The Gifts of the Holy Spirit: - Vital Christianity

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Calvin never distinguished between permanent and temporary gifts. He saw a distinction only
as it relates to offices. Those necessary for the government of the church are perpetual while
those applied at the beginning for its foundation are temporary. He thus saw pastors and elders
now playing a leading role rather than apostles and prophets.
While Calvin generally downplayed the need for the gifts since the apostolic era, he seemed
open to the idea that they could have surfaced later on. In fact, he once included Luther among
modern "apostles."49 The primary focus for Calvin, however, was the preaching of the Word.
The Post-Reformation Age
John Wesley, the father of Methodism and the subsequent holiness movements, observed a
correlation between the loss of gifts and the general state of the church:
"The causes of their decline was not as has been vulgarly supposed because there is
no more need for them, because all the world becomes Christian. . . . The real cause
was: the love of many, almost all Christians so-called, was waxed cold . . . this was
the real cause why the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit were no longer to be
found in the Christian church: because the Christians were turned heathen again and
had only a dead form left." 33
It was Wesley's belief that though orthodoxy remained, it did so with diminished expectations.
The church had accommodated itself to secularism and unbelief reigned.
Throughout church history various groups came into being which were characterized by their
open practice of spiritual gifts. Many of these were considered fanatical and even heretical by
"mainstream" Christians of their day.
This has also been true of the Pentecostals in the early part of our own century. The
Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Camisards, the Jansenists, the early Quakers, the Shakers, the
Irvingites, etc. suffered persecution at the hands of Christians because of their open use of the
charismatic gifts.
The Significant Role of Healing in the Church Throughout the Ages
The following is a summary of the significant role healing has played in the life and
ministry of the church throughout the ages. Here are some examples of that claim.