Well, my ol' buddy Adrian is at it again - beating that old charismatic-cessationist drum again - this time he's into it with Dan Phillips from Team Pyro. I have had online debates with Adrian on these matters in the past and have always found them helpful and enlightening. If you are interested you can do a search for "charismaticism vs. cessationism" on my blog and it will take you to a slew of posts interacting with Adrian on the subject.
Adrian has invited me to comment on his recent exchange with Dan and so, I am happy to take him up on it. I haven't had the chance to read all of the posts they have exchanged, but I will address two of them.
Dan wrote Tongues Across the Water," in reply to an earlier post of Adrian's and you can find links on that one to all of Dan's earlier posts.
Adrian replied with Charismatic Debate - Responding to Dan Phillips.
In this exchange, the debate is not on the charismatic gifts per se, but on the place of experience in the Christian life. Dan says that Adrian and the charismatics tend to overemphasize feelings. Adrian replies to Dan as follows:
Dan would probably agree with all of this up to this point. Where he parts company is over my call for us to eagerly seek for experiences of God. He repeats a frequent misunderstanding that cessationists often have of charismatics when he removes the last two words of that sentence and claims we are merely seeking emotional experiences. For most of the charismatics I know at least, it is NOT mere emotion that we seek; rather we seek an appropriate emotional response to the presence of God, and we seek His activity in our lives and churches to be manifestly present.
There is all the difference in the world between trying to work up an emotional frenzy (which, of course, we have all seen) and using legitimate God-given means of putting ourselves in an appropriate place where God can meet us.
Though Adrian is my best blogging bud and I love him dearly, I'm squarely with Dan on this. And being a card-carrying know-it-all that I am I'll see if I can add something to the discussion.
I'm not sure what Adrian is trying to say when he says that charismatics are not seeking "mere emotion" but "an appropriate emotional response to the presence of God." That sounds like an emotion to me. But I think what he is getting at here is that charismatics are seeking the presence of God first, with the understanding that a sense of the presence of God will manifest itself in an emotional way.
Later in the post Adrian says this:
I do believe that we should seek those experiences of God and take every appropriate step to actively pursue them.
Well, here are a few incoherent thoughts on all of that. I think one of the problems here is in defining what constitutes an "experience." I suggest that all of life is an experience. There is no such thing as a "non-experience." Laughter is an experience, crying is an experience, reading a book is an experience, sleeping is an experience, watching TV is an experience, boredom is an experience, confusion is an experience, joy is an experience, loneliness is an experience. Everything is an experience. I am in the middle of an experience right now, the experience of writing a blog post. Again, there is no such thing as a non-experience.
To take matters a bit further, we have to ask the question "what is an experience of God?" If we believe that God is omnipresent, then we must insist that at all times and in all places, we are always experiencing God, whether we are conscious of it or not. We may be experiencing His blessings, His cursings, His joy, His anger, His approbation, His rebuke, His discipline, His patience, or His tender loving care. Again, whether we know it or not, there is no such thing as a "non-experience of God." Even in hell, God is experienced in His wrath.
I believe that, in reality, what Adrian is advocating is not merely an experience of God in it's broad sense, but a particular kind, and narrowly defined experience - what I would call spiritual ecstasy. Toward the end of the post he says this:
I do believe we can expect moments when heaven seems almost to break in and we respond with joy and wonder at the manifest presence of our coming king.
I actually can accept the first part of the statement at face value - I think we can expect moments of spiritual ecstasy at times but I don't see that the Scripture anywhere commands us to seek them. Adrian quotes Lloyd-Jones on seeking these experiences, but without knowing the larger context of the following words I don't know where he would go to back them up in Scripture:
We must not be content until we have had some manifestation of the activity of God. We must concentrate on this. This is my plea, that we concentrate on this, because it is the great message of the Bible Let us put it like this: Do we really believe that God can still act?
I contend that God's activity is always manifest, isn't that what Romans 1, God's works are always manifest in creation. Similarly, God's special graces are always manifest in the lives of any Christians who in any way conform their lives to God's Word.
I see in Scripture that, on very rare occasions, for instance Paul's experience of the third heaven in II Corinthians 12, there were those who experienced something like spiritual ecstasy, but I don't see that we are commanded to pursue such experiences.
When my boys were younger we used to spend alot of time playing catch with the football in the front yard. Often they would run patterns - I taught them the differences between fly patterns, posts and down and outs - and I would throw to them. One day, after only a few throws, one of my sons (who is a bit of a free spirit) stopped and said "dad, I need to work on my signature end zone dance."
I liken that to this call to pursue experiences. While no one should deny a football player the right to rejoice when scoring a touchdown or the euphoria that comes with a big win, doing an end zone dance or locker room celebration is not the object of the game. The object is to play the game.
Similarly, what we are to pursue is not spiritual ecstasy, but Jesus Christ Himself. And we ought not to make spiritual ecstasy the mark of a true experience with Jesus. Nor ought we to expect that spiritual ecstasy will necessarily follow great spiritual victories. Remember what happend to Elijah after his great victory over the prophets of Baal in I Kings 18-19.
Now, if you want to talk about an experience of a kind of settled joy that characterizes the whole of a Christian's life, I can accept that. I believe that joy is a fruit of the spirit that can even be present in the midst of sorrow. What I am arguing here is that this super duper intensified experience of joy that takes the form of spiritual ecstasy is not normative in the Christian life, and is not to particularly to be sought.
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