The Problem of Wineskins by Howard A. Snyder

Author:Howard A. Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seedbed Publishing
Published: 2017-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Place of Spiritual Gifts

10

God creates. Hence man and woman, created in the divine image, also create. The Spirit of God who was “moving over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2) at the dawn of creation is the same Spirit who, according to Scripture, operates in the church, giving to each Christian “the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7).

The Christian faith makes room for gifts and creativity on the basis of the important biblical doctrine of the gifts of the Spirit. And yet, great confusion exists regarding spiritual gifts. Too often specific Christian traditions—implicitly, if not explicitly—deny the possibility of real creativity. The institutional church often shows a serious and crippling misunderstanding of the biblical concept of spiritual gifts. And even though there is a great renewal of interest in the gifts of the Spirit today, this interest has often generated more heat than light.

One cannot really understand what the New Testament means when it speaks of the church unless one understands what it teaches about the gifts of the Spirit. Spiritual gifts are primarily a matter not of individual Christian experience but of the corporate life of the church. Gifts are given for and in the context of community.

I have already suggested in chapter 6 how our misunderstanding of spiritual gifts affects our concept of the pastoral ministry and feeds the superstar idea, and in the last chapter we noted that structure must be compatible with gifts. We need now to discuss more positively, and in somewhat more detail, the place of spiritual gifts in the life of the church.

The contemporary church in its institutional form makes little room for spontaneous spiritual gifts. Worse yet, too often it does not need spiritual gifts in order to function more or less successfully. When the local church is structured after an institutional rather than a charismatic model, spiritual gifts are replaced by aptitude, education, and technique, and thus become superfluous.

Several common misunderstandings of spiritual gifts today need to be corrected and shown for what they are: unbiblical tendencies that effectively quench the working of the Holy Spirit in the Christian community. I suggest, in particular, five such tendencies.

1. The tendency to deny or discredit spiritual gifts. In its most extreme form, this tendency says the gifts of the Spirit were given as miraculous signs at Pentecost but have no legitimacy today. Gifts of healing, prophecy, and tongues are no longer considered valid. In a milder form this tendency admits, in theory, the validity of spiritual gifts but in practice is suspicious of them and tends to discredit them. All spiritual gifts, and especially the more controversial ones, are thought to be superfluous at best and heretical at worst.

Such a position, however, arbitrarily limits the operation of the Holy Spirit and the applicability of the New Testament to our day. There is no more warrant, for instance, for applying chapters 12 and 14 of 1 Corinthians exclusively to the early church than there is for limiting the thirteenth chapter in this way.

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