Do the excesses of the charismatic movement in relation to tongues and prophecy concern you?

This text is from a series of letters written by David Gooding in 1996.

I can quite understand your anxiety about the excessive claims of the modern charismatic movement. I do not believe that what they claim to be the gift of tongues and many of their so-called prophecies are genuine in the biblical sense of the term. I have also been greatly distressed recently at the confusion created by extreme charismatic sects in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. They have brought great disrepute upon the gospel.

However, what would worry me a little is if concern about these extremes should lead to interpretations of 1 Corinthians 12–14 which are not necessarily true to what Paul is saying: interpretations that appeal to us because with one fell swoop of Goliath's sword they would cut the head off all these dangerous aspects of the charismatic movement.

I suspect that the interpretation of 'that which is perfect' as referring either to the completion of the canon, or to the present maturity of the church, gains a lot of cogency in the minds of those who support it. If it is true, it summarily silences the charismatic claims and disposes of the problems that arise therefrom. I think, therefore, that it would be safer to examine what Paul is saying on its own merits, and to search out what it would have meant at the time when he was writing to the church.

An immediate consideration comes to mind. If it is true that, when the final word of God's New Testament revelation was given, the gift of prophecy ceased and the gift of tongues gradually petered out, then much of Paul's practical instruction in 1 Corinthians 14 is no longer of relevance to us today. His practical instruction relates to a time when the genuine gift of prophecy and the genuine gift of tongues were still a possibility, and he writes to control and, in the case of the gift of tongues, to restrain the use of these gifts in the church. On your view of the matter, these instructions as to how we should control and restrain these gifts are no longer relevant. If Paul were writing to us now, all he would need to say is that these gifts have long since ceased, and therefore we do not need any instructions as to how to regulate them.

Of course, you could come back to me and say that there are large passages of Leviticus which are no longer relevant to us, since animal sacrifices have all ceased. But in the case of Leviticus, the sacrifices that now have ceased were prototypes of the sacrifice of Christ, and therefore are exceedingly relevant for us. All the regulations of those sacrifices and the laws on impurity and cleansing still have relevance to us, in that they communicate to us some of God's standards of holiness.

I think I should hesitate a long while before I adopted the view that a great deal of 1 Corinthians 14 is neither relevant nor of any practical importance for us.

You seem to regard prophecy and tongues in the early days of the church to have been, both of them, the means of God's authoritative revelation of truth, and that God used them solely for that purpose and for none other. So that the gifts of prophecies and tongues were automatically discontinued when God had no more new truth to reveal: the sole and only function that they ever had had now ceased. Can you substantiate that view from the New Testament?

You seem, I must say, to attribute to the gifts of tongues and prophecy in the early church a far greater importance than I ever imagined they had. For instance, we read in the Acts of the Apostles of the prophet Agabus, whose prediction of a coming famine led the early Gentile believers to make a collection of money and send it on for famine relief to their fellow Christians in Judea. But Agabus's prophecy did not communicate a revealed truth or doctrine, did it? It was not part of the faith once and for all delivered to the church, was it? And if this kind of prophecy was not part of the New Testament revelation, why should it necessarily have ceased when the final sentence of the New Testament revelation was complete?

Again, I would say that a lot of the so-called prophecies in charismatic circles nowadays are not genuine prophecies at all. All kinds of predictions are made that never come true; and it is a very serious thing for people to get up and in the name of the Lord give a prophecy which does not come true. In the Old Testament, such people would have been dealt with very severely.

Moreover, a lot of prophetic messages given by charismatics are simplistic in the extreme. The written word of God itself would supply the message in far greater depth and with far greater clarity than these so-called prophets are supposed to convey.

That said, I would once again hesitate a long while before I would say that, in the course of the two thousand years since Jude wrote about the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, God has never given his people in any continent on earth a prophetic warning of things that were about to come upon them, and so guard them in their times of acute danger and need.

Can it be then, perhaps, that at the present time we may not have the same idea of what prophecy was in Paul's day? I grant that in Ephesians 2:20 we are told that the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone; and that here the apostle may well be thinking of the New Testament revelation that was given not only through apostles but also through prophets. Was the writer to the Hebrews an apostle? Or was he a prophet? Luke was certainly not an apostle, but he wrote one of the New Testament histories. In the Hebrew Old Testament, the writers of the histories of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings are called prophets. Would you feel it fair to designate Luke as a New Testament prophet?

On the other hand, a study of what the particular prophets mentioned in the New Testament prophecies seems to show that their ministry was not always concerned with revealing new doctrinal truths to the early church. I think of people like Anna and Agabus. And certainly, as far as I can ascertain from the New Testament, the gift of tongues was never used to communicate revelation of new doctrine.

So then, what do you understand by prophecy? What was its function? For instance, were the prophets mentioned in 1 Corinthians 14 people of the same status as Isaiah and Jeremiah? Were they, all of them, people who were used of God to convey doctrinal truth just as much as Paul and Peter and John were used for that purpose? Or was the function of many of them far more humble?

Ever yours sincerely in Christ,