One or two more matters should come up for discussion before I finish my post-game analysis of the Slick-Waldron debate over the gifts of prophecy, tongues, and healing. Here, I think, we pass from the good things I learned and the ugly of my confusion over the debate question to the bad.
I think Matt’s use of 1 Corinthians 1:7 was bad. 1 Corinthians 1:7 reads: “so that you are not lacking in any gift, awaiting eagerly the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In this statement Paul congratulates the Corinthian church for the fact that they do not lack in any gift as they await the Second Coming. Matt pressed the text as a proof that all the spiritual gifts given to the Corinthians are normative for all churches till the Second Coming.
Well, quite evidently the text teaches no such thing. I actually asked Matt about this in the cross-examination. The text is plainly not normative but descriptive. Descriptive texts are not necessarily normative. While sometimes descriptive texts do indirectly teach us biblical norms, using them this way is a lot more complicated than Matt seems to think.
The Book of Judges is a major, biblical case in point. Judges is descriptive but not directly normative. The text that says that Judas went out and hanged himself is descriptive, but not directly normative. Even so 1 Corinthians says nothing about whether other churches should normatively have all the Corinthians’ spiritual gifts. It only says the Corinthians did in the first century. It says nothing about these gifts lasting till the Second Coming. It only says that they had them while waiting for the Second Coming. The text does not prove what Matt thinks, and the fact that he thinks so manifests bad hermeneutics in which the important distinction between descriptive and normative texts is ignored.
Another thing that I thought was really bad was the incredibly naïve way that Matt quoted a couple of statements from my book. Perhaps the worst was his use of my tongue in cheek remark in my book that there is prophecy in the church today. He seemed to take it as a kind of unintentional admission that I granted his argument. I can’t see why else he would have raised the issue. Here is the statement in the context of my book. I think you will see why Matt’s use of it was so bad. “I have something very shocking to say to you. I can prove to you that there is prophecy in the church today! I can prove it to you very simply. According to the Bibles you hold in your hands, and in particular Revelation 1:1-3, the book of Revelation is a prophecy. We are a church. There is, thus, prophecy in the church today.” My point was, of course, that the ministry of apostles and prophets continues in the church today through their inscripturated words. This helps us understand passages like Ephesians 4 where apostles and prophets are given (Ephesians 4:13) “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” I certainly did not mean to say, and I think Matt should have known this, that there are living prophets in the world today.
Dr. Sam Waldron is the Academic Dean of CBTS and professor of Systematic Theology. He is also one of the pastors of Grace Reformed Baptist Church in Owensboro, KY. Dr. Waldron received a B.A. from Cornerstone University, an M.Div. from Trinity Ministerial Academy, a Th.M. from Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. From 1977 to 2001 he was a pastor of the Reformed Baptist Church of Grand Rapids, MI. Dr. Waldron is the author of numerous books including A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, The End Times Made Simple, Baptist Roots in America, To Be Continued?, and MacArthur’s Millennial Manifesto: A Friendly Response.
