Did the Gifts Stop?

This is one of the sixteen questions that actually divide the visible church, and it is unusual among them: it is not a question about how a man is saved, and both answers have been held by people who agree about everything that matters more. It is also a question where a single verse carries nearly the whole weight of one side, which makes it checkable in a way most disputes are not.

The steps: the position stated as its defenders hold it, why it is not a silly position, the verse it rests on, what that verse says in context, how the commentators on this site read it, and what to do with modern claims.

1. The case for cessation, stated properly

Cessationism is the view that the miraculous gifts, tongues, prophecy, healing, miracles, were given to establish the church and authenticate the apostles, and ceased when that work was done. It is not the view that God no longer acts, and anyone arguing against a God who no longer acts is fighting nobody. Every serious cessationist believes God answers prayer, heals, and providentially orders events. The claim is narrower: the sign gifts, exercised by individuals as a regular ministry, were for the founding period.

Three arguments carry it, and they are real arguments.

The purpose argument. Scripture ties signs to the authentication of a new message: "How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him; God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost" (Hebrews 2:3-4). Signs confirmed the word. Once the word is confirmed and written, the confirming function is complete. And Scripture's miracles do cluster: Moses and the exodus, Elijah and Elisha, Christ and the apostles, with long stretches of comparative silence between.

The historical argument. Whatever was happening in Corinth is not obviously what has happened since. There is no unbroken chain of tongues-speaking congregations from the first century to the twentieth, and the modern movement dates in its present form to the beginning of the twentieth century.

The pastoral argument, which is the strongest of the three. Claimed gifts have done real harm. People have been told their child died because they lacked faith. Money has been taken. Nonsense has been spoken over congregations with "thus saith the Lord" attached, and when a prophecy fails, nobody is held to Deuteronomy 18:22. A man who has watched that happen and concluded the whole category is dangerous is not being faithless. He is being careful, and Scripture tells him to be: "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1).

2. The verse it rests on

The verse as it is usually cited. "Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away" (1 Corinthians 13:8). There it is in Paul's own hand: tongues shall cease.

The claim built on it. Paul says the gifts will stop. The next verses say when: "For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away" (1 Corinthians 13:9-10). On one popular reading, that which is perfect is the completed New Testament. Partial revelation through prophets gave way to the whole written revelation, and the gifts that delivered it in pieces were no longer needed.

What the passage actually says next. Paul does not leave the phrase undefined. He explains it twice, in two images, in the very next breath. "When I was a child, I spake as a child… but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Corinthians 13:11-12).

What changes. Face to face. Knowing as I am known. Whatever else those describe, they do not describe the arrival of a book. No Christian who has ever owned a complete Bible has thereby seen God face to face, or known Him as fully as God knows him. Paul is naming a moment of direct sight, and he is contrasting it with the indirect seeing we do now, with the Scriptures in our hands. If that which is perfect came in the fourth century, the "darkly" is over and the "face to face" has happened, and everyone reading this would have to be living after it.

What John says about his own book. John closes his Gospel by telling the reader it is not the whole record. "And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name" (John 20:30-31). And again: "the world itself could not contain the books that should be written" (John 21:25). The written Word is complete for what it was given to do, to bring a reader to believe and to live. It never claims to be all that Christ has said, or to be the last time He would speak. Christ is the living Word, and He still speaks: "My sheep hear my voice" (John 10:27), and "I have yet many things to say unto you… when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth" (John 16:12-13). Whatever He says now is tested against what He has already said, and it will never contradict it.

3. What the commentators do with it

This is where the argument can be checked rather than asserted, and the result is not close. Seven voices on this site comment on this passage. They span the fourth century to the nineteenth, and they include strict Calvinists, an Arminian, and a Greek Father reading it in his own language. Not one of them takes that which is perfect to mean the completed canon.

But when that which is perfect is come — The state of eternal blessedness; then that which is in part — that which is imperfect, shall be done away; the imperfect as well as the probationary state shall cease for ever.

Adam Clarke

But when that which is perfect is come — At death and in the last day.

John Wesley

The sense here is, that "in heaven" — a state of absolute perfection — that which is "in part," or which is imperfect, shall be lost in superior brightness.

Albert Barnes

When perfect knowledge of God, of Christ, and of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven shall take place; which will not in this life, but in that which is to come.

John Gill

Gill is worth pausing on. He is a Baptist and a high Calvinist, exactly the tradition where cessationism is now strongest, and he writes that the perfect knowledge in view "will not in this life" take place. The Pulpit Commentary says it is "lost in perfectness when we have at last attained to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." And Chrysostom, in the fourth century, reading Greek as a native and with no stake whatever in a modern argument, treats it as the relation between our present knowledge and the knowledge to come: "our knowledge of this, when compared with that which is to come, is a sort of partial and imperfect thing, and is done away on the coming of that other."

And one more, who does not merely read the phrase differently but names the cessationist use of the verse as a mistake. Alexander Maclaren, a Victorian Baptist, opening 1 Corinthians 13:8BH:

"Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease," that has been misunderstood as if it amounted to a declaration that the miraculous gifts in the early Church were intended to be of brief duration. However true that may be, it is not what Paul means here. The cessation to which he refers is their cessation in the light of the perfect Future.

Alexander Maclaren, on 1 Corinthians 13:8 and 13:13

Note the fairness of his middle sentence. "However true that may be" — he does not claim the gifts continued, and he is not arguing for them here. He is saying the verse is not about that, which is a different and stronger claim than picking a side. Paul is contrasting two sets of three: prophecies, tongues and knowledge, which pass; faith, hope and charity, which last. The subject is what survives into eternity, not a date in church history.

