"I'd like to suggest that this 'soft' non-cessationist sentiment is something that needs to be rejected as emphatically as the full-blown, prophetic, tongues-speaking variety."

Maybe Snoeberger needs to look in the mirror to find his villain while he wonders how this “cross pollination” came about, after all, one of the blogs he “follows” is Piper who is a charismatic.

Maybe I just didn’t read it right, but he seems to be lumping together a person’s relationship with God - specifically, the Holy Spirit - with revelation to the church as a whole, then turning around and saying that since God’s revelation to the church (canonical Scripture) is closed, then so is any communication with the individual. I’m not going to go down quite to the level of “In the Garden” but I’m not so sure you can just take God out of the equation when it comes to people feeling a “leading” or “prompting” or what have you. At the end of the day, apart from those, how does one make a choice, confident he is in the will of God? I hate to parrot the argument, but if you’re going to say that the only way God speaks to the individual Christian is in the pages of Scripture, doesn’t it follow that you need chapter and verse for, say, who you’re going to marry, where you’re going to go to school, what job you’ll take, which church you’ll join, etc? I mean, strictly speaking, you’re bordering on that joke about Matt. 27:5 and Luke 10:37. I guess I don’t understand how you can disallow a personal communicative relationship with the Holy Spirit and claim to make day-to-day decisions and still be within God’s will, unless God has no particular will about practical decisions like marriage, education, and church membership.

[Alex Guggenheim] Maybe Snoeberger needs to look in the mirror to find his villain while he wonders how this “cross pollination” came about, after all, one of the blogs he “follows” is Piper who is a charismatic.

Are you suggesting that someone cannot follow the blog of someone with whom they disagree? If not, then what is your point?

[Alex Guggenheim] Maybe Snoeberger needs to look in the mirror to find his villain while he wonders how this “cross pollination” came about, after all, one of the blogs he “follows” is Piper who is a charismatic.

Well, it is never a fond place to be when one is right yet they arrived there via an erring route. It appears that Snoeberger did indeed address this in the blog previous to this when he raised his concern, rather plainly, with the pollination of Piper’s erring doctrines relevant to this and conservative Evangelicalism, so with apologies to Mark and those reading here is what he addressed in portion 5a (bold mine):

http://systematicsmatters.blogspot.com/2009/09/fundamentalist-raison-de…

On March 7th of this year, David Wilkerson, a seasoned “prophet” from New York City, issued a warning that is particularly eerie in view of today’s date: “An earth-shattering calamity is about to happen…. It will engulf the whole [New York City] megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires….John Piper, for instance, denounced Wilkerson’s comments, but in a strikingly anemic way: “Wilkerson’s prophecy,” he reassures us, “does not resonate with my spirit…. God might have said this…I don’t want to be more critical than is due, but the comment arrested me. If, in fact, God is bombarding the church today with authoritative prophecies and coded messages (i.e., tongues), this cannot help but mute or at best distill one’s claim to two critical fundamentals of the faith, namely, biblical sufficiency and biblical authority (sola scriptura). It seems to me to go without saying that if the church needs additional revelations, then the Bible does not give everything we need for life and godliness (2 Pet 1:3) and does not thoroughly equip us for every good work (2 Tim 3:17). Further, if the theological landscape becomes littered with an endless corpus of private and normative revelatory material, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how sola scriptura can be successfully maintained…I am not suggesting here that Piper…has explicitly denied these cardinal doctrines…But I would say that this accommodation and embrace of continuationism by such prominent evangelical figures, coupled with an increasing suppression of differences on “non-essential” doctrines in the interest of standing “together for the gospel,” represents a troubling and potentially disastrous fissure in conservative evangelicalism that needs to be exposed as ultimately destructive to the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

How does one, such as Piper, denounce the pseudo-prophecy of Wilkerson yet claim God still might have said it? So either he’s condemning what God might have said or playing games with words. Nevertheless, I wanted to make the point that Snoeberger did indeed address it.

If we follow this paradigm I do not see any place for the Holy Spirit. If there is no relationship with God except through His Word, then apparently the indwelling ministry of the Holy Spirit is limited to what? However, if His presence in our lives is real and practical, there must be some room for the subjective. To equate this with full blown “signs and wonders” may be the “safest” way to go, but does this fit with what the Bible says about the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives? I don’t think so.

