No true cessationist

I’ve never in my life knowingly met a bona fide cessationist. Cessationism, recall, is the doctrine that the signs and wonders performed by the Holy Spirit through baptized believers in the first century ceased with the passing of the apostles (whether gradually or abruptly, either way they stopped). So that, from about the year 100 to the present, the supernatural gifts of the Spirit—his charismata bestowed upon the faithful—no longer occur and/or have not occurred. These include:

1. Speaking in tongues (whether natural or angelic languages)

2. Healings of the sick (through inexplicable, divinely wrought means)

3. Exorcisms (casting out demons from those possessed by them)

4. Dreams/visions from God (e.g., Saint Paul’s vision of the Macedonian man)

5. Foretellings of the future (whether prophecies, “words,” images, visions, or dreams)

6. Ecstatic heavenly rapture (e.g., Paul’s experience in the “third heaven”)

7. Suspension of natural laws (e.g., walking on water; levitation)

8. Spectacular miracles (e.g., feeding the five thousand; blood spilling from a consecrated host)

9. Relics of saints/martyrs charged with spiritual power (e.g., Paul in Ephesus)

10. Communication with or visions of the dead (e.g., Samuel and the witch of Endor; the souls of the martyrs beneath the altar in Revelation)

That’s far from an authoritative list; I can imagine alternative taxonomies. The point is that none of them are “natural” occurrences; all of them are “supernatural” happenings. The biblical point is that they are the work of God; that God’s word attests them; that no Christian disputes their occurrence in the first century; and that some or all of them were understood to be special gifts of the Holy Spirit, “signs and wonders” performed by him through the baptized as evidence of the power of Christ and the truth of the gospel.

Testimony of such “signs and wonders” continues throughout the church’s history. So far as I can tell, nobody disputes this either (with the possible exception of tongues). The question is whether the testimony is true.

As I understand it, cessationism rose to modest prominence in and after the Protestant Reformation and has been a durable minority strand of Christian teaching and practice since then, particularly in the last two or three centuries—before Pentecostalism, as a check on Roman superstition; after Pentecostalism, as an additional brake on charismatic enthusiasm run rampant.

Here’s the thing. I grew up in a (sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly) cessationist tradition. I know plenty of others who have similar experiences. I’m well aware that I can Google “arguments for cessationism” or “are tongues still spoken” and find plenty of websites and writers selling me on the doctrine.

And yet. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for: a flesh-and-blood cessationist. By which I mean, a Christian who is willing and able to defend actual cessationism as a principled and consistent doctrine.

Sure, I know plenty of folks who are put off by glossolalia, not to mention the peculiarities and sometime abuses of hyper-charismatic or fraudulent or prosperity preachers. But the moment I ask about the other nine signs and wonders listed above, they quickly fall into one of the following seven categories:

1. “Sure, I may not attend a charismatic church, but obviously some/all of those things have happened since the apostles’ passing and/or still happen today.”

2. “Well, I’ve not personally experienced/witnessed such things, but I don’t doubt they still happen.”

3. “Granted, I have trouble believing such things, but I’ll also admit that I have good friends whom I would trust with my life who swear that they have seen/experienced such things, and I can’t deny their credibility or honesty.”

4. “For myself, I’m extremely wary of any and all claims regarding miracles and supernatural happenings, and I take for granted that many (perhaps most) claims about them are false … but if I’m honest, since I believe they happened in the Bible, and the same God alive then is alive now, then yes, sometimes they really do happen here and now.”

5. “I’m a functioning cessationist, but I don’t actually have very good reasons to support it besides my own skepticism and disenchantment; in other words, I realize how weak my grounds are for disbelieving in any signs and wonders whatsoever performed through special gifts of the Spirit in the last two millennia—so I basically shrug my shoulders and admit that I’m probably wrong, though I wish I wasn’t and live that way too.”

6. “God is God and I am not; who am I to tell him that he’s not allowed to work wonders since the apostles? or that I know without a doubt that he hasn’t? or that it’s impossible?”

7. “You’d think I’m a cessationist, and yeah, I attend a cessationist church, and sure, I’m not evangelistic about this, but … [begins to whisper] … I’ve never told anyone this … [whispering quickens] … I’ve actually [seen/experienced/performed] a miracle, and I’ll go to my grave knowing in my bones that [X supernatural event] happened; you could never convince me otherwise.”

