This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “I Corinthians 13” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, April 21, 1996.
About this sermon
The modern Pentecostal movement raises the question of which gifts continue in the church today. Teaching, helps, and administration continue, while apostleship, prophecy, miracles, healings, and tongues were temporary. That distinction shapes how 1 Corinthians 13 reads.
Sermon transcript
Morning, we are reading again from 1 Corinthians, and we are at chapter 12, beginning at verse 27 and reading from that point. My intention during our series on this section of Scripture is to read from various translations so that you might have a sense of what those translations say and how they sound. Last week we read from the New American Standard, and believe it or not, this morning we are reading from the New International Version. Give your attention to God’s holy word. Chapter 12, 1 Corinthians, verse 27. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.
And in the church, God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of healing, those able to help others, those with gifts of administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But eagerly desire the greater gifts.
And now I will show you the most excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith that can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled. Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
Now we see only a reflection, dimly. Then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, just as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. If truly, O Lord, power is ascribed to You and it is made plain to us in Your word, we are asking that we might have strength through Your word. Lord, grant us strength such as would come to us at times like this, for the hearing of the word, for its appropriation. But we also ask that we might be those, O God, who are blessed by this word in a wonderful way. Father, as we give our attention to it, may we, in keeping with the word, prove to be Your children truly. This we ask through Christ. Amen.
This is a very difficult message for me to preach. Preparing this message has been very hard on me. There are many reasons for this, and I will not go into all of them, but one of them is that I am very sensitive to where each of you may be. We are considering 1 Corinthians 12 through 14, and a passage about which there has been a great deal of discussion. That discussion has at times been intense and very painful. I do not know where each one of you is in regard to this matter.
So it is very possible that I might be offending you this morning. I intend to speak very straightforwardly. And I pray that God enables me to do so with grace and with love. Even if you are not at the same place as I am, I hope this message may be a help to you, and that in time we may come to agree. Do I need to remind you at all about how controversial this section of Scripture is? How controversial it has become in our own century, in the time in which we live.
At its center are what are called the charismatic gifts. The word charismatic means gifted, and we generally use this word to describe someone with a strong personal presence. We say of someone that they are charismatic. They attract attention. They draw a crowd. They create excitement. In this context, in 1 Corinthians 12–14, the term charismatic refers to the various gifts that the Holy Spirit has given to Christ’s Church.
Historically, the Church has held that there are generally two groupings of gifts: a distinction between what are considered temporary gifts and continuing gifts. Paul provides lists of gifts in several passages in his epistles. For instance, you may wish to consult Romans 12, verses 6 through 8, for comparison. Or you may wish to look at Ephesians 4, verse 11, another passage that provides a list for us. But here in 1 Corinthians 12–14, we are given lists in various places. In chapter 12, we are given a list in verses 8 through 10, and in the text we read this morning, verse 28 of that chapter, we are again given a list by Paul. That list is repeated in part as Paul continues his argument, even as we move into the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians and the opening verses there. But historically, the Church has held that some of these lists include both temporary gifts and continuing gifts. Look at 1 Corinthians 12, verse 28.
It is convenient for us, as it is readily available. Can you identify in that text the temporary gifts and the continuing gifts? According to the Church as it has expressed itself historically, the temporary gifts are the gifts of apostle, prophet, miracles, healings, and tongues. These are the temporary gifts, while the continuing gifts are teacher, helps, and administrations, as stated in the New American Standard Bible at that point.
But even if you have a New International Version or a King James Version in front of you, you can see my point. As we have listed these continuing gifts—the teacher, the helps, and the administration—it is clear that they provide the basis for the classic three-office position as it has been held in the Church historically. The teacher is the minister of the Word; the helps are deacons in deaconal ministry, called to support the Church in its needs and to direct its service for the poor; the administration, or as the King James Version has it, governments, are the ruling elders, to whom, together with the ministers of the Word, oversight and judgment for the flock of Christ are committed.
Therefore, these continuing gifts, as we have outlined them, take on a formal and conservative quality. Formal, because they become officially related to office in the ongoing life and ministry of the Church; conservative, because their purpose is to preserve, or conserve, the Church’s regular devotion to the gospel through official means.
But what about the other gifts? If we have these continuing gifts in the Church, what about the other gifts mentioned—the so-called temporary gifts? The Church’s historic position, or more specifically at this point, the Orthodox Protestant position, is that the gifts identified as temporary have in fact ceased. We are living past the time of their use in the Church, specifically. That is, with the closing of the New Testament, with the finality of God’s revelation given to us in the New Testament, God is no longer communicating to us His will as He formerly did. The canon is closed, and the role of the temporary gift has been fulfilled. What they had in view has been taken care of in the divine economy. Therefore, the temporary gifts are indeed temporary, and their time of use in the Church has ceased. They are no longer operating in the Church. These gifts are those of apostles, prophets, miracles, healings, and tongues, as they are identified for us in the twenty-eighth verse of that twelfth chapter.
