.” ^[3] For Lloyd-Jones, such a capitulation constituted a serious diminishment of both the New Testament Scriptures as well as the experience of New Testament Christianity and, ultimately, quenched the Spirit. He refused to surrender to the accepted mediocrity of much of the spiritual experience he saw within his own Reformed Evangelical stream of the church, holding it to be a reductionistic view of key sections of Scripture. Looking at Biblical passages that spoke of spiritual gifts, such as Romans 12:6-8 and 1 Corinthians, he asked:

“Are you going to say: ‘Oh no, of course that has nothing to do with us; that was the early church before we got the Scriptures’? But if you begin to say that, you will find that very little of the New Testament applies to us today… No, that is about the worst form of dispensationalism that one can ever be guilty of – yet there is a great deal of this teaching at the present time. I think, therefore, that this is one of the most urgent matters confronting us.” ^[4]

Lloyd-Jones categorically rejected the cessationist argument, that spiritual gifts ceased with the apostolic generation, and he did so on the basis of the Scriptures themselves with a rigorous appeal to their authority. “The Scriptures never anywhere say that these things [speaking of spiritual gifts and miraculous phenomena] were only temporary – never! There is no such statement anywhere,” ^[5] he insisted. He held an enduring concern, that those who hold to this view placed an unbiblical limitation upon the sovereignty of the Spirit.

One key text at the time that was often marshalled in support of cessationism was 1 Corinthians 13, particularly verse 10, where the Apostle Paul writes that supernatural gifts will cease “when the perfect comes”. Some cessationists interpreted “the perfect” as a reference to the completion of the New Testament canon, thus rendering the revelatory gifts, and their corresponding miraculous gifts that authenticated the divine message, as having fulfilled their purpose, and therefore, no longer necessary. Lloyd-Jones was emphatic in his rejection of this interpretation. Aligning with what is now the dominant scholarly consensus, he argued that “the perfect” in this passage cannot credibly be understood as the completed Scriptures, but instead is describing eschatological fullness. The “perfect” is that age of everlasting glory, after the return of Christ and the consummation of God’s redemptive plan, ^[6] in which God’s people “no longer see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (verse 12), with the Lord Himself. To assert otherwise, Lloyd-Jones contended, “is inconsistent, and contradictory – indeed, there is only one word to describe such a view, it is nonsense.” ^[7] His critique reveals, yet again, his persistent demand for the convergence of Word and Spirit, in which neither are diminished. He concludes this argument by saying: “So you see the difficulties men land themselves in when they dislike something and cannot fully understand it and try to explain it away. All things must be judged in the light of the Scriptures, and we must not twist them to suit our theory or argument… there is nothing in all of Scripture itself which says that [spiritual gifts] are to end, and further, every attempt to make the Scriptures say that leads to the same dismal, impossible conclusions that we have already seen in the case of 1 Corinthians 13.” ^[8]

His openness to the Spirit and to the more supernatural dimensions of Christianity – carefully grounded in, and subject to the authority of Scripture – is what made Lloyd-Jones atypical of his Reformed tradition in the mid-20th century. ^[9] This is what the Doctor meant when he described himself as “a Bible Calvinist, not a system Calvinist”. ^[10] In contrast to the tendency on the side of the Reformed tradition, to think that if Calvin did not believe something, then neither should they, Lloyd-Jones – while revering heroes of the faith like John Calvin – was convinced that “ultimately if Calvin said one thing and the Bible said another, [then] Calvin was wrong.” ^[11]

Endorsing spiritual gifts across church history

As an avid student of church history, he saw the charismata evidenced in ebbs and flows at various points in the life of the church. In a lecture delivered in 1971 at the Christian Medical Fellowship, he references church fathers like Tertullian and Augustine and the way in which both made use of the argument that the miraculous phenomena which was occurring in their own times was part of their apologetic for the legitimacy of the Christian faith. ^[12] He goes on to confess that he has “never been satisfied with Warfield’s answer to that,” ^[13] outlined in Warfield’s polemic work on cessationism, Counterfeit Miracles. ^[14] On the contrary, Lloyd-Jones states: “I find it is almost laughable that people should say that they do not see any evidence of the gifts today. It means, of course, that they are only thinking of speaking in tongues or of prophecy or of miracles. They do not realise that all these others are equally gifts – the apostle does not seem to draw any distinction, but puts them all into the same category. We are entitled, therefore, to argue that if some of these gifts have been in evidence throughout the history of the church and still are, then why not all of them?” ^[15]

