The Hump of the Camel

The articles I’ve been doing on the excesses of Bethel, and on the Charismatic Movement more generally, have attracted greater than average interest, as judged by the web stats. I’m not sure if this is because folks attracted by the titles were hoping to find the route to a more intense experience of the Holy Spirit (Charismatics always are), or whether readers are seeing the articles as the evidence that Garvey has finally lost his theological marbles – or whether, perhaps, people are finding resonances with their own with half-formed doubts that the increasingly experiential goals in their churches’ meetings are raising for them.

One of the reasons for my embracing Charismatic theology back in the day, despite certain misgivings based on the problems it caused, was that the spiritual gifts apparently exercised by Charismatics were in the Bible. I was never really convinced by the cessationist explanations that they had been withdrawn by God because no longer necessary after the apostolic age. To put it more directly, the Bible did not teach that they had, or would be, withdrawn, making the claim mere speculation. It seemed to me that, for instance, prophecies like those of Agabus, warning of famine or of the imminent danger for Paul, would be as useful today as then, and I still think so.

Let’s start with a contemporary endpoint: the belief that God routinely speaks to Christians, assuming they learn to listen. It’s the basis of Bethel’s supernatural ministry school, is seemingly common in YWAM training (see video linked in my comment under last post), and is apparently taught to kids even in mainstream youth camps like Spree SW in my area. Furthermore, it has become inherent in the common dictum that “prayer is a two-way conversation.” But in point of fact nowhere in Scripture are we taught to expect God to speak to us in our routine daily prayers, and certainly not at our command, so that a teacher cannot demand that trainee-prayers feed back what God has told them after (say) a ten-minute session. But they do anyway. So where did the belief and practice come from?