I’m not exaggerating when I say I have never encountered another type of response from a purported cessationist, at least not “in real life.” I’ve also known plenty of non-cessationists—there are a lot of Pentecostals and Catholics in the world!—and it’s a given that their response to this conversation is one long eye-roll.

So where are they hiding? Or why does it seem like once you start poking and prodding, the cessationist shell is hiding an inner charismatic—or, to be more precise, a thoughtful Christian unwilling to deny either charismatic gifts or signs and wonders in the present? I’ve speculated elsewhere that this is part of a broader American evangelical loosening. I’ve also seen, more and more, both pastors and normies falling back on one of four things:

1. awareness of miracles in Christian history;

2. awareness of miracles in the contemporary global south;

3. awareness of the paucity of biblical arguments for hard cessationism;

4. a profound respect for divine power and freedom.

Put those together, and they form a strong allergy to anything like doctrinaire denial of signs and wonders. And in the decline or absence of thick denominational identity with recognized teachers who authoritatively denounce charismatic belief, you can see why cessationism would be on the wane—if it is.

A loosening

Churches of Christ are evangelical-adjacent; sometimes trends in the CoC world reflect wider evangelical trends, sometimes not. In the following case I think they do.

It seems to me there has been, in the past twenty years, what I’m going to call a “loosening” in low-church American Protestant contexts. And the phenomenon appears to be widespread, not limited regionally or denominationally. Here’s what I mean.

For multiple generations—I’d say at least five, probably more—the following things were true of the sort of churches (I like to call them “baptist” with a lower-case “b”) I have in mind:

1. Alcohol was off limits.

2. Ditto for tattoos.

3. Ditto for gambling of any kind.

4. Cessationism was a given.

5. Salvation was sectarian.

6. Feast days were suspicious.

7. Sacraments were epiphenomenal at best, optional at worst.

8. Sunday morning worship was only one of many weekly congregational gatherings.

In my observation, most or all of these features have been forgotten, reversed, or weakened in recent years. Moreover, this loosening has occurred not only among Millennials and Gen Z believers; it has occurred also among Gen X and Boomer believers at the same time. In other words, the very same people who once shared in the “old way” have transitioned along with their children and grandchildren into the “new way.” The divide is not between parents and children; to the extent that the divide still exists, it’s located elsewhere.

This is important to note for two reasons. First, the battle is not cross-generational so much as cross-epochal. Second, the battle isn’t perennial, since this profound social, moral, and liturgical transformation hasn’t happened with each new generation of low-church believers. The old faith was handed down, generation to generation, until the last two decades or so. And then all at once “everybody” changed. (Not everybody—but a lot of them.)

Here’s how those eight markers play out today, in my experience:

1. Most low-church Protestants I know (from twentysomethings to grandparents) now drink alcohol, including those who for decades did not. In fact, all of a sudden it seems taken for granted that alcohol is not even a question for Christians to consider.

2. Tattoos abound in this Christian sub-culture!

3. Gambling gambling is still off limits. But every church I’ve been a part of as an adult has had men’s poker groups or similar gatherings where money is bet and exchanged. And nobody seems to talk about gambling online or on sporting events as a serious or pressing moral question.

4. Whether at church (with folks from their 30s to their 70s) or in the classroom, the Christians I talk to are either outright spooky, meaning unapologetically affirming of charismatic gifts, or agnostic. I regularly poll both crowds, and just about no one wants to defend cessationism as a doctrine. I actually can’t recall the last time I met someone who was willing, even casually, to argue the view that signs and wonders (“miracles”) no longer occur. This shift may be the most seismic on the list!

5. By “sectarian salvation” I mean, minimally, confessional-doctrinal-ecclesial boundaries on who can and cannot be saved. Historically capital-B Baptists in this country have readily admitted that, for example, Catholics are not Christians, or at least usually lack saving faith. For a century Baptists and CoC-ers did fierce battle over the necessity and efficacy of baptism for this very reason: it drew lines around who would and would not be saved! And yet today I find in almost every corner an enormous ecumenical tent beneath which just about any self-identified Christian is counted as “in.” Certainly nothing so archaic as a denominational line would count somebody out.

