Is it ok to go a little long on this question?
My wife had an insightful point the other day. Because she has experienced this to be true of her, and me, she said this. Her thought was that maybe it's not that hard cessationists are blind to their own unbelief, but that they are afraid of unbelief. The idea there is that one way of protecting ourselves from disappointment in our christian experience, is to give ourselves over to not expecting too much. If we expect too much, we open ourselves up to disappointment, and often that disappointment can lead to unbelief as we wrongly and quickly conclude that God doesn't honor His promises. It's much safer to domesticate what we expect of our christian experience and leave the more clearly supernatural adventures in the past to be for us just a sort of fantasy that happened to be true...for them; more convenient to dismiss those spiritual realities as existing only in a sort of apostolic middle earth. But to open myself up to the possibility that their christian experience could or should be true for me, but that isn't, means that I must first seriously re-examine my heart and belief before I presume to say that God no longer works in a certain way...which means I must truly open myself up to the possibility that I've been wrong and actually don't know something that is important. It means becoming more vulnerable to having my faith tested in ways that I'm uncomfortable with.
What are your thoughts on this? True? Not True? Why or why not?
Frank Answers:
One of the things I find completely disreputable about Continualist arguments/reproaches of Cessationism is that it inevitably looks for heart motives in the Cessationist, and wants to talk about hypothetical hidden sins or sinfulness in the Cessationist. This is entirely evident in this diagnosis by you and your wife: you can't actually see a sin in the other side, but you have to assume it in order to make sense of your beliefs and why we would reject them.
From my side, I think it is much safer to simply reject the pleas of Cessationists and our reasoning and arguments from history and the Bible but then to hide behind fictional accounts of our souls' inner dialogs. Like a lot of Continualism, it's an unfalsifiable rationalization.
I reject your diagnosis for three reasons:
[1] In the Bible, there are no places where the writer (Luke, Paul, Peter, Jude, etc., but ultimately the Holy Spirit) says that one way you will suffer for your faith, or suffer as a trial, is by the failure of God to produce a miracle. The category of trial which brings sanctification (for example, James 1:2-4) is due to "πειρασμός" -- that is, the conditions one is subject to. For that reason, I shouldn't see my lack of prophecy or tongues as something to suffer through, but as something else.
[2] In the Bible, our instructions regarding the use of the Apostolic gifts are, in the best possible case, limited. Paul doesn't instruct Timothy or Titus to solve the church's problems by means of signs and wonders -- even though, you must admit, that would be a fantastic way to prove that the shepherd of the local flock has divine authority. Paul doesn't solve the problems of the Corinthian church by means of supernatural intuition and prophecy, but appeals to them to stick to something more ordinary -- which is, the love which is a necessary consequence of the Gospel. Paul doesn't ask the Galatians to overcome the Judaizers by means of miracles -- or, to your point, to suffer through since they might not get a miracle. Because the Bible doesn't ask us to invest that much confidence in gifts that will never manifest, I think your appeal to do so lacks something.
[3] The Bible gives me bigger fish to fry. The Gospel itself gives me bigger fish to fry because I have the first problem of dying to sin daily (cf. Luke 9:23). I have other things to worry about concerning the sins in my life I can see to be bothered about an alleged massive gap of unbelief which, frankly, the Bible does not accuse me of.
