Counterfeit Miracles

When our Lord came down to earth He drew heaven with Him. The signs which accompanied His ministry were but the trailing clouds of glory which He brought from heaven, which is His home. The number of the miracles which He wrought may easily be underrated. It has been said that in effect He banished disease and death from Palestine for the three years of His ministry. If this is exaggeration it is pardonable exaggeration. Wherever He went, He brought a blessing:

One hem but of the garment that He wore
Could medicine whole countries of their pain;
One touch of that pale hand could life restore.

We ordinarily greatly underestimate His beneficent activity as He went about, as Luke says, doing good. *

His own divine power by which He began to found His church He continued in the Apostles whom He had chosen to complete this great work. They transmitted it in turn, as part of their own miracle-working and the crowning sign of their divine commission, to others, in the form of what the New Testament calls spiritual gifts2 in the sense of extraordinary capacities produced in the early Christian communities by direct gift of the Holy Spirit.

The number and variety of these spiritual gifts were considerable. Even Paul’s enumerations, the fullest of which occurs in the twelfth chapter of I Corinthians, can hardly be read as exhaustive scientific catalogues. The name which is commonly applied to them3 is broad enough to embrace what may be called both the ordinary and the

* For all references see corresponding numbers at the end of the volume.

specifically extraordinary gifts of the Spirit; both those, that is, which were distinctively gracious, and those which were distinctly miraculous. In fact, in the classical passage which treats of them (I Cor. 12-14) both classes are brought together under this name. The non-miraculous, gracious gifts are, indeed, in this passage given the preference and called “the greatest gifts”; and the search after them is represented as “the more excellent way”; the longing for the highest of them — faith, hope, and love — being the most excellent way of all. Among the miraculous gifts themselves, a like distinction is made in favor of “prophecy” (that is, the gift of exhortation and teaching), and, in general, in favor of those by which the body of Christ is edified.

The diffusion of these miraculous gifts is, perhaps, quite generally underestimated. One of the valuable features of the passage, I Cor. 12-14, consists in the picture given in it of Christian worship in the Apostolic age (14: 26 ff.).4 “What is it, then, brethren?” the Apostle asks. “When ye come together, each one hath a psalm, hath a teaching, hath a revelation, hath a tongue, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying. If any man speaketh in a tongue, let it be by two or at the most three, and that in turn; and let one interpret: but if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God. And let the prophets speak by two or three, and let the others discern. But if a revelation be made to another sitting by, let the first keep silence. For ye all can prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted; and the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets; for God is not a God of confusion, but of peace.” This, it is to be observed, was the ordinary church worship at Corinth in the Apostles’ day. It is analogous in form to the freedom of our modern prayer-meeting services. What chiefly distinguishes it from them is that those who took part in it might often have a miraculous gift to exercise, “a revelation, a tongue, an interpretation,” as well as “a psalm or a teaching.” There is no reason to believe that the infant congregation at Corinth was singular in this. The Apostle does not write as if he were describing a marvellous state of affairs peculiar to that church. He even makes the transition to the next item of his advice in the significant words, “as in all the churches of the saints.” And the hints in the rest of his letters and in the Book of Acts require us, accordingly, to look upon this beautiful picture of Christian worship as one which would be true to life for any of the numerous congregations planted by the Apostles in the length and breadth of the world visited and preached to by them.

The argument may be extended to those items of the fuller list, given in I Cor. 12, which found less occasion for their exhibition in the formal meetings for worship, but belonged more to life outside the meeting-room. That enumeration includes among the extraordinary items, you will remember, gifts of healings, workings of miracles, prophecy, discernings of spirits, kinds of tongues, the interpretation of tongues — all of which, appropriate to the worshipping assembly, are repeated in I Cor. 14: 26 ff. We are justified in considering it characteristic of the Apostolic churches that such miraculous gifts should be displayed in them. The exception would be, not a church with, but a church without, such gifts. Everywhere, the Apostolic Church was marked out as itself a gift from God, by showing forth the possession of the Spirit in appropriate works of the Spirit — miracles of healing and miracles of power, miracles of knowledge, whether in the form of prophecy or of the discerning of spirits, miracles of speech, whether of the gift of tongues or of their interpretation. The Apostolic Church was characteristically a miracle-working church.6

How long did this state of things continue? It was the characterizing peculiarity of specifically the Apostolic

Church, and it belonged therefore exclusively to the Apostolic age — although no doubt this designation may be taken with some latitude. These gifts were not the possession of the primitive Christian as such;6 nor for that matter of the Apostolic Church or the Apostolic age for themselves; they were distinctively the authentication of the Apostles. They were part of the credentials of the Apostles as the authoritative agents of God in founding the church. Their function thus confined them to distinctively the Apostolic Church, and they necessarily passed away with it.7 Of this we may make sure on the ground both of principle and of fact; that is to say both under the guidance of the New Testament teaching as to their origin and nature, and on the credit of the testimony of later ages as to their cessation. But I shall not stop at this point to adduce the proof of this. It will be sufficiently intimated in the criticism which I purpose to make of certain opposing opinions which have been current among students of the subject. My design is to state and examine the chief views which have been held favorable to the continuance of the charismata beyond the Apostolic age. In the process of this examination occasion will offer for noting whatever is needful to convince us that the possession of the charismata was confined to the Apostolic age.

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