Strange Gifts of the Spirit

This is a web exclusive from our upcoming issue The Supernatural. Humans are naturally hungry for mystery, magic, and faith. Many who forsake traditional religion are drawn to spiritualism and pagan practices. Christians, meanwhile, have always affirmed that there is more than meets our eyes, that our world is teeming with angels and demons, powers and principalities, signs and wonders. The “supernatural” is real; in fact, it’s entirely natural. Subscribe here.

Over a decade ago, I was an early-twenty-something minister with a Pentecostal denomination, working with university students. One summer day, I was strolling through my city’s downtown, feeling discouraged about conflicts on the ministry team, the seeming lack of success of some of our work, and the imminent departure of a close friend. As I walked, a sudden, almost imperative sentence crossed my mind: “You’re going to see Chris tonight.” Chris was one of many students with whom I’d regularly been spending time that summer, discussing many of the problems which often loom large to young adults: what they wanted do with their lives, their relational difficulties, existential questions related to faith and the nature of reality, and more. I hadn’t been thinking about or praying for Chris on that day in particular, so this interruption surprised me. However, like the Pentecostal I was, I quickly began to consider whether this thought might have been the voice of God.

I had been taught to believe that the Spirit of God still speaks to the people of God – not only in scripture, but also through prophetic words and miraculous occurrences. I’d also been taught that I must be carefully discerning as to what I believed I’d heard from God. I shouldn’t assume that every thought that drifted unbidden through my mind was the voice of the Holy Spirit. I decided to wait and see whether I would run into Chris and went about my day, mostly forgetting about it. But some hours later, on my way to a party that evening, I walked through the city’s square, and there Chris was. Our conversation was brief, as we were both headed to other places. I left the encounter, however, with a renewed sense that God cared for him, cared for me, and was with me in the midst of a difficult time of ministry. I left believing, as I had for many years, that God sometimes chooses to speak through the quiet urging of the Holy Spirit.

Photograph by Terren Hurst / Unsplash.

Though I am now an Anglican, I still believe that God speaks like this. I’ve come to disagree with Pentecostals about several matters, but I believe that the gifts of the Spirit are at work in the church today. I speak in tongues. I know people who have been healed physically. Though I often struggle to sense the leading of the Holy Spirit and make no claims to any sort of unique spiritual giftedness, my work in ministry has – occasionally – contained quiet, supernatural moments of encouragement, assurance, guidance, and the surprising power of God. These gifts, understood as the examples of the “charismata” mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12, give their name to what is called the charismatic movement. (This is distinct from the sense of “charisma” as personal magnetism and charm).

Claims to hear from or to speak on behalf of God are often, and rightly, met with skepticism. Many of us are familiar with assertions of modern prophecy, mystical experiences, or extrabiblical revelation as put forward by people whose honesty seems suspect: televangelists, authors of sensationalist memoirs, politically-adjacent figures, and the like. Given the egregious nature of some of these claims, I can understand why a disinterested observer might dismiss them as a self-interested sham.

Are skeptics right that there is nothing more to these than self-serving fabrication? Or is there a richer history of Christian supernatural revelation and experience which may still find expression, a history that is an alternative to the sensationalized, politicized charismatic theology that seems to characterize a great deal of popular American religion today?

Pentecostals and other charismatics have long looked to the New Testament church as depicted in the Book of Acts for their theology of the supernatural. Acts reports many forms of miraculous experiences within the church, including healings, speech in other languages, prophecies (including foretelling the future), visions, and personal revelations through the Holy Spirit. We’re told of a family of daughters who prophesy, of exorcisms, and of other supernatural incidents that don’t really fall into any of the above categories. Paul’s instructions to the church in Corinth indicate that speaking in tongues and interpretation of tongues as well as prophecy by both men and women happened during public worship.

In the centuries to follow, this expectation that supernatural occurrences are part of the church’s common life continues to appear in the works of some notable theologians. Irenaeus, the great second-century bishop of Lyons, wrote that true disciples of Christ received and exercised spiritual gifts granted them through the grace of God. “Some really and truly drive out demons, … some have foreknowledge of the future, and visions and prophetic speech, and others lay their hands on the sick and make them well, and as we said, even the dead have been raised and have remained with us for many years.” Origen likewise claimed that miraculous signs and wonders were still performed, though with greater scarcity, in the churches of his day, and Augustine’s City of God recounts several miracles, including healings and exorcisms.

How can one begin to distinguish between valid and invalid charismatic claims?

For these and other patristic theologians, it was clear that supernatural gifts of the Spirit were still present in the life of the church. These texts show that healings, prophecies, and other phenomena were viewed as part of the pattern which had been initiated at Pentecost. Such revelations and signs were given as sources of encouragement and vision for the church but always needed to be confirmed by biblical testimony. This kind of supernatural experience was not supposed to supplant scripture but rather to illuminate it. Tertullian, for example, describes a Christian woman’s supernatural vision; he used this vision along with scripture, logic, and contemporary references to expound his theology of the soul. Augustine describes miracles to illustrate how the power of God was still at work in his own time: his purpose was that Christ might be known, and this was the purpose he ascribed to the miracles as well.

