Beauty So Ancient and So New: 7 Part Series: Post 4: The Fathers Were Not Cessationists (And Neither Should We Be)

There is a argument you will hear in certain Reformed and conservative evangelical circles that goes something like this: “the miraculous gifts of the Spirit: tongues, prophecy, healing, the whole charismatic portfolio, were given to authenticate the apostles and establish the early church, and once the canon of Scripture was complete, they were withdrawn. God, having finished his point, moved on to a more orderly arrangement.”

It is a tidy argument. It is also, historically speaking, almost entirely made up. Sorry to my Reformed peeps.

I don’t mean that cruelly. I mean that if you go looking for this position in the fathers, the men who were actually there, or close enough to there to matter, you will not find it. What you will find instead is a church that expected the Spirit to move, described the Spirit moving, occasionally worried that the Spirit was moving less than he used to, and attributed that decline not to a divine policy change but to the church’s own coldness and sin.

Irenaeus of Lyon, writing around 180 AD (which is to say, within living memory of the apostolic generation) describes the charismata as present and active in his own communities. He lists them almost casually: prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, raising the dead. He is making a theological argument against the Gnostics, who claimed special spiritual knowledge unavailable to ordinary believers, and his counter-argument is essentially: the Spirit is here, moving through the body, doing what he has always done. The gifts are not the possession of a spiritual elite. They belong to the church. (Against Heresies, II.32.4; V.6.1)

Origen, a generation later, is more philosophically careful about everything (he’s Origen, he can’t help it) but he still matter-of-factly mentions that miracles happen in Christian communities, that healings occur, that the Spirit moves in ways that resist purely rational accounting. He’s not making a big deal of it. And that’s the flipping point. It’s not remarkable in a way that requires extensive defense. It’s just what the church is like. It’s reality.

Then there is Chrysostom, and this is where it gets interesting. Chrysostom, preaching in Antioch and later Constantinople in the late fourth century, does acknowledge that certain gifts seem less visible in his own day than they were in the apostolic era. Cessationists sometimes cite this as evidence for their position. But read what he actually says. He doesn’t say God withdrew the gifts. He says the church has grown cold and the fault is ours. He mourns it the way you mourn a fire that has gone low. The fire hasn’t been abolished, but no one has been tending it.

That is a completely different argument.

Basil of Caesarea gives us perhaps the most theologically developed account. His treatise On the Holy Spirit is simultaneously the most rigorous defense of the Spirit’s full divinity in the patristic era and a document written by a man who expected the Spirit to actually do things. For Basil, the Spirit is not a historical figure who showed up at Pentecost and then gradually phased out. He is the one in whom we live, the one who distributes gifts as he wills, the one who knits the body together in love. The present tense is everywhere. The Spirit is doing this. Not the Spirit did this. (On the Holy Spirit, XVI.38; XIX.49)

What happened, then? How did a church that universally expected the Spirit to move produce a theological tradition that decided he had stopped?

Part of it is the Reformation’s necessary overcorrection. When the medieval church had accumulated centuries of dubious miracle claims, questionable relics, and spirituality untethered from Scripture, the Reformers rightly called for a return to the Word. But in some streams, the overcorrection became its own problem. Enthusiasm became the enemy of orthodoxy, and the Spirit was gradually domesticated into a power that illuminated Scripture and not much else. Warfield formalized this in the nineteenth century, and cessationism became, in certain circles, a mark of theological seriousness.

But theological seriousness is not the same as theological faithfulness. And the fathers, the men who wrote the creeds these same circles confess, did not believe it.

The answer to rootless charismatic excess is not cessationism. The answer is deeper roots. The creed in one hand and an open palm in the other. The ancient church held both without apparent difficulty. So can we. We just have to water the right roots so the Tree of Life and be experienced faithfully in the present.

Part 5: What Constantine Gave and What He Cost Us, next.