John 14:26 “ ‘But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.’”

John 16:13-14 “ ‘However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.’”

1 Corinthians 2:11-14 “For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

[mounty]…unless God has no particular will about practical decisions like marriage, education, and church membership.

God has a sovereign will and it will be accomplished in full detail. I reject the idea that God has a perfect and therefore a permissive will for individuals. I refer to it as the “one school, one wife, one ministry for life.” I define that as having to go to the perfect school, or you will not meet the perfect wife and find the perfect ministry. Since Christians are not perfect there can be no “perfect” will except for the sovereign will of God, which is accomplished through our rising and our falling.

[Larry]

[Alex Guggenheim] Maybe Snoeberger needs to look in the mirror to find his villain while he wonders how this “cross pollination” came about, after all, one of the blogs he “follows” is Piper who is a charismatic.

Are you suggesting that someone cannot follow the blog of someone with whom they disagree? If not, then what is your point?

I made my point, it was about cross-pollinating, unfortunately you missed it Larry. But for my delight it appears Snoeberger did indeed address the damaging (well Snoeberger did use the word destructive) influence of the erring doctrine of Piper! So you may now rest easy Larry.

[mounty] I’m not so sure you can just take God out of the equation when it comes to people feeling a “leading” or “prompting” or what have you. At the end of the day, apart from those, how does one make a choice, confident he is in the will of God? I hate to parrot the argument, but if you’re going to say that the only way God speaks to the individual Christian is in the pages of Scripture, doesn’t it follow that you need chapter and verse for, say, who you’re going to marry, where you’re going to go to school, what job you’ll take, which church you’ll join, etc? … I guess I don’t understand how you can disallow a personal communicative relationship with the Holy Spirit and claim to make day-to-day decisions and still be within God’s will, unless God has no particular will about practical decisions like marriage, education, and church membership.

No because those are your decisions for you to make in light of the principles and boundaries set in Scripture for which you are free to make in such contexts. There is a very erring concept and teaching popularized by bizarre personalities in fundamentalism and Evangelicalism at large about the “leading of the Holy Spirit” and its definition. It is not some voice in your head telling you anything, that isn’t presented in Scripture. I do wish I had time for a more thorough essay on the matter but the damage done by this singular erring view is substantial in many quarters.

Snoeberger gets it wrong in using Wallace to make his point. Wallace is saying there is no verbal revelation from God today outside the Bible, but that this does not forbid God from communicating to us personally in a non-verbally authoritative way. It seemed to me that Snoeberger wasn’t careful with what Wallace actually said. He goes on in his article to condemn the dangers of a position that God verbally reveals things outside His Word, and he implies that Wallace’s position allows that.

I agree with Bob Hayton, and would like to enlarge on what he said.

I first admit that I have not read the book “Who’s afraid of the Holy Spirit?”. If this book gives details that justify Mark’s Snoeberger’s interpretation, then I will gladly stand corrected. But from the data available in Mark’s own post and the link he gives, I suspect he is over-reaching.

First, please note that the quote from Dr. Wallace is about “communications”, but Mark Snoeberger addresses Wallace’s ideas using the word “revelation”. I’m pretty sure Dan Wallace would not want this replacement made. It does “harden” the intent of Dr. Wallace’s statements.

What Dan Wallace seems to be addressing is, in part, distanciation, that well-known phenomenon in which rigorous study of the Scriptures dissolves the spiritual walk of the believer into a mere academic study. Wallace seems to be indicating that he had fallen prey to exactly that, and needed to discover a closer walk with Christ than he could get from the mere exegetical process. I believe that David in the Psalms would be sympathetic with that goal. For is not one of the purposes of the Psalms to help us understand the feelings behind our faith as well as to give propositional truths about our faith?

If one reads the forward to the book by Wayne Grudem (just follow the link Mark Snoeberger gives), Grudem lists 7 works of the Holy Spirit that the authors of the book affirm, and states that he does not believe they violate cessationism (an odd statement for Grudem, who is not purely cessationist either). Of these 7, only point 2 (the idea that subjective impressions are used by the Holy Spirit to guide the believer) is addressed in the Snoeberger article. Clearly, Wallace is talking about many more processes than Snoeberger is addressing, and even Wayne Grudem thinks so.

