On miracles and miracle-workers

“Jesus worked miracles through the Holy Spirit. Christians have the same Spirit. Therefore they can do the same miracles.” This is the syllogism often put out by Bill Johnson of the Bethel Redding cult. It depends on an erroneous kenotic view of the incarnation and is proven useless by the trail of failed wonders and the fraudulent leg-lengthening, angel-feathers etc widely used by their acolytes as a substitute.

But the influence of John Wimber from the 1980s, and his downstream legacy, the New Apostolic Reformation, follows a similar logic even when it avoids kenotic theology. “Here’s a Bible story about Peter doing a stupendous miracle. He was only a simple fisherman, but indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Christians have the same Spirit. Therefore they can do the same miracles.”

This too is clearly muddled thinking. Peter also wrote Scripture, but it does not follow that we all can. Might not apostleship be a special calling associated with miracle working? Certainly, for 1900 years before Wimber, Christians believed that mostly the gift of working miracles had died out with the apostles, or at least miracles were the extremely rare fruit of especially holy saints.

In the Roman Catholic Church, usually this meant being a dead saint who had gained sufficient merit either to do the miraculous, or to persuade Jesus to do it. Notice that this view has nothing to do with God’s sovereign distribution of spiritual gifts, but with spiritual stature comparable to that of the apostles.

Even in Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement before Vineyard, it was the anointed man in the suit on stage who was uniquely qualified to empty the wheelchairs – as indeed is, in practice, the case to this day. Brits travel to America so latter day “apostles” can wave their jackets over them, rather than simply laying hands on themselves at home because they have the Spirit. Or else they pay fees for the School of Supernatural Ministry the suits have set up, to purchase their own certificate of spiritual merit without even having to die.

But what does the New Testament actually teach about the occurrence of miracles, and the power to perform them? These two are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, the New Testament teaching is ambiguous, probably because it was written when the apostles were still working signs and wonders, but I want here to pull some of it together.

The first thing to say is about the miracles of Jesus. There is no doubt that they were done, overall, to validate the divine origin of his ministry. In that respect he was like Elijah or Elisha (to whom Luke in particular draws many subtle parallels). But beyond that they pointed to Jesus’s Messiahship, certain miracles appearing in the Hebrew Bible as specifically associated with Messiah. Even more than that they affirmed his divinity, partly through their character, such as his power over nature in ways the Scriptures attributed specifically to Yahweh, and partly through his authority. Both Elijah and Elisha raised people from the dead, but only after intensive prayer. Jesus simply commanded, and things happened.

The fact that Acts 10:38 attributes Jesus’s miracles to his anointing with the Holy Spirit does not endorse Bill Johnson’s kenotic (self-emptying) Incarnation at all. The works of the Son are all Trinitarian, from the creation of the world as the Word of the initiating hovering Father, through the Spirit; to his own resurrection, variously described as the work of God, the work of the Spirit, and the work of Jesus himself. “By myself I can do nothing” is actually a Trinitarian statement, not a human one.

In his lifetime, Jesus empowered both his twelve apostles, and Luke’s “the Seventy” to perform such authoritative miracles in his name. I’ll return to that later. When they exulted in their power even over demons, Jesus urged them to rejoice instead that their names were written in heaven. The divine gospel of salvation from sin is the essential thing the miracles were performed to validate, and spreading that gospel is our own commission from Jesus.

“A wicked and perverse generation seeks after a sign.” In this respect, the cessationists are right and the NAR preachers who refuse to accept a Christianity without miracles are wrong, especially when the latter see the gospel merely as a “first step” or forget to preach it altogether.

After Pentecost, it is a matter of fact that throughout the Acts and Epistles the only individuals to whom miracle-working is attributed are apostles, with only two apparent exceptions – Philip the Evangelist, and Stephen, both among the seven original deacons of Acts 6. That’s an anomaly to be explained, because the link between apostleship and miracle-working is otherwise very strong.

