The Reformers and the Gifts¶

This is the page where the cessationist case has real weight, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The men who recovered the gospel in the sixteenth century were, almost to a man, sceptical of the extraordinary gifts. They did not expect tongues in the congregation or healings at the altar. If the argument from history were a head-count, this is where it would turn.

It does not turn here, for three reasons: their position was formed in a polemical fight, against a rival church's miracle claims; it was a judgement about the ordinary state of the church, not a new revelation; and the claim that the church had always taught cessation is false.

The claim¶

The magisterial Reformers were largely cessationist in practice, and the doctrine of cessation as a settled Protestant position is a post-Reformation construction. Both halves matter. The first keeps this page honest. The second keeps the historical argument from being lost by default. What the Reformers did was not hand down a tradition they had received; they made a judgement, in a fight, about what the church should ordinarily expect. Judgements can be re-examined.

Luther: the word against the wonder¶

Luther spent the 1520s fighting "enthusiasts" — Karlstadt, Müntzer, and the radicals who said the Spirit spoke directly to them. His counter-principle was the external word: God works through means, through the preached word and the sacraments, not through private revelation claimed against the text. In Against the Heavenly Prophets (1525) he attacked the claim that a wonder or an inner voice could settle doctrine.

That is the setting for his caution, but caution is not a decree. Luther prayed over the sick and expected God to hear him; he believed the devil could counterfeit wonders and that God could still act. What he refused was the inference from a marvel to a doctrine — the argument Deuteronomy 13:1-5 and Galatians 1:8 already forbid. A sign never authenticates teaching; teaching judges signs.

He did not write a treatise proving that the gifts had ceased. He wrote as a pastor guarding the word, and his caution has been read ever since as more systematic than it was.

Calvin: the gifts ceased, and God is free¶

Calvin is clearer and less cautious. In the prefatory address to his Institutes he argues that the apostles' miracles sealed the gospel at its founding, and that Rome's signs cannot authenticate Rome's doctrine. In his commentary on 1 Corinthians he treats healings and tongues as extraordinary endowments given for a season. The Treatise on Relics (1543) is the polemical edge of the same position.

Two things need saying about this.

First, the argument about miracles was an argument about authority. If the Roman church was the church of continuing miracles, its claims about the Mass, the saints and the papacy came with credentials, and the Reformation needed the credentials to fail. Calvin had a stake in the conclusion and said so with a polemicist's force.

Second, Calvin did not claim that God was bound. He distinguished the ordinary from the extraordinary and insisted God is free to act beyond the ordinary means he has promised. Later cessationists have often dropped that distinction, turning "the gifts have ceased" from a description of the church's ordinary state into a law of God's conduct.

Why the Reformers argued this way¶

1. The argument was formed against a rival's miracles¶

The Reformers fought on two fronts: Rome's shrines, relics and pilgrimage cures on one side, the radicals' direct revelations on the other. Both claimed the Spirit against the settled means of grace. A doctrine that closed the age of wonders did double duty — it disarmed Rome's credentials and disciplined the enthusiasts. The polemical context did not make the conclusion false, but it explains why it was reached so quickly.

2. It was a judgement about the ordinary, not a new revelation¶

Notice what they did not do: they did not produce a text that says the gifts would stop. They argued from the founding purpose of the signs (Hebrews 2:3-4; Ephesians 2:20) and from the church's present experience — we do not see them now. That is an inference, and a respectable one. But an inference from the state of the church is revisable by a change in the state of the church. It is not a word from God.

3. "The church always taught cessation" is false¶

Robert Bruce Mullin's Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (1996) traces the Protestant "miracles ceased" position and shows how largely post-Reformation it is: a construction of the controversialists, hardened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the argument with rationalism and Catholic revival pressed in. The earlier church, as the previous pages show, did not teach it.

The detail is telling. John Owen's discourse on spiritual gifts (1690s) distinguishes the extraordinary gifts, which he says have ceased, from the ordinary graces, which continue. But the Westminster Confession of 1646, the flagship of Reformed confessionalism, contains no article of cessation at all. The doctrine had to be argued into the tradition.

The seventeenth century: providences, fasts, and an Irish stroker¶

Once the doctrine was stated, the reports did not stop. The Puritan century is full of them, in a different key. Fasts and days of humiliation were held for the sick, and providence literature collected deliverances and healings as evidence of God's government — Increase Mather's Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (1684), Richard Baxter's The Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691).

The strangest case is Valentine Greatrakes, an Irish Protestant gentleman who found, in the 1660s, that he could relieve the sick by stroking them. In 1666 he came to England, drew crowds, and submitted to examination by natural philosophers, Robert Boyle among them. A pamphlet war followed: was this a gift, a fraud, or a natural effect? Jane Shaw's Miracles in Enlightenment England (2006) reconstructs the episode and the arguments it provoked. Greatrakes was not a preacher and made no doctrinal claim; what he shows is that the question was live, empirical, and contested among educated Protestants — not settled by a doctrine.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that the Reformers were largely cessationist in practice; that their position was a polemical judgement about the church's ordinary state rather than a received tradition; that the settled doctrine is post-Reformation in date; and that seventeenth-century Protestants kept reporting and testing healings long after it was stated.

It does not prove: that the Reformers were dishonest, or that their caution was mistaken. Much of what they rejected deserved rejecting. Nor does it prove that the gifts continued — no historical argument can prove that. It proves that the doctrine of cessation is younger than the church, and that the reports it was built to explain did not stop when it was built.