Strange Fire Conference #3: Joni Eareckson Tada and R. C. Sproul

by Dan Phillips

First post
Second post
My overall summary report to CBC

The next session featured Joni Eareckson Tada. I expect you know her story: at age seventeen, Joni's dive into unexpectedly shallow water resulted in her becoming a quadriplegic for life. Her first book Joni, written in 1976, is a gut-wrenching read. Here faithful yet vulnerably candid style has remained her trademark. Joni's talks are chats rather than addresses; they are personal testimonies mixed with spontaneous singing of snatches of hymns. I find it impossible to listen to her without being moved, and without coming away thinking, "Yeah, I don't really have problems."

This was a very touching, personal session. Joni and MacArthur have known each other for a long time, and a lot of kidding has gone back and forth (she said that, when she decided to wear her wedding dress outside her chair, while other said she floated like an angel, Mac said she looked like a float). So she leaned on that friendship to call him up to the stage with her to sing an unrehearsed duet. It was very nice, and left few dry eyes.

Nor did Joni's occasionally tearful testimony concerning the path she's traveled. In early days, Charismatic friends kept wanting to command Joni's healing. Once, Joni was taken to a Kathryn Kuhlman meeting. They went hours early, to get front and center seating. However, Joni and the other folks in wheelchairs were hustled off to the side out of the way, where the spotlight never found them. Afterwards the ushers moved them out, a very quiet line of 35 souls, all untouched, unhealed, left to wonder why the Savior had in fact passed them by.

Joni shared the struggle she's had as her affliction has forced her to confront the corruption in her own heart. She has had cancer, she has severe chronic pain — just think about that for a moment — she has constant daily struggles. But in it, Joni has found a hope to hang on to that is very different than the focus of most prominent Charismatic leaders: Jesus, the Gospel, heaven. Joni shared that she and her husband Ken talk about pain being splashovers of Hell. Then what are splashovers of Heaven? Not happy days, they concluded, but finding Jesus in the splashovers of Hell.

In fact, one of the most poignant reflections Joni shared (in my words) was that a new, healthy body is not what she is most looking forward to about resurrection life. What she most looks forward to is the full healing of her heart, the final removal of its remaining corruptions and temptations. In other talks she has said that she plans to thank Jesus for her wheelchair, and for what He has taught her through it. It calls to mind Solzhenitsyn's "Bless you, prison, for being my life."

She noted that Jesus was never "about" healing; alluding to Mark 1, she noted that when healings threatened to take focus away from His preaching, He would move on.

As if Joni weren't dealing with enough pains and suffering, after the talk we were told that she'd had to leave right away because (as I understood it) she had some bleeding that they could not stop.

I spoke with friends on-site who were monitoring Twitter. They told me that, previous to Joni taking the stage, the carpers and critics were very active and strident. But when Joni spoke, they shut up. Ditto during talks by Justin Peters, who suffers from cerebral palsy.

The critics didn't (and don't) have much to say to folks like Joni and Justin. Lower back-pain, headaches, poor sense of smell? They're all over that. Sometimes they are, that is. Quadriplegia and cerebral palsy? Not so much. Off to the side of the stage, please.

This is "continuationism" in a nutshell, isn't it? One hundred years of desperately trying to prop up their position by argument, redefinition, and distraction — but in all the whole world not one faith healer commanding one Joni Eareckson Tada to "rise and walk," to any good effect. Kathryn Kuhlman's ushers bear mute testimony to the fact that they expect no such thing to happen. Why not? Because that gift, the ability to heal on command, has not in fact continued. Tens of thousands of smart phones have failed to capture one such occurrence, though they could have captured many in the days of Jesus and the apostles (cf. Mark 6:56). The very fact that they are forced to make verbal arguments for continuationism — rather than pointing to 1900 years of Joni's and Justin's hopping up out of their wheelchairs — is potent proof that their position is bankrupt, and that in their hearts they know it.

Then John MacArthur made a remark in passing that stuck with me. He pointed that in the whole sweep of Biblical history, there were not that many healings. This is particularly true in the Old Testament, where the miracles usually "ended up with a lot of people dead. Once, the whole world." I'd never seen it that way, but of course he's right. Another point of discontinuity between the genuine and the imitation — Charismatic leader Benny Hinn and his "Holy Ghost machine gun" to the contrary notwithstanding.

The next session was a video from R. C. Sproul, who was prevented from coming by ill health. Sproul briefly traced the history of the Pentecostal movement. It was an early-20th-century invention that had no traction into the mainstream until the middle of that century, after which it spread to the Roman Catholic church and elsewhere indiscriminately.

Sproul then made the point that the Spirit's coming in Pentecost has to be set in the context of the history of redemption. It isn't a "and then that happened" event. Sproul set up by contrast with Moses wishing that all the Lord's people could have the Spirit (Num. 11:29). What had been a wish on Moses' lips becomes a prophecy in Joel 2, and then a reality in Acts 2.

What we see in Acts is the Spirit coming to four people-groups: first the Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 2), then the half-Jew Samaritans (Acts 8), then the Gentile proselytes in Acts 11, and then the full-on Gentile converts in Acs 19. Each group receives its own reenactment of Pentecost, presided over by apostles, signifying their full reception of the Spirit. Unlike the false teaching of Pentecostals, in each case, every believer present received the Spirit.

I have often noted (and argued at some length in my unpublished book on the Holy Spirit) that trying to re-do this period in order to receive the Spirit is like trying to build a manger and gather some shepherds and angels to receive Christ. The manger is how Christ came into the world, and the events in Acts are how the Spirit formed the church. It isn't intended that we reproduce the historical events.

And so Sproul's argument was that the problem with Pentecostals is that they make too little of Pentecost, not too much; and that their understanding of it differs from the apostles'.

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