Spiritual gifts

There is an on-going debate amongst denominations of the Christian Church in this modern era, regarding the existence of spiritual gifts, and whether or not some of those endowments of the Holy Spirit have become permanently obsolete. In particular, it is the gifts which bear a more “magical quality” that have been declared unnecessary to the proper functioning of the Church today, such as speaking in tongues and prophecy. Anyone who claims to have one of these mystical abilities is eyed with suspicion and something of condescension by more evangelical followers of Christ. In the meantime, other more tangible and down-to-earth gifts, such as teaching and hospitality, are acknowledged, encouraged and nodded upon as conveying respectability and normalcy. Why does such a distinction exist? If Scripture has laid out a picture of the Church that includes something beyond the physical and material, why does the Bride of Christ so quickly dismiss the relevance of such supernatural abilities?


It seems to me that Fear forms at least a portion of the explanation, based on the emphasis placed by traditional denominations on solid doctrine and a sound system of belief not intrinsic to emotional sentiment. Fear of believing in Relativism. Fear of being deceived by the heart into turning from the straight and narrow path to Heaven to the broad and comfortable streets of Hell. There is a certain amount of concrete security in merely explicating the ideas of accepted theology that does not accompany a vision from God in the middle of the night. But while cautionary evaluation of our faith and actions is important and indispensible, perhaps we have strayed too far from Mystery in search of Reality. Writer and critic Edmund Fuller comments:

"…[O]ne fashionable and ironic misdirection is away from mystery. We should not be shrinking from mystery, from what cannot be understood. A God who could be wholly understood would necessarily become an idol. I deplore the flight of several modern bishops of my own Episcopal Communion from the doctrine of the Trinity, for example. The Trinity is a mystery…They are of Faith, not of demonstration. Why we should fear mystery in religion in an age when the most advanced probes of science reveal ever new mysteries in the universe of a stupendous scale, quite escapes me. It is a mistake, a confusion of categories, a loss of faith, a loss of nerve." (from Fuller's “After the Moon Landings: a Further Report on the Christian Spaceman C.S. Lewis.”)

Why have so many Christians, who have a greater basis than all other humans for believing in the magical—after all, when has Grace ever been satisfactorily defined as rational?—chosen to avoid the mention of so many things ethereal? I would put forward for consideration a claim that it is our very definition of Reality which is tainted. Perhaps in our efforts to be doctrinally correct, we as Christians lose sight of the Godhead as the true center of reality, and choose instead an idol of Logic and Familiarity to cling to.