Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04056 Few questions in contemporary church life generate more confusion and, in some quarters, more dangerous claims than this one. The rise of the New Apostolic Reformation, with its assertion that God is restoring apostles and prophets to the church with governing authority and fresh revelation, has made this question urgent. But the answer…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 04058 When Christians think about the future, attention tends to focus on the events of the end times: the rapture, the tribulation, the return of Christ, the millennial kingdom. Less commonly asked is what the Holy Spirit will be doing through all of this. Yet Scripture has more to say on the subject than…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 04048 The gift of prophecy is among the most discussed and most misunderstood gifts in the New Testament. Some believers treat every impression or sense of spiritual prompting as “a word from the Lord.” Others conclude that genuine prophecy ended with the apostolic age and that anyone claiming to prophesy today is at best…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 10066 Replacement theology, also called supersessionism, is the belief that the Church has permanently replaced Israel in God’s plan, and that the promises God made to Israel in the Old Testament are now fulfilled spiritually in the Church rather than literally in the nation of Israel. This teaching, whilst widely held throughout church history,…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2067 When we speak of God knowing the future, we naturally reach for spatial metaphors: God “looks ahead,” he “foresees” events, he “knows in advance” what will happen. These metaphors are comfortable, but they may be more misleading than helpful. The question of how God’s relationship to time shapes our understanding of prophecy is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion Q04012 The question may seem almost impertinent. Can a divine person be suppressed? Can a member of the Godhead be hindered? Yet Scripture addresses this directly, and the answer it gives has significant implications for how we understand both the Spirit’s work and our responsibility towards it. What the Text Actually Says Paul’s instruction…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2008 The question of whether God speaks today, and how He does so, sits at the intersection of several significant theological debates. Cessationists argue that God speaks exclusively through Scripture now that the canon is complete and that the gifts of the Spirit, including prophecy, have ceased. Many charismatics emphasise direct divine communication through…
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….
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 4062 The cessationist and continuationist debate turns, at its heart, on a single exegetical decision: are prophecy and Scripture the same category of thing? If they are, then genuine prophecy today would mean adding to the Word of God — an obvious impossibility given that the canon is closed. But if prophecy and Scripture…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 9109 The church has always struggled to hold two things together: genuine openness to the Spirit’s ongoing work in equipping believers with gifts, and the biblical insistence on order, intelligibility, and discernment in corporate worship. The history of charismatic Christianity is littered with the wreckage of communities that lost the second whilst pursuing the…