However, with the opening of this century, the historic Protestant position on this matter has been powerfully and even successfully attacked. There had been pressure all along since the Reformation, but that had been generally behind the scenes, with pockets that offered suggestions and opposition to what even the Reformers were saying. With the 19th century, the pressure intensified, so much so that B.B. Warfield felt compelled to respond to the pressures along these lines in his own day. He wrote a massive work on perfectionism, unfortunately, which no one any longer reads.
He also wrote a shorter treatment entitled Counterfeit Miracles, which is directly relevant and a great help to the Church. But these earlier difficulties, even those that Warfield faced, were but campfires when compared to the wildfire that was unleashed on the Church of Christ on the first of January, 1901.
That was the date when Agnes Osmond received the visitation of the Holy Spirit in what she understood to be the gift of speaking in tongues at the hands of Charles Parham in his Bible College in Topeka, Kansas. This visitation, as it was understood and interpreted, meant the sure and certain availability of those spiritual gifts once thought to be temporary and no longer present. Speaking in tongues was available to the Church in our time, contrary to what the Church had previously taught. Speaking in tongues then led to ministries of miracles and services of healing.
In 1906, at Azusa Street in Los Angeles, the Great Revival occurred. There was an explosion of what were claimed to be a revisitation of the miraculous gifts for the Church. This led to the ministry of Amy Semple McPherson and her Four Square Gospel Church and its program. From this beginning, it was a short step to the claim of the recovery of all the other spiritual gifts—not only speaking in tongues, not only miracles and healings, but also apostleship and the gift of prophecy. About ten years ago, during the period of church growth enthusiasm that affected even the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a number of OP pastors were present at a West Coast conference. The featured speaker at that conference informed his audience that he knew at least fourteen living apostles. Such are the claims of the Pentecostal movement. At first, Pentecostalism was a minor movement, with a following among people of lower income, those who had been deeply influenced by the Holiness movement, and who held a basic fundamentalist disposition.
This movement was popularized by a number of prominent personalities. I mentioned Amy Semple McPherson. You can read a fictionalized version of her story in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry. But though this was the beginning of the Pentecostal movement, by the 1950s and 1960s, this movement had achieved widespread acceptance. Oral Roberts, a Pentecostal, as a result of what was taking place in the 1950s and 1960s, became a mainline Methodist. He joined the mainline Church.
Catherine Kuhlman, here in Pittsburgh, was welcomed with her spirit-filled, miracle-filled prayer and praise services into the sacred spaces of the First Presbyterian Church at Sixth and Wood downtown. Two prominent seminary presidents, John Mackay of Princeton and Henry Van Dusen of Union Seminary in New York City, although they never claimed to speak in tongues themselves, agreed on Pentecostalism’s positive contribution. The Episcopalian Samuel Shoemaker, also well known here in Pittsburgh, together with the Anglican Philip Edgecumbe Hughes, and the ecumenist Leslie Newbigin, were especially impressed by the charismatic movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
Newbigin identified Pentecostalism as the great third principle stream for the Church’s life, the two others being Catholicism and Protestantism. He said, “A third chair must now be set at the ecumenical table.” We are no longer in the backwater; we are in the mainstream. It would seem that the new phenomenon of Pentecostalism would be drawing, actually, from the other two who were seated at that ecumenical table.
Not just the Protestants, from whom, you see, the Pentecostals had most directly come, but also from the Catholics, since in the late sixties Duquesne University, a Catholic university, became the site of the Holy Spirit’s descent upon post-Vatican II Roman Catholics. They, too, were speaking in tongues and receiving the gifts of healings and miracles, and other gifts as well. The charismatic movement is now firmly entrenched and generally accepted by conservatives and liberals alike, by Roman Catholics and by Protestants.
So much is this the case that even in Reformed churches and in their institutions, their colleges and in their seminaries, less and less is said to distance them and their position from the Pentecostalist claims for legitimacy. As a result, we are now faced with a crisis situation. It is a crisis situation for Christendom generally. It is a crisis situation increasingly for those who are of Reformed persuasion. For myself, I am committed to the historic Orthodox Protestant position, as has also been the Orthodox Presbyterian Church on this matter. I believe firmly that the gifts that the Church has traditionally identified as temporary are in fact temporary, and that they have ceased in their New Testament manifestation. They are no longer available to the people of God today. This means that I believe the charismatic position on 1 Corinthians 12–14 to be gravely mistaken and in error. But to maintain this position creates its own problems, and I am sure you are aware of that, leaving, seemingly, the Reformed church in an even more precarious position still, even greater at risk.
