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Voices: Index

Why this section exists

A casebook is a set of arguments, and an argument is only worth answering when it is stated by someone who holds it. Most of what passes for the debate is not that. It is a sermon against a slogan: the cessationist has retired the Holy Spirit to a filing cabinet, the continuationist has traded the Bible for a feeling. Neither is a position anyone serious holds, and a reader who has only met the slogans has not met the question.

So this section lets the best representatives of both sides speak, at length, in their own terms. It is not a gallery of villains and heroes. The cessationist page is written to be recognisable to a cessationist — its argument, its internal logic, its honest worries, and the two questions it has to answer. The pages on Keener, on Wimber and Storms, and on the global church are written the same way: what the person actually argued, what they did not claim, and what a fair critic says back.

There is a second reason. This site's case is that cessationism is an inference, not a text. If that is true, the inference deserves to be seen whole, with its premises on the table, rather than met with a proof text of our own. A reader who finishes these pages should be able to say what each side claims and where exactly the disagreement lies.

The four pages

Page The voice What it gives you
The Cessationist Case at Its Best Warfield, Gaffin, Robertson, Thomas, McDougall, MacArthur The strongest form of the other side, its real strengths, and the two questions it must answer.
Craig Keener and the Credibility of Miracles Craig Keener The modern report literature, the method behind it, and what it can and cannot establish.
Wimber, Storms, and the Practice of the Gifts John Wimber, Sam Storms How the gifts are actually practised, and why the argument has moved from "did they cease?" to "how are they used?"
The Global Church Speaks The majority church What a very large part of the world church believes and prays, and why the Western question sounds strange to it.

A note on method: paraphrase, not quotation

These pages summarise positions; they do not anthologise them. Modern authors are paraphrased and cited by title and year, and quotation marks appear only where the wording has been checked. There are no invented quotations, page numbers, or citations here, and where a summary compresses a long argument the compression is flagged ("the argument is," "in effect"). Scripture is quoted in the ESV. The general standards are in what this site does and does not claim, and the sources are graded in the source library. If a reader wants the exact words, the book is named so that he can find them.

How to use these pages

Read the cessationist page first. It is the longest and the most important, because the rest of the casebook is only as good as the argument it answers. Then read Keener for the evidence, Wimber and Storms for the practice, and the global church for the question of whose experience counts. None of them asks the reader to accept a doctrine because a story impressed someone.

See also