Ed Stetzer: Continualist Christians: The "Third" Wave of the Holy Spirit

I've already written extensively on my continualist brothers and sisters and I thought it helpful to continue that series for a couple more posts.

I started this series during the Strange Fire Conference, to (I hope) provide some additional light in the midst of what became a lot of social media heat. (Honestly, 140 characters on Twitter is NOT the best place for theological conversations.)

The Mainstreaming of the Continualist View

One of the interesting results of the Strange Fire conference and book may be the point of John MacArthur's concern—the reaction shows that more and more evangelicals are, indeed, continualists. That's important for this post, so I thought it worth mentioning in the introduction.

Simply put, belief in the sign gifts seems to be a mainstream view now. (I'd not be surprised if it is a majority view, and plan to poll on that soon and to see how belief "in" relates to practice "of" those gifts.) Regardless, even organizations in a similar theological stream (Reformed) to John MacArthur, like The Gospel Coalition, are providing helpful analyses on the continualist movement. Pastors like John Piper are explaining their robustly continualist beliefs.

As such, I imagine that John MacArthur, as a convinced cessationist, felt a bit like Jerome who woke up "the whole world groaned and marvelled to find itself Arian." Thus, he spoke up and against this growing continualist influence and, of course, the debate was joined by others.

However, my approach has been to educate rather than debate. There's been plenty of criticism (and counter criticism) and that has been needed at times (in both directions). Of course, one of the important things we need to consider about criticism is this: do those being criticized recognize themselves in the criticism. (See my series on criticism here.) Keep reading