What is a Hyper-Cessationist?

As a capital “R” Reformed person, I would call myself a cessationist. This simply means that I believe God has “ceased” giving any new doctrine and/or new ethics. You could also describe it as the belief that there is no more canon to be given. It also means God will not give any more infallible revelation that has the authority of Scripture itself.

But for some time now, I have been deeply troubled by some of the assumptions that the term “cessationist” now seems to carry. Cessationism has morphed into something dark and suffocating. It has become a thick, wet blanket used to smother anything that smacks of the supernatural. There are contemporary proponents of this type of cessationism who seem to think and teach that the term means God has no interaction with us apart from His Word, and that all miracles except for conversion have ceased. At the very least, claims of the miraculous are to be looked at with disdain and doubt. They teach there are no more spiritual gifts. There are no more “signs and wonders.” But such a view is not historical cessationism. It is a type of contemporary distortion that can only be described as “hyper-cessationism,” and its consequences could not be more dire.

Defining Our Terms

First of all, what is a hyper-cessationist? We could define it as the following: a person who is not just a cessationist, but who also aggressively tries to undermine or disprove anything abnormal in the Christian life; who is automatically skeptical of the miraculous, including but not limited to revival, healing, dreams, and visions; and whose worldview is closer to functional deism or rationalism despite theoretically denying such.

More generally, it means a person who has gone beyond what the Westminster Divines intended in the cessationist clause of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which as we will see, was meant to protect against claims of new doctrine and ethics, not signs, wonders, impressions, and even gifts (including prophecy) per se, assuming they are consistent with and (ordinarily) mediated through the Holy Scriptures.

The leading scholars on the Westminster Confession’s view of cessationism agree. For example, it has been well documented that many of the Westminster Divines believed that dreams, angelic visitations, and prophetic impulses and motions can all still have a role in the ordinary lives of Christians.[1] John Owen is representative when he states, “To say God does not or may not send his angels to any of his saints, to communicate his mind to them as to some particulars of their duty according to his word or to foreshadow to them his own approaching work, seems to unwarrantably limit the Holy One of Israel.”^[2] William Bridge, a Westminster Divine, said: “But, you will say, may not God speak by extraordinary visions and revelations, in these days of ours? Yes, without all doubt he may: God is not to be limited, he may speak in what way he pleases.”^[3]

Richard Baxter agreed with both Owen and Bridge, but expressed his views more candidly than either: “It is possible that God may make new revelations to particular persons about their duties, events, or matters of fact, in subordination to the Scripture, either by inspiration, vision, apparition or voice.”^[4] Cotton Mather said about his grandpa: “Increase Mather did no less than three times as the Year 1678 was coming on, very publickly declare that he was verily perswaded a very Mortal Disease would shortly break in, and the Slain of the Lord would be many. Some of his Friends were troubled at him for it. But when the Year 1678 was come on, we saw the Mortal Disease. The Small-Pox broke in.”^[5] George Gillespie, another Westminster Divine, said that John Knox, John Welsh, Robert Bruce and others were “more than ordinary pastors and teachers, even holy prophets receiving extraordinary revelations from God, and foretelling strange and remarkable things, which did accordingly come to pass punctually, to the great admiration of all who knew the particulars”^[6]

Perhaps the most convincing of all came from John Flavel and Samuel Rutherford, both prominent ministers in the seventeenth century. What do we make of reports such as John Flavel’s dreams, for instance: “Mr. Flavel replied that he expected much trouble because of his dream the night before, adding, that when he had such representations made to him in his sleep, they seldom or never failed. Accordingly, they were overtaken by a dreadful tempest.”^[7] Or what about Rutherford’s reports of the prophetical insight of men like John Knox and Jan Huss, the latter apparently predicting both the rise of Luther and the time of his rising?^[8] Considering Rutherford’s substantial role in the Westminster Assembly, it is worth giving in full:

There is a third revelation of some particular men, who have foretold things to come, even since the ceasing of the Canon, as John Huss, Wycliffe, Luther, have foretold things to come and they certainly fell out, and in our nation of Scotland, M. George Wishart foretold that Cardinal Beaton should not come out alive at the gates of the Castle of St. Andrews, but that he should die a shameful death; and he was hanged over the window that he did look out when he saw the man of God burnt. Mr. Knox prophesied of the hanging of the Lord of Grange. Mr. John Davidson uttered prophecies, known to many of the kingdom, and diverse preachers in England have done the like.[9]

Quotes such as these has led Kevin D. Young to conclude that “without a doubt, the Westminster Confession of Faith teaches cessationism, but it is a cessationism which requires considerable nuance and allows for supernatural surprises so long as they are working with and through the Word of God.” In what may be the most scholarly treatment of cessationism in the Reformed tradition, Garnet Howard Milne concludes, “Many of the authors of the WCF accepted that ‘prophecy’ continued in their time, and a number of them apparently believed that disclosure of God’s will through dreams, visions, and angelic communication remained possible.”^[10] This is why the Westminster Divines who gave us the section on the cessation of certain types of revelation also wrote WCF 5.3: “God, in his ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at his pleasure.”

