Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04071 The differences between Reformed, charismatic, and dispensational pneumatology come down to how each tradition understands the work of the Holy Spirit today, especially the spiritual gifts and the believer’s experience of the Spirit’s power. A dispensational pneumatology such as the one held here charts a careful course between the two, affirming that the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 09013 The question of whether prophets exist in the church today sits at the intersection of several important issues: the nature of spiritual gifts, the sufficiency of Scripture, the closure of the canon, and the practical experience of many believers who have received what they understand to be prophetic words. The answer requires careful…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04123 Few topics in modern church life generate as much confusion, controversy, and pastoral difficulty as the question of speaking in tongues. For some believers, tongues is the defining mark of spiritual vitality, the indispensable evidence of the Spirit’s fullness. For others, it belongs entirely to the apostolic era and has no place in…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04116 The question of whether the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in the New Testament remain available to the church today is among the most practically consequential theological debates of the modern era. For much of evangelical Christianity in the West, the answer has been shaped not primarily by careful biblical exegesis but…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04113 The question of whether God still performs miracles is one that evangelical Christians answer very differently, and the disagreement tends to generate more heat than light. One position dismisses virtually all claimed miraculous experience as enthusiastic error or deliberate fabrication. Another uses the language of miracles so freely that the word loses the…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 04109 Philip is introduced in Acts 6 as one of seven men chosen to distribute food to widows in the Jerusalem church. He was not an apostle. He was not a member of the Twelve. By Acts 21:8 he is known simply as “Philip the evangelist.” Yet in Samaria he performed healings and cast…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 4061 Of all the biblical arguments marshalled in support of cessationism — the view that certain spiritual gifts have ceased with the apostolic age — the most frequently cited is 1 Corinthians 13:10: “when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.” The cessationist reading identifies “the perfect” as the completed New Testament canon….