Of course, church history has its scoundrels and frauds too. And there are also ambiguous cases. What are we to make, for example, of the Zwickau prophets of the sixteenth century, denounced as fanatics by Martin Luther, revered as models by many Anabaptists? Modern Pentecostalism, in its most theologically robust form, has emphasized warnings against fraud and an acceptance that some phenomena are difficult to place. William Seymour, the early twentieth-century father of the Pentecostal movement, was also concerned about differentiating between false and true charismatic phenomena. Seymour joined Luther’s and others’ cautions against “counterfeit” signs and cautioned his followers that claims of spiritual gifts ought to be tested. Still, even with this caution, from Seymour’s Azusa Street revival the Pentecostal movement grew, and today it is the fastest-growing Christian tradition worldwide. Charismatic revivals have abounded in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: I might mention the Vineyard movement, charismatic renewal movements in the Roman Catholic and other preexisting communions, and more. Many of these movements have followed Seymour both in embracing supernatural experiences as normative for Christians and in emphasizing the importance of testing claims of such experiences against scripture.

Photograph by Terren Hurst / Unsplash.

Others, however, have fallen prey to the prosperity gospel, the teaching that God will bestow health and wealth upon believers who exercise sufficient faith. Many of the charismatic leaders who appear in the media embrace a version of this view. Paula White-Cain, for example, speaking recently at a Miami church, promised that listeners who exercised faith, specifically through giving financially, would be blessed by God and experience “financial abundance.” As for Seymour, while he taught that physical healing and the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other languages were available to Christians through Christ’s atonement, he did not endorse the sort of Pentecostal triumphalism which has frequently become wedded with the prosperity gospel today.

How can one begin to distinguish between valid and invalid charismatic claims? In the past, those visions, healings, and other signs that have been interpreted as valid were often recognized as intended to demonstrate the reality, power, and goodness of God to the watching world, rather than to build up the singular authority of a human leader. Such revelations must therefore be subject to scripture, interpreted and understood with scripture. Signs thought to be valid are usually linked to orthodox as opposed to novel theological positions; to holiness of life; and, if they make prophetic claims, to accuracy. This last aspect is too frequently glossed over in Pentecostal culture. One thinks, for example, of self-acclaimed prophets such as William “Dutch” Sheets, who insisted in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election that God had revealed that the results of the election would be overturned. He has made no apology; his YouTube channel still has 360,000 subscribers.

While these sorts of charismatic pitfalls are often glaringly public in nature, more theologically orthodox occurrences of the supernatural seem less likely to feature within the church’s public narrative. However, there are still instances of such healthy charismatic developments. The Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley, for example, of doing fieldwork within two charismatic congregations in England of differing denominations. Though the churches had distinct polity, demographic makeup, and more, Coakley noted that members of both congregations mentioned similar, biblically resonant changes as a result of their churches’ experience of charismatic renewal. These congregations experienced the changes particularly in their practices of prayer. There was, Coakley said, a commonly expressed sentiment in both congregations that:

people had in a new way found prayer to be “two-way relationship,” not just a talking at God, but God (the Holy Spirit) already cooperating in their prayer, energizing it from within. This was said to be “the real thing, making yourself a channel for the Spirit’s work,” an intermingling of the human desire for God and the Spirit’s interceding to the Father…. With this then came the sense of prayer “in the Spirit” becoming a uniting thread in life, “an all-encompassing relationship,” so that prayer became no longer one activity (or duty) amongst others, but the wellspring of all activities. Thus Paul’s injunction “Pray constantly” (1 Thess. 5.17) was said to take on new meaning, as did Jesus’ insistence on trust, faith, and confidence in prayer (“Ask, and it will be given you,” Matt. 7:7), even though it was admitted that one did not always get what one expected.

As in the early church, then, charismatic phenomena, when rightly understood, are reinforced by scripture and serve to deepen the church’s worship, life of prayer, and dependence on the Spirit of God.

This renewal of spiritual life, as charismatic experience harmonizes with scripture and supplements but does not supplant the ordinary means of grace, is what we can hope for, as the Spirit of God encourages, empowers, and purifies the church, building it up and calling it to repentance.

In my own life, I’ve witnessed the quiet, supernatural work of the Spirit. I’ve seen this power present in the lives of those I love, whether through my father giving a word of knowledge which proved to be correct to a man he didn’t know, or my husband, a relative stranger to charismatic phenomena, suddenly speaking in tongues for the first time after I prayed for him during a particularly spiritually disturbed night. I’ve tried to weigh what I see and hear carefully and with circumspection, knowing that I am human and prone to error. Yet when I examine the faith and witness of those Christians who have come before me, I continue to hope that – despite our human failings and propensities to crave power, money, and other things we shouldn’t – the supernatural work of God may yet be present among us, in ways more varied and more strange than we might expect.