Such views were not only common in the Reformed and Protestant world, however. They were especially abundant in the first centuries of the New Testament church, after the canon had closed. For instance, the aged Augustine reported a litany of miracles and extraordinary events taking place either in his city or very near to it: “A miracle that happened at Milan while I was there, when a blind man had his sight restored…I have been concerned that such accounts should be published because I saw that signs of divine power like those of the older days were frequently occurring in modern times too…many miracles have occurred there (at Hippo) and to my certain knowledge many miracles have occurred there which are not recorded in the published documents and nearly 70 of these documents have been produced at the time of writing.”[11]

Irenaeus tells us in his Against Heresies that a man was brought back to life after having been dead.[12] Many others such as Justin Martyr, Jerome, and Basil the Great speak of exorcisms and strange prophecies coming to pass. This is not an argument for continuationism in contrast to cessationism. That would require a different kind of article. This is a matter of general examination as it pertains to the world of the supernatural. If certain cultures and churches error on the side of enthusiasm, fanaticism, and hyper-gullibility, others fall into the ditch of materialism and hyper-skepticism. For many of our churches in the West, especially the cessationist ones, this seems to be the situation we find ourselves in at present.                                         

Today’s Cessationism is an Aberration

Today, popular treatments of cessationism rarely if ever nuance these things, so most people who are in cessationist camps are left thinking that God simply never makes use of dreams, angelic visits, or prophetic motions. As mentioned above, some even believe God no longer works miracles, other than conversion. We are left with a type of hyper-cessationism that ultimately boxes God off from intervention in His world.

The implications of this could not be more drastic. Without realizing it, suddenly we have become more deistic than Christian. We have become materialists, intellectualists, and rationalists. Not only can everything be explained in terms of the natural, but we also don’t expect or even desire to see anything unusual or supernatural.

This is why revival and healing has often been rejected in such circles. This mindset automatically rejects anything abnormal, unusual, or miraculous as an explanation for what happens in the material realm. We begin to see it as “cheating” or a kind of cop out to believe that we must leave room for the supernatural, and specifically for God’s miraculous intervention, whenever we interpret things in the natural world. But why do we assume such a thing is cheating? Why do we feel like such explanations would be inferior to the type that seeks to explain phenomena without God? Thus, rationalism has come to dictate how many cessationists think about things. This is why even Christians will begin to doubt the Scriptures when it comes to whether the flood was universal, or whether all the miracles we read about could have really happened as presented. This is certainly true of any supernatural phenomena we see in the present. They are quickly dismissed as foolish, excessive, and anti-scientific, even by Christians.

Christians today, including cessationists, believe the Lord caused an iron axe-head to float. We believe that Jonah lived in the belly of a fish and that the Red Sea was parted in two. We believe that Lazarus was raised from the dead. But to assume that such things are too extraordinary for our world today would go beyond what persons such as Flavel and Rutherford believed. The question here is why has modern Christianity, and especially in the conservative and confessional world, swung to such a radical position as it pertains to how God moves and operates in our contemporary setting? How have we become more cessationist than the Reformers and Post-Reformers? Where did we take such a consequential turn towards deism and rationalism, and away from the supernatural?

Unquestionably, two chief factors are the rise of “charismania” and the West’s general tendency towards rationalism. This has created a situation for something like hyper-cessationism to gain traction in many churches. But one extreme doesn’t warrant another, and the extreme of hyper-cessationism is actually worse than charismania because it is harder to detect. It is stale and dry. It is too subtle to gain notice until all warmth and vigor has already been snuffed out.

So what should someone who has been ensnared by hyper-cessationism do? The first thing is to confess that this is you. Does your worldview reflect the one you find in the Scriptures, or is it closer to what you would find in deism? Could it be that the materialism, rationalism, and scientism of the West has fogged your ability to expect and even see the supernatural, as described for us in every page of the Bible? Is your posture towards the supernatural, especially when unexpected, one of disbelief and skepticism? Do you deny that God uses impulses and other things to move His people in a certain direction or to help them make decisions? Has your view of the world become anti-supernatural?  These are just a few examples, but they could help diagnose if your cessationism has become "hyper."

The second thing to do is repent and change direction. If your doctrine of the Holy Spirit has no room in it for mighty outpourings of God or for the unusual and exceptional, including miracles, revival, and instantaneous conversions on a large scale, is it really the Holy Spirit we see in the Bible? Is it the Holy Spirit of our Reformed fathers? It is time to come back to the views of the historic church, whose understanding of the supernatural was much more nuanced, less cautious, and more consistent with the worldview of the Bible. It is time to be revived by the Spirit of the Living God.

In such days as these, when evil seems to be increasing on every side, we need more of God’s unction, power, and Spirit, not less. We need the historical understanding of cessationism, not its ugly stepsister that is dragging her stale, heavy, ugly bristles across Western churches today, smothering anything that smacks of too much life and vigor. In the words of Hamlet, probably: “hyper-cessationists: there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” In the words of the Westminster Confession: “God, in his ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at his pleasure” (5.3).