Continuationism of the Spiritual Gifts

Continuationism takes its name and much of its argument from what it opposes. Cessationism, historically strong in Reformed and other confessional Protestant traditions, held that the most dramatic gifts described in 1 Corinthians 12, prophecy, tongues, healing and miracles among them, were given specifically to authenticate the apostles and the church's founding generation, and that they ceased once that founding work was complete and the New Testament canon finished. On this reading, the gifts were a scaffold removed once the building, Scripture and the established church, stood on its own.

Continuationists answer that the New Testament nowhere states an expiration date for the gifts, that Paul writes about them as ordinary features of congregational life rather than as founding-era exceptions, and that restricting their operation to the first century is an inference read into the text rather than a claim the text itself makes. Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians add their own ongoing experience of healing, prophecy and tongues in worship as living evidence against the cessationist claim that these gifts stopped.

The argument has run for over a century without resolution and divides Protestant Christianity roughly along the same lines that divide Pentecostal and Charismatic churches from confessional Reformed and other cessationist traditions, making it one of the clearest doctrinal fault lines within evangelical Protestantism specifically, distinct from the older divisions over sacraments or church government.

The Azusa Street revival that began in Los Angeles in 1906 put continuing prophecy, healing and tongues at the public center of a Christian movement in a way earlier Holiness revivals had not, and the Pentecostal denominations that grew from it, the Assemblies of God among the largest, built continuationism into their statements of faith as a settled conviction rather than an open question.

The Charismatic movement of the 1960s and 1970s carried the same conviction into Catholic parishes and mainline Protestant congregations that had no Pentecostal background at all, producing Catholic Charismatic Renewal and charismatic wings inside Anglican, Lutheran and other historically cessationist-leaning or simply gift-silent traditions. A further wave in the 1980s, often called the Third Wave, brought continuationist practice, expectant prayer for healing and prophetic ministry particularly, into evangelical churches that kept a more traditional, non-Pentecostal style of worship otherwise.

The cumulative effect has been to make continuationism, in practice if not always in official confession, the working assumption of a large and growing share of global Christianity, concentrated most heavily in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements themselves but no longer confined to denominations that use either word in their name.