If we follow Wallace’s intent and use the word “communication” rather than revelation, a host of new questions arise:
What about the communication by God via nature? What theologians refer to as “Natural Revelation”, as in Psalm 19:1, is clearly non-verbal. It speaks clearly, but not specifically with words. It even yields a set of propositional truths in Romans 1 despite the lack of words in the content. It is verifiable, in the sense that Scripture affirms that its inherent universality should be understood by mankind.
What about the work of the Holy Spirit in giving joy, hope, and love? Look it up with your Bible search engines. There are a number of references. These communications (if that’s the right word) are non-verbal, non-verifiable, yet affirmed as being quite real in Scripture.
In what form does the Spirit’s convicting work occur? While I admit that it is frequently a product of a verbal communication from Scripture, it is clearly somewhat subjective. It is entirely acceptable that it requires verification from Scripture (in the sense that I can imagine I am feeling convicted about something that is not sin), but it is clearly not safe to automatically discount it (“whatsoever is not of faith is sin”).

To call such communications “sinister” points out the real problem with Snoeberger’s article: he is reacting to the inherent drift away from Scripture in churches today by making statements more extreme than can be substantiated from Scripture or reason, and he is perhaps misrepresenting Dan Wallace’s intent in doing so.

I, along with Mark Snoeberger, am very uncomfortable and disturbed by the subjective and mystic approach to the faith taken by many Charismatics, non-cessationists, and even some Fundamentalists. But there are some things that are beyond human reason that are affirmed in the Scriptures, and that occur in the processes of our faith. We must be careful not to remove those from our faith in our zeal to defend it.

PS: Just before posting this, I read it to a brother pastor, who suggested the following things:
Jeremiah 9:24 says “But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the LORD.”

Please note the distinction between “understanding” and “knowing” here. Study it.
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Is Mark Snoeberger trying to say that we cannot experience God? That is an extreme statement.

How does the Holy Spirit’s comforting work occur?

We cannot use the idea of Scripture to say that God doesn’t do something when the Scriptures affirms that He does it.

The “leading of the Spirit” is a much abused term. But let’s not deny it exists at all.

[MShep2] If we follow this paradigm I do not see any place for the Holy Spirit. If there is no relationship with God except through His Word, then apparently the indwelling ministry of the Holy Spirit is limited to what? However, if His presence in our lives is real and practical, there must be some room for the subjective. To equate this with full blown “signs and wonders” may be the “safest” way to go, but does this fit with what the Bible says about the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives? I don’t think so.

Good point, MShep2!, but I wanted to point out that the first two verses you use…

[MShep2] John 14:26 “ ‘But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.’”

John 16:13-14 “ ‘However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.”

…may in fact be directed specifically to the Apostles with their future writing of Scripture and guiding of the church in view.

The last verse you use, though, is sufficient to call into serious question what Mark Snoeberger has said.

communicating to us personally in a non-verbally authoritative way.

What is this? What would it look like? How would you know what it authoritatively communicates?

How does one, such as Piper, denounce the pseudo-prophecy of Wilkerson yet claim God still might have said it? So either he’s condemning what God might have said or playing games with words. Nevertheless, I wanted to make the point that Snoeberger did indeed address it.

Thanks Alex, for clarifying. I didn’t miss your point. I wondered about its validity, particularly since I know Mark and I know the things that he thinks about Piper. I think it was good that you clarified it by quoting Mark.

I don’t think linking to someone on a blog site is cross pollinating, at least so far as I can tell.

Thanks Mike for explaining yourself in a nice full post on this subject. I didn’t have the time to quite say exactly all that, but I wanted to say more than I did. I am more open to non-cessationism than yourself, but I agree that an over-reaction to continuationism can lead to an unBiblical silencing of any work of the Spirit today (practically).

First, please note that the quote from Dr. Wallace is about “communications”, but Mark Snoeberger addresses Wallace’s ideas using the word “revelation”.

So how would you define the difference here for the point of your distinction?