Thursday, July 8, 2010

The Best Essay Ever Written on Spiritual Gifts Today?

I'm always interested in good teaching on spiritual gifts, especially when it combines good scholarship with openess to the Spirit. Therefore I was certainly intriged and interested when I saw this title at Justin Taylor's blog - The Best Essay Ever Written on Spiritual Gifts Today:

He is referring to an article by Vern Poythress in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society published in 1996 called “Modern Spiritual Gifts as Analogous to Apostolic Gifts: Affirming Extraordinary Works of the Spirit Within Cessationist Theology.” The thesis of the article is:
"I maintain that modern spiritual gifts are analogous to but not identical with the divinely authoritative gifts exercised by the apostles. Since there is no strict identity, apostolic teaching and the biblical canon have exclusive divine authority. On the other hand, since there is analogy, modern spiritual gifts are still genuine and useful to the church. Hence, there is a middle way between blanket approval and blanket rejection of modern charismatic gifts."
The link above will take you to the article  It is 27 pages long as I printed it out, so it is not something that can be easily sumarized in a brief blog post.  I will read it and share my comments after I have time to think about the content.

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