Both the literary parallels with Jesus’s work in Luke’s apostolic miracle accounts, and their use of authoritative command rather than prayer, clearly teach us that the twelve, and later Paul, are standing in the place of Jesus, to whom of course they usually attribute their power.

Luke himself, though the recorder of Philip and Stephen’s miracles, stresses the centrality of apostleship. By the end of Acts 2 the church has grown to 3,000 Spirit-filled believers, plus the original 120. Yet Luke says that “many signs and wonders were done by the apostles.” Then in Acts 5 “The apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders among the people.” In fact, so focused on the apostles alone is this power that the sick are brought into the streets so that Peter’s shadow might fall on them! This is all about personal charisma, as it was in Jesus’s works, and it is only Luke’s frequent reminders of Peter’s humility as a servant of Christ that stop us seeing Peter, and later Paul, as near-divine (and Paul is actually mistaken for a god by the pagan Lystrans).

A detail in the two Petrine miracles of Acts 9 reminds us that authority is the focus. If miracles were simply a matter of possessing the Holy Spirit and faith, the local believers would have healed the paralytic and resurrected Tabitha themselves. As it is, Peter travels out of his way at their request, and he makes no effort to “train” them, but actually excludes everyone from the room in Tabitha’s case. In fact, the point of these stories, I believe, is to re-establish Peter’s apostolic authority for the next chapter, when he will supersede the torah of Moses both by abolishing the food laws and by admitting uncircumcised gentiles to the covenant of Abraham. That requires spiritual clout, and Luke has demonstrated it in the healings!

Paul seems to have the same view as Luke in his letters. In 2 Corinthians, he chides the church about accepting other authorities over him: “The things that mark an apostle – signs, wonders, and miracles – were done among you with great perseverance.” To make sense, he must be implying that the “superapostles” couldn’t offer such validation, but also that miracles were not being worked by any of the Corinthians, or they too would be marked as apostles.

This is particularly interesting because it is in his other letter to the Corinthians that the core Charismatic passage on spiritual gifts occurs, which lists “miracles” and “gifts of healing” amongst the manifestations “given to each, as [God] determines.” Is Paul contradicting himself, then, in making miraculous powers an apostolic distinctive? These chapters, at the least, overturn the Wimber “If Peter could, we all can” logic, because Paul rhetorically asks, “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues?” (1 Corinthians 12:29).

The clue, as I’ve written before, is that Paul’s teaching is on the gifts and callings God has established “in the church,” and not “in each church.” If the Corinthian church, as is self-evident, had no apostles apart from the remote oversight of Paul, then the miraculous gifts, too, might well be assumed to be a gift for the entire Church through the apostles – there is no contradiction. Even nowadays, the miracles of the apostles validate their doctrine in our preaching. In that case, Charismatics need to take more note of the early church context before they claim the whole list of gifts for themselves.

Neither are they entitled to appoint their own modern apostles to get round it, because in the main the New Testament is quite clear on its definition of “apostles” as those twelve specifically chosen by Jesus, and Paul who was granted an extraordinary encounter with the risen Jesus “as one untimely born.”

However, Luke puts a fly in the ointment in two ways. Firstly, he refers to both Paul and Barnabas as “apostles” in Acts 14:14, and in fact Paul himself seems to refer to his companion Silas as an apostle in 1 Thessalonians 2:7, as well as possibly referring to Andronicus and Junias as such in Romans 16:7 (though previous association with apostles is another interpretation).

The best explanation is that to Luke, “apostle” (meaning somebody sent) had a functional as well as a technical meaning. After all, we retain such an ambiguous usage in our understanding of “my ministry,” meaning any folk’s service for God, and “The Ministry,” which we immediately associate with pulpits, pastorates and seminary training. So he probably intends miracles to be primarily the domain of Apostles rather than apostles.