To begin with, all of us, non-Pentecostals and Pentecostals, are being forced to acknowledge a certain irony that affects us as we consider this issue. Here we are in the midst of a portion of Paul’s writings that seems so clearly directed toward the resolution of conflict and the reduction of tension, yet it is actually generating intense and bitter disputes. These disputes occur with great theological intensity. Emotions run high when Calvinist orthodoxy encounters Pentecostalism. We all easily are led to believe that our attitudes and actions directly contradict what Paul says about love in 1 Corinthians 13. In other words, to be firm in our position is unloving, and therefore condemned. Secondly, this very situation, as I think you can see, tends to work to the disadvantage of Reformed orthodoxy.
You see, in a certain ironic way, this situation creates the illusion that we are in the same situation and context as Paul and the early Corinthians. In other words, just as Paul and the Corinthians were engaged in a debate over spiritual gifts, so are we. It is that simple. There was a debate then, and there is a debate now. The situations are the same, and the debates are the same. But this, of course, creates the illusion that spiritual gifts are still at issue, still in use, and still available to the Church today. It creates that illusion.
The specifics of the argument seemingly work to the disadvantage of the Reformed participants. Paul and the Corinthians were not in disagreement about whether spiritual gifts exist, but about how they are to be used. Strange as it may sound, some in the Reformed tradition, while rejecting the idea that our situations are exactly the same, have accepted the argument in practice. What do you do with this quotation, for instance, from a highly respected Reformed theologian?
The issue here in the present debate between charismatics and non-charismatics is the unity and welfare of Christ’s entire body—emphasize, entire—and the health of all its members, both charismatic and non-charismatic. To be sure, this Reformed theologian works very hard to convince charismatics of his non-charismatic position. But his assumption is that charismatics, as such, are part of the true Church of Christ. The effect of this position is that a charismatic individual, by virtue of his or her charismatic conviction, must not be excluded, in fact cannot be excluded, from the definition and the reality of Christ’s true Church.
You cannot do it. It is impossible. You cannot discipline such a person. It may well be that the charismatic feels particularly uncomfortable in your denomination. But that individual cannot, by virtue of his or her charismatic conviction alone, be excluded.
Reasoning along these lines, this Reformed theologian commits himself to a program of dialogue. I might add, a seemingly endless program of dialogue, because the program of dialogue can never be brought to a conclusion, since discipline is never in view. You could not bring charges against the charismatic. Really.
But thirdly, the risk at which Reformed orthodoxy is placed in all of this is now made all the more apparent because the program for dialogue is perceived by too many well-intentioned but naive and ignorant Christians to be the very fulfillment of Paul’s encouragement to love in this passage in 1 Corinthians 13. If you do not commit yourself to dialogue, you do not love. In other words, love, as Paul defines it, mandates the program for dialogue in addressing the difficulty. Only such love as this stands in such an exalted position to address the problem, which you must know according to our Reformed theologian, since he tells us is essentially counterproductive.
The controversy itself is essentially, by definition, counterproductive. An abnormality, he goes on to say, which compromises the Church, reduces its credibility both to itself and to the world, and thus impairs its effectiveness in the world. In this position, the controversy, since it is a controversy, becomes the greater evil in relation to the error, in relation to false doctrine. That there is controversy is a greater evil than embracing false doctrine.
Love in this situation, in this setting, is therefore defined as dialogue. Love equals dialogue. Love equals exchange, and this love specifically finds its application in this context in the ongoing discussion, with the discussion in its ongoing character being the resolution. There is no other resolution. The only resolution is the ongoing discussion. That is all. I think you realize what is happening. This assigns a validity, a legitimacy, permanently to the opposing side.
And we will be to that individual or church who thinks about terminating the dialogue, ending it, who forgoes the discussion, or rejects the idea that the discussion itself constitutes the resolution, or rejects the position that the disagreement and the controversy themselves are the greater evil in comparison to the false teaching. This new definition of love, as if it were defined by the dialogue itself, suggests that the love the apostle has in mind is something else altogether.
Now, as I said at the beginning of this message, it is a very difficult message for me to preach. In part, as I said at the beginning, because I am not sure where each of you is with regard to the discussion. But secondly, because I have had to take on friends. And that is very painful. I preach this message to you today as a reminder of the severe controversy that exists over this present section of Scripture. But also to remind you just how much reform orthodoxy is at risk in this debate. Brothers and sisters in Christ, with regard to this matter, we are fighting for our very integrity.
Let us give heed to the word of God and its call to a genuine biblical love. Our God, again, we are before you as your people, dependent upon you and your word. And as our forefathers in the faith have been people of your word, we would be people of your word, too. And in our love for you and our love for others, may it be that Jesus Christ himself is coming to expression in us. And as in him, there is the perfect love for the truth, and no equivocation with regard to it. May there be such love in us.
We pray your forbearance with us where we stumble, even if we present our position in a way that does not please you. But help us, O God, that we might do well before you. And in doing well, O God, may you be pleased to use us in order to help others. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.