6. Until recently, Churches of Christ wouldn’t even acknowledge Christmas or Easter. Other churches would celebrate those, but not Advent or Epiphany or Pentecost or Lent. Those were for Catholics. And yet now Advent and Lent and the liturgical calendar are all the rage.

7. In my normie evangelical students, I spy sacramental minimalism as a default setting, but the moment we start talking and reading, their innate charismatic spookiness starts nudging them up the sacramental ladder. They see both the importance of the sacraments and the lack of any self-evident reason why sacraments must be purely symbolic, cordoned off from the grace they mediate as signs thereof. The more liturgical and charismatic this generation gets, the more sacramental they seem to become. They’re certainly far more open to it; they don’t share previous generations’ firm biblical and doctrinal priors on communion and baptism as non-efficacious.

8. Once upon a time, what it meant to be faithful in churches of Christ was to attend Sunday morning Bible class, followed by public worship, followed by Sunday evening worship, followed by Wednesday evening Bible class. Other churches have had similar arrangements. From what I can tell, both Sunday and Wednesday evening gatherings are dying. The trend lines are all pointing down. Some congregations, especially larger ones, and especially more conservative ones, are maintaining the meetings. But across the board they are less and less frequent; the social norm that this is what it means to be a member in good standing is no longer widespread. Naturally, this is of a piece with, and in turn creates a feedback loop with, decreasing biblical literacy and biblical study. The less “being a knowledgeable Bible reader” is convertible with “being a serious disciple of Christ,” the less “additional meetings” will seem necessary to the Christian life.

This is all anecdotal, I admit. Am I wrong? Do others see the same trends? Am I missing some? Is it right to call this a kind of “loosening”? I’m not looking for causes, only the effects (or symptoms) themselves. I welcome correction and addition.

Christianity is a conspiracy theory

Christians are people who believe in a God they cannot see, in a man who rose from the dead after being publicly executed, in countless phenomena denied by modern science (walking on water, passing through walls, stilling a storm with a word, healing a disease with a touch, hearing a message spoken in a foreign language as if it were in one’s own, and much more), in unseen and immaterial inimical intelligent powers constantly assaulting and accusing and harassing and possessing human beings, in a world beyond this world that cannot be measured or accessed through empirical or other typical instruments of knowledge, in an ongoing contest or battle between that world and this world (carried out chiefly by the aforesaid intelligent powers, some of whom are good, some of whom are evil), in the real presence of a once-dead man’s bodily elements—his very flesh and blood!—available in bread and wine that, Christians readily admit, are chemically and constitutionally identical to ordinary bread and wine, the sole difference being the words spoken over them, words that mediate the omnipotent power of, again, the invisible Creator with whom we began.

Christians are weird. Our beliefs are bizarre. Our doctrines are wacky. We are not ordinary people, if by “ordinary” you mean adherents of the reputable epistemology of the secular West as defined by scientism, empiricism, and Enlightenment.

Being an orthodox Christian, attending a traditional church, will only ensure that you are a spookier person, in all the ways outlined above, and thus less “normal” in your beliefs. You’re bound to become the kind of person who believes that exorcisms happen. Who believes that angels and demons are rampant. That our enemy is not flesh and blood but the principalities and powers and rulers of this present darkness.

Going to church, you’ll come to take for granted that this world of ours is headed somewhere, that it is governed by an all-knowing and all-powerful Intelligence, that despite the charnel house that is this earth and its history the secret heart of the cosmos is infinite Love, that in the end all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. Also that, more than occasionally, saints levitate.

You’re weird! You’re a Christian! The blood spilled on a tree by a Galilean Jew two millennia ago saves you from the wrongs you’ve committed against the Creator of the universe! Right? It makes perfect sense to me, but then again, I’m a Christian. Maybe common sense isn’t our forte.

If others suspect of us of a grand delusion, a sort of mass psychosis or hypnosis, who can blame them? Christianity is a conspiracy theory. There are devils hiding around every corner. None of this can be studied in a lab. All of it is taken on trust.

Whether that means they are crazy for not believing it, or we are crazy for buying it, one of us is right and one of us is wrong. More to the point, “what’s reasonable” isn’t the criterion for deciding. We don’t as a general matter know in advance what counts as reasonable. “What’s reasonable” is the question.

And by definition, it’s question-begging to suppose otherwise.