But secondly, what about Stephen and Philip, apparently contradicting all that Luke has said elsewhere about the exclusive power of the apostles? I suppose it is possible that he thought of them as small-a apostles. But another possibility, given their early association with the Jerusalem church, is that their “anointing” was as members of the “seventy” that Jesus had sent out. This view is held by the Orthodox Church based, presumably, on early traditions, and they even distinguish Philip from the Philip of the Twelve by calling him “Philip of the Seventy.” Needless to say, this explanation does nothing to open up the gift of working miracles to anyone nowadays.

However, one more New Testament hint seems to prevent us from lapsing into absolute cessationism or, worse, philosophical antisupernaturalism. And that is Galatians 3:5, in which Paul chides the church for depending on the law rather than the Spirit. He says, “Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?”

Is he contradicting his words to the Corinthians here? Are miracles not “the mark of an apostle” at all, but an indication that they are “moving in the gifts”? In a previous post, I suggested that maybe Paul’s present tense was a rhetorical device, and that the miracles he meant were those he himself had performed there.

But on reflection it seems to me, from practical experience of modern miracles, that what is actually happening in Paul’s thinking is that there is a distinction between a gift of miracles, in which Peter or Paul can heal by command, or by having their shadow fall on the sick, or by sending out aprons they have used (Acts 19:12); and God’s working of miracles, occasionally, through prayer.

An example came up in discussing this at my house group yesterday. Last year, a believer with an acquired problem in one eye, and what I take to be a dysfunctional congenital amblyopia in the other, went to a missionary meeting locally. He decided on the spur of the moment to go for prayer, which was done by the missionary and a few other folks, and experienced a massive improvement not only in the “sick” eye, but in the one he’d never been able to see with before.

He actually testified to this in our church service, and said he was due to go to the eye clinic and would see what they said. My reaction at the time (not knowing the chap), was to think “Either this bloke is a con-artist, or this is a near-Messianic, blind from birth, miracle” (John 9:32).

One of my group yesterday, though, knew the man before the healing, and had seen him stumbling over furniture and the like. She has kept in touch, and says he dutifully went to the eye clinic, had the tests done, and was asked why he had come. At that stage he simply explained the problem. Only then did the ophthalmologist look at the results, and pronounce that there was nothing for them to treat. And only then did he tell them why that might be! The man turns out to be a Christian of long standing. So we have here faith in God, but no great expectation of healing, and no identifiable “worker of miracles.”

I’ve seen a couple of similar cases: a friend and patient awaiting cardiac treatment after work-up gets prayed for in his home-group, and immediately feels better. On my advice, he continues meds until seen in the cardiac clinic (with explanatory letter from me), and new invests show his coronary arteries to be clear. Cardiologist shrugs it off as a mystery in correspondence. My friend lives another twenty years or so symptom-free. The patient is a Charismatic, but I have no idea of the degree of expectation when he was prayed for. But there is no identifiable “worker of miracles.”

I politely ask a lady in church how she is, and she says she has a bad wrist. My medical instincts take over, and a quick examination persuades me she has De Quervain’s tenosynovitis. Remembering my surroundings, I recruit two or three bystanders to pray. She immediately (and to her surprise) feels a tingling in the wrist, and is fine from then on. My expectation in prayer – extremely low. Hers – non-existent, but too polite to refuse. No identifiable “worker of miracles.”

I believe that this model enables us to accept that “God works miracles among us,” but that the gift of miracles, being limited at least in the main to apostles, is not to be striven for, let alone claimed as available to all.

Practically, it ought to make us quicker to pray for the sick in terms other than “Please give the doctors wisdom,” because our God is immanently active in our affairs. But to avoid all the dangers of false expectation, which can potentially destroy faith, we need to cultivate a way of praying that recognises miracles as the exception, albeit a very real one, rather than the rule.

Maybe the best example I know of that is the payer “catch phrase” of one of my group – “It’s your call, Lord.”