For Lloyd-Jones, “the history of the church was alive with the activity of God,” as Peter Joy Lewis points out in his Foreword to Unspeakable, “and it was from such an historical as well as Biblical perspective that he was able to evaluate movements and trends in our own day.” ^[16] We have already seen the way in which he viewed the validity of spiritual gifts like prophecy and miracles occurring among the Scottish Covenanters like Alexander Peden and John Welsh. Within his own time, Lloyd-Jones accepted the claims of miraculous demonstrations of the Spirit’s power in the Indonesian revival (1965) ^[17] as well as that of Pastor His in China of whom he writes: “It seems as if God has granted them in the initial stages of a given work, or when some special attestation of the truth has been needed.” ^[18] He even recounts the story of a minister who received the gift of prophetic foreknowledge during the revival in 1904–1905, who “was told beforehand of something that was going to happen in his church, not once, but morning by morning … he would be given direct and exact information of something that was going to happen during that day, and it did happen.” ^[19]

Cessationism as indistinguishable from the error of Higher Criticism

Throughout his life, there is a detectable, increasing consciousness to bring congruence between the paradigmatic pattern of revival that he saw in the book of Acts, and what he longed to see in his own day. Lloyd-Jones warns of the danger of beginning one’s functional understanding of church history at some later period of time, and thus becoming captive to tradition, instead of asking God for the kind of Christianity that was demonstrated in the New Testament. He warns against starting one’s theological convictions at the Reformation or the Westminster Confession, contending that believers must begin their church history with the New Testament. ^[20] He charged cessationists with being “guilty of the error known as ‘higher criticism’ … that sits in judgment on the Scriptures and says, ‘Of course, yes, that was only temporary, that does not apply to us.’ You decide what is acceptable and what is not … This argument [of cessationism] is exactly the same.” ^[21]

Unsurprisingly, over the years that followed the publication of these sermons, the reaction from cessationists to such a stinging rebuke was significant. Geoffrey Thomas sought to downplay these beliefs, arguing that Lloyd-Jones was, in fact, a cessationist; that his only connection to the Charismatic Movement “was a coincidence of terminology”; and that “the great theme of his book of sermons on the gifts of the Spirit, Prove all Things, is not anti-cessationism but the sovereignty of the Spirit in his operations.” ^[22] Leigh Powell labelled his charge as “unfair”. ^[23] Peter Masters wrote off the entire book, Prove All Things, as “probably the worst piece of exegesis and the most ill-informed book ever to appear under the Doctor’s name,” due in part to the “withering and intolerant” comments that were aimed toward cessationists. ^[24] A synod of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland in May of 1986 even went so far as to pass a formal censure on the books of Lloyd-Jones, out of fear “they were allowing Pentecostal and charismatic theology to take root in Reformed circles”. ^[25] One of those who passed the formal censure said of him: “Dr Lloyd-Jones knew quite well that his name was being linked with charismatic theology, and if he wished, he could have easily distinguished his position from that of the Charismatic Movement with its pretensions to tongue speaking. The plain fact is, that whilst he vigorously condemned non-experiential Calvinism as dead orthodoxy, there is no condemnation of the central tenets of the charismatic position.” ^[26]

“The excesses of children are bet-ter than the inactivity of death”

Yet what seemed to be overlooked by critics from within his own theological tribe of Reformed Evangelicalism, is that the basis of Lloyd-Jones’ rejection of cessationism, was his own evangelical commitment to the Reformation principle of sola scriptura. His argument demands an answer to the question: what is the difference between theological liberals who minimise the authority of the New Testament by casting doubt on its inerrancy, and cessationists who minimise the authority of the New Testament by casting doubt on its applicability? On what Biblical grounds should believers disobey the apostolic command to “earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy” (1 Cor.14v1)? As has been pointed out repeatedly, Lloyd-Jones was more concerned about the threat of spiritual deadness, than that of spiritual excess, as it concerned the twentieth-century Church. He had come to increasingly feel “that a certain aridity had entered the Christian church, including the Reformed wing of which he was a part”. ^[27] He believed the early church had to deal with spiritual excess as a natural consequence of the abundance of life and spiritual vitality that marked their experience. Thus, he states in a 1964 sermon: “It is always life that tends to lead to excesses. There is no problem of discipline in a graveyard; there is no problem very much in a formal church. The problems arise when there is life.” ^[28] He then asks: “Would anyone like to claim that, speaking generally, that is the danger in the church today? Well it is not, of course, and the reason is that we have been tending to interpret the New Testament teaching in the light of our own experiences.” ^[29]

In other words, as Iain Murray summarises, at the time in which Lloyd-Jones delivered these rebukes, “deadness was more common than excitement. It would be a disaster for evangelicals, and for men of Reformed convictions, if they became preoccupied with answering the new Pentecostal claims instead of recognising that ‘the greatest need of the church is to realise again the activity of the Holy Spirit’”. ^[30] The Doctor saw in the New Testament depictions of the early church, a pneumatic church who believed the gospel, who were filled with the Spirit, and who had received spiritual gifts that existed for the building up of the body of Christ. ^[31] He saw “a living body, thrilling with life, a life that manifested itself in various ways, sometimes, even, in excesses.” ^[32]

