The Cold Comfort of Cessationists

This short blog will cast me as a polemicist, but it is hard to be anything less when it comes to confronting the cold comfort of cessationists – those who deny any ongoing ministry in the church age of the Holy Spirit, which includes healing, miracles, prophecy, and the like. 

According to their exegesis of 1 Corinthians 13.10-13, the perfect, the complete, has come in that the canon is closed and complete. That means the imperfect is now past, and this imperfect included tongues and prophecy. They quite forget that knowledge is part of the equation as well; it certainly hasn’t passed away. And when the complete comes (the canon’s closure) we will see face to face. This hasn’t happened either, last time I looked. 

That this all refers to the return of Jesus and the consummation of the ages is patently obvious – except to the awkward embarrassment of cessationsits; they can’t stand the thought of messy, charismatic manifestations. In part, at least, this is because they are children of the Enlightenment, when rationalism eventually became a Christian virtue; no way will a respectable cessationist be caught without modernity defining their interpretative paradigm. 

It is a callous person who insists God no longer supernaturally heals and that the gifts of God’s Spirit have had their day. What cold comfort to a person suffering, especially when their need is beyond the current reach of medical science. Of course, a cessationist will happily trot off to the doctor and then claim God works through medicine/ science, but not by his Spirit, supernaturally. No, that day is over. How does this help someone reaching out to their father for healing? They will likely be comforted with platitudes about God’s will and sickness, except when it comes to the cessationist, because, if they really believed their own cessationist dogma, they’d not visit a doctor and wait patiently for God’s will to be done. We could wish it so! 

If God heals through medicine, they may be thankful, but don’t ever mention anything supernatural. I think they are affronted by miracles and healings they secretly have prayed for but haven’t ever experienced. One thing I do know, they give cold comfort to many with their dismissal of anything seemingly supernatural, any gift of the Holy Spirit, they say, is superseded. 

They are heartless and misguided exegetes.