Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
I think I can honestly say you're the first one I've personally met!  I didn't even know that cessationism was a doctrine until very recently, so I'm not really up on both sides of the issue.
My whole church life revolved around signs and wonders and miracles, so of course all the teaching and doctrine supported that. So digging into cessationism and how its supported scripturally is interesting. |
I was once a cessationist, and a rather passionate one at that! Cessationism is a product of the same form of rationalism that wrought on the doctrine of biblical inerrency and infallibility; both were products of the
Princeton theologians. To understand cessationism, one must clearly understand inerrency in terms of a doctrine designed to cope with first, the need to make rational sense of the world in a Christianized context, and second, the need conflate a rationally inspired "literalist" reading of Scripture in a world where the lame do not walk, where the sun does not stand still, where rivers and oceans do not split to reveal dry land, where city walls do not spontaneously fall down, and where the dead stay dead.
The solution was a rather simple one for the Princetonians: merely to apply a form of dispensationalism to history, and to insist that different "Ages" constituted different activity from God. One can then believe in the world-wide flood, floating axe-heads and the graffiti of Yahweh on the walls of Babylon, while still maintaining in particularly good rationalistic fashion that the world is mechanistic and predictable. Cessationists must deny any hint the sort of charismatic miraculous that an otherwise "plain reading" of the Bible would allow, because on the one hand, they wisely recognized that any vigorous test of miracles will undoubtedly fail to impress in the same manner as those of biblical proportions. Thus, on the other hand, if one were to allow even the slightest metaphoric or allusive interpretation of contemporary events to effect our perception of modern life, this leaves the untouchable biblical accounts to the same sort of allegorizing or exaggeration.
Of course, cessationism becomes something of a puzzle once one recognizes that the doctrine of inerrency is frought with problems. Most cessationists hold to a vacuous ideal in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary: that a plain and literalistic reading of the Bible does not stand well in the face of history and science.