Your Sons & Daughters Shall Prophesy - Prophetic Gifts Today In The New Testament Church

Did Prophecy Cease-or Does It Continue?

the blessings, always watching that we do not push the experience beyond reasonable scriptural application. But please, do not shut the church doors on prophecy! Prophecy did continue after the first apostles passed from the scene, but by approximately A.D. 260 the ominous force of institutionalization had snuffed out the prophetic flame in the mainline Church. How and why did this happen? Is it really necessary to sacrifice the prophetic dimen sion to ecclesiastical structure as a church becomes more formalized? This is our subject in the next chapter.

REFLECTIONS

C.S.Lewis, in his Screwtape Letters, once said that "there are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about ...devils.One is to disbelieve in their existence.The other is to believe, and to feel an exces sive and unhealthy interest in them." We might say something similar to Christians today on the subject of claims to revelations from God: one is to disbelieve any such thing, while the other is to believe all such claims without exercising proper discernment. 26 David Pytches I have been enormously heartened by the fact that there are thou sands of people who are sick of narrowness and churchiness, and who long for the fresh air of the New Testament.I am greatly encouraged too by the obvious fact that thousands of people deplore the spiritual loss that the church has plainly sustained since the days of Pentecost.There is I find a hunger-sometimes almost a desperate hunger to regain the shining cer tainties and revel in the freedom and power of the new-born church....I am firmly of the opinion that so great is the longing for New Testament Christianity that it will be along this line that true spiritual revival will come. 27 J. B.Phillips ...Our theologizing must stop paying mere lip service to the Spirit and recognize his crucial role in Pauline theology; and it means that the church must risk freeing the Spirit from being boxed into the creed and getting him back into the experienced life of the believer and the believing community. 28 Gordon Fee 241.