It was these excesses, in which spiritual gifts were misused within the church, that the Apostle Paul corrected in his letters—most notably in 1 Corinthians v12-14, yet also in Romans 12v6-10 and 1 Thessalonians 5v19-22. Lloyd-Jones, as we will see in the next section, seeks to follow the apostolic example of Paul, in the way he critiqued elements of charismatic theology that he saw as out of alignment with the plumbline of God’s Word. He acknowledged that it is “children [who] tend to run to excesses”. But that was not cause for him to reject or minimise all expressions of the supernatural dimensions of the charismata outright, as was the default position of the cessationism that he examined and had found wanting in both Scripture and history. On the contrary, he maintains that dead orthodoxy is still the greatest danger to the church of his time, for “the excesses of children are better than the inactivity of death.” ^[33]

References

1. Powell, “The Legacy of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981): Some Analytical Perspectives”, 52.
2. Christopher Catherwood, Martyn Lloyd-Jones: A Family Portrait, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994), 123.
3. Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable, 18. “The second danger then, is that of being satisfied with very much less that what is in the Scripture, and the danger of interpreting Scripture by our experiences and reducing its teaching to the level of what we know and experience; and I would say that this second is the greater danger of the two at the present time.”
4. Lloyd-Jones, Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 12 Christian Conduct, 228.
5. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 31-32.
6. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 32.
7. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 32-33.
8. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 33.
9. Kay, “Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s Influence on Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism in the UK,” 276.
10. Catherwood, Martyn Lloyd-Jones: His Life and Relevance for the 21st Century, 31.
11. Catherwood, Martyn Lloyd-Jones: A Family Portrait, 133.
12. Lloyd-Jones, Healing and the Scriptures, 27.
13. Ibid.
14. For example, of Augustine, Warfield states, “There is no one to whom we could go with more confidence, whether on the score of his ability or his trustworthiness, than to Augustine, to assure us of what really happened in any ordinary matter. Yet, whenever it is a case of marvellous happenings, he shows himself quite unreliable. Here he is a child of his times and cannot rise above them.” (B.B. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles, (London: Banner of Truth, 1972),76).
15. Lloyd-Jones, Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 12 Christian Conduct, 227.
16. Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable, 9.
17. Michael A. Eaton, Baptism with the Spirit: The Teaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1989), 187.
18. Lloyd-Jones, Healing and the Scriptures, 29. “In addition to this, those who have been interested in reading books like, for instance, Pastor Hsi of China, will have come across incidents and events which I, at any rate, could not explain except in terms of the supernatural and the miraculous. It seems as if God has granted them in the initial stages of a given work, or when some special attestation of the truth has been needed.”
19. Lloyd-Jones, Revival, 135.
20. Lloyd-Jones, Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 12 Christian Conduct, 277. “But it is here that the danger to which I have referred comes in. It is that some of us want to say, 'But all this has nothing to do with us, that was only the early church.' So we rule it all out and we start our thinking at the Reformation or perhaps even in the following century when the Westminster Confession was drawn up, and we are governed in our whole thinking by that. …that seems to be not only wrong, but completely unscriptural. We are to go back to the New Testament itself, and we have no right to lay down any definition unless it is strictly in accord with the teaching of the New Testament.”
21. Lloyd-Jones, Prove All Things, 43.
22. Geoffrey Thomas, “The Piety of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Submitting to the Spirit of God,” Eusebeia 7 (Spring 2007), 103.
23. Powell, “The Legacy of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981): Some Analytical Perspectives”, 53.
24. Atherstone, Jones, and Kay, ‘Lloyd-Jones and the Charismatic Controversy’, in Engaging with Martyn Lloyd-Jones, 147.
25. Ibid, 148.
26. Roy Middleton, ‘The Synod Resolution on the Pentecostal-Charismatic Movement and the Teaching of Dr D. M. Lloyd-Jones’, Free Presbyterian Magazine, 92 (May 1987), 155.
27. Catherwood, Martyn Lloyd-Jones: A Family Portrait, 125.
28. Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable, 19.
29. Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable, 120.
30. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd Jones: The Fight of Faith 1939-1981, 486.
31. Lloyd-Jones, Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 12 Christian Conduct, 283. “The picture we have of the early church is of a body of people who believed the gospel, who were filled with the Holy Spirit and who received gifts… it was a pneumatic church, a pneumatic body, with the life of the Spirit showing itself in varying ways in each member so that everyone took part in the life of the church.”
32. Lloyd-Jones, Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 12 Christian Conduct, 286.
33. Ibid.