We Do Not See Them Today¶

The objection¶

This is the argument most people actually use, and it is rarely written down. It feels less like a doctrine than like honesty.

We pray for the sick; some recover, some die, and no one can say which was a healing. No one in my congregation has ever prophesied, and tongues happen in other churches, to people who expect them. If God were still giving these things, we would see them in ordinary congregations. We do not. So they are not given.

It has the shape of an observation, and observations can be true. But it is not the simple report it presents itself as.

The claim at its strongest¶

If God were still giving the gifts, they would be evident in the church's ordinary life, not only on the margins.
In the modern West they are not evident: healings are ambiguous or absent, prophecy is not part of the church's order, tongues are confined to a minority.
Therefore the gifts are not being given.
And if they are not being given, God has stopped giving them.

The fourth premise carries the doctrine, and it is not an observation. "Not given here" does not entail "withdrawn everywhere," still less "withdrawn by decree." Between "we do not see" and "God has ceased" there is a gap only revelation can bridge.

The problems¶

1. The premise is local and selective¶

The "we" is doing enormous work. It usually means my church, my tradition, my lifetime, my country — a small, unrepresentative sample of the church across two thousand years and six continents.

The churches of the global South and East are, by and large, not cessationist. Reports of healing, deliverance, prophecy, and tongues come from Nigeria and Uganda, from Brazil and Korea, and from the Chinese house churches — not as a rare exception but as a normal part of congregational life, often in churches growing faster than anything in the West. Some of those reports are exaggerated; some are not, and their volume and independence are a problem for a doctrine that says the gifts stopped. The global South page sets out what is claimed and how it should be graded.

A doctrine of cessation is a claim about the whole church. It cannot be established from the experience of one province of it.

2. Scripture diagnoses the absence as unbelief, not as a decree¶

Here the objection is not merely incomplete; it is contradicted by the category Scripture uses.

"And he did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief" (Matthew 13:58). "And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief" (Mark 6:5-6). When the Gospels explain why the works were few, they name a human cause. They never name a divine withdrawal.

The exegesis belongs to the unbelief of Nazareth. The point here is method: if we are going to interpret an absence, we should use the interpretation Scripture gives. It gives unbelief. This is not a verdict on the sick — God does withhold, and Paul's thorn is the proof (2 Corinthians 12:9) — but a general scarcity is exactly the claim, and for that Scripture has a diagnosis.

3. Functional cessationism is self-fulfilling¶

Where the gifts are neither expected, nor sought, nor recognised, they are not reported. This is not a conspiracy; it is how attention and institutions work.

A congregation with no place in its liturgy for a word, a testimony, or a prayer for the sick with expectation will not produce any. A church that has decided what a healing would look like — instant, total, medically certified — will file the gradual recovery under "coincidence." "We do not see them" and "we do not ask for them" are often the same sentence.

Paul commands the church to "earnestly desire the spiritual gifts" (1 Corinthians 14:1). A church that disobeys the command and then observes the consequence has not discovered a decree. See seeking the gifts.

4. An argument from silence is not evidence of a divine act¶

There is a difference between the absence of a report and a report of an absence. For most of the church's history we have thin records of what ordinary Christians did on a Tuesday. The silence of a chronicle is not the silence of God.

The argument also proves far too much. By its logic the gifts had ceased in Nazareth, in Israel under Ahab, and wherever the church was cold. It would have "proved" cessation to Chrysostom's congregation in Antioch around 390, where he said the gifts were no longer present as once they had been — and the centuries after him report them again. An argument that yields the same conclusion in every generation, including generations followed by renewal, is tracking the temperature of the church, not a divine act. The fallacies page names this: decline is not cessation.

5. The West's own history shows absence followed by renewal¶

The West has been here before. The eighteenth-century revivals were preceded by a settled assumption that the age of miracles was over, and the nineteenth century saw Irving, Wesley's heirs, and the seers. Azusa Street in 1906 began among people the respectable church had written off, and the charismatic renewal of the 1960s and 1970s spread through the mainline and the universities.

The most instructive case is Augustine. Late in the fourth century he wrote, as a settled opinion, that the miraculous belonged to the apostolic age. Then, as bishop of Hippo, he began collecting accounts of healings in his own diocese, and in City of God said in effect that the world was full of miracles he had once thought had ceased (the page). The greatest theologian of the West changed his mind in public, under the weight of testimony he had gathered himself.

What the objection is right about¶

The West's experience is real. The ordinary Western churchgoer has not seen a verifiable healing, much of what is claimed elsewhere is exaggerated, and some of it is fraud — which is why the command is to test, not merely to receive (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

And God distributes "to each one individually as he wills" (1 Corinthians 12:11). Unevenness is expected: a church may be poor in gifts for reasons that are not its fault. That is the freedom of the Giver, and a call to ask — not a licence to conclude that he has stopped.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that the empirical premise is local and selective; that Scripture's own diagnosis of scarcity is unbelief; that an observed absence is not a datable divine act; and that the same argument would have proved cessation in every century before a renewal.

It does not prove: that the Western church is full of genuine gifts, that every report from Africa or Asia is true, that unbelief explains every disappointment, or that the gifts are evenly distributed. It proves the observation cannot carry the doctrine.