Seven for seven, across four centuries and both camps, and none of them reads it as the canon. That does not settle whether the gifts continue, and it should not be made to. Cessationism can be held on the purpose argument and the historical argument without this verse at all, and its better defenders do exactly that. But the popular version, the one repeated in comment threads as though Paul had said it outright, is resting on a reading that the commentators most likely to be sympathetic to it do not hold.

4. Before the apostolic age, and outside the Twelve

One fact ought to be settled before the era is argued over, because it complicates every version of the argument. The gifts did not begin at Pentecost.

Jesus “gave them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease” (Matthew 10:1), and the commission is plainer still: “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8). That is the Twelve, and Judas is among them.

And it was not confined to the Twelve. “After these things the LORD appointed other seventy also, and sent them two and two before his face” (Luke 10:1), with the charge “heal the sick that are therein” (Luke 10:9), and they came back saying “even the devils are subject unto us through thy name” (Luke 10:17). The King James reads seventy; many manuscripts read seventy-two, and translations differ for that reason. Either way they are unnamed disciples, not apostles, not elders, and they are a different body entirely from the seventy elders of Numbers 11, who were given the Spirit for the burden of governing rather than a mission with authority over demons.

So the gifts were operating before the Cross, before Pentecost, and in men holding no office. That does not decide whether they continue. It does mean an argument that ties them to an apostolic era has to explain a period when they were neither apostolic nor an era.

And Christ’s own word to the seventy when they returned is the one this whole subject keeps needing: “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). He said that to men whose gift had just worked. A working gift is not the evidence of belonging, and He told them so Himself. Judas had the power of Matthew 10 and was called a devil (John 6:70); the Spirit came upon Balaam and he went for the money (Numbers 24:2; 2 Peter 2:15); and the men of Matthew 7 prophesied and cast out devils in His name and heard “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:22-23). Note what that last one says and does not say: the Greek is oudepote, never at any time. Those are not men who fell away. They are men who were never His, whose gifts worked anyway, which is the more unsettling of the two possibilities.

5. A second terminus, in another letter

Everything above turns on one verse in one chapter, which is fair, because the cessationist case turns on it too. But Paul sets an end point for the gifts a second time, in a different letter, using a different word, and the argument is independent of 1 Corinthians 13 entirely.

And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ Ephesians 4:11-13

“Till we all come” is mechri katantêsômen: until we all reach. It is a terminus, plainly stated, and Paul stacks three phrases to say what it is. The unity of the faith. The full knowledge of the Son of God. The measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

So the gifts do have an expiry, and this passage names it. It is simply not the death of the apostles, and it is not a book. Nobody claims the church has reached the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. Whatever else is true, we are not on the far side of that sentence.

Which changes the shape of the argument. A cessationist is not answering an argument from silence, because nobody here is claiming Scripture sets no end. Scripture sets two, in two letters, and both of them are placed somewhere no one has arrived.

The two endings may not be the same ending. Ephesians 4:13 names the church’s maturity; 1 Corinthians 13:12 names seeing face to face. They could be one thing described twice or two stages of one thing, and Paul does not say. What neither of them can be is the completed canon, because a man holding a whole Bible has not thereby seen God face to face, and the canon plainly did not produce the unity of the faith. The Pulpit Commentary, quoted above, already joins the two: the partial is “lost in perfectness when we have at last attained to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”

And notice what the same passage says the gifts are for, since it is not what either camp usually argues about: for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body. Not for display, not for proof, and not for the bearer. That is the subject of its own letter, Spiritual Gifts.

6. What the other side has to answer

Turnabout, because a page that only convicts one side is not doing its job.

Paul does say the gifts will cease. That is not a cessationist invention; it is in verse 8. Continuationists tend to quote verse 10 to win the argument and then never say what verse 8 is for. If the gifts end at the resurrection, fine, but then say so plainly: they end, and Paul says they end, and the thing that outlasts them is love, which is the entire point of the chapter and the reason the passage exists. 1 Corinthians 13 is not an argument for the gifts. It is a rebuke to a church that was proud of them.

And Paul's own regulation is severe. Two or three at most, one at a time, an interpreter or silence, prophets judged by other prophets, and "let all things be done decently and in order" (1 Corinthians 14:40). Most of what is defended today by appeal to 1 Corinthians 14 would be stopped by 1 Corinthians 14. A congregation cannot claim the chapter as a warrant and ignore it as a rule.

The plain command sits at the end of it, and it applies to both sides: "covet to prophesy, and forbid not to speak with tongues" (1 Corinthians 14:39). Forbid not is an instruction to the cautious. Decently and in order is an instruction to the enthusiastic. Both are in the same chapter, from the same apostle, to the same church.

7. A witness worth naming

Arguments about whether God still does this tend to run entirely on texts, and there is a reason to name at least one case, carefully.

Jackie Pullinger is a British missionary who arrived in Hong Kong in 1966 with no invitation and almost no money, and spent decades in the Kowloon Walled City, a lawless block of stacked tenements controlled by triad societies and saturated with heroin, demolished in 1993. She worked among addicts and gang members. Her account, and the accounts of those who worked with her, describe heroin addicts coming off the drug without the ordinary agony of withdrawal while Christians prayed over them in tongues.

Two things about naming her here. First, what she is: not proof, and not a doctrine. A testimony is evidence of the kind that has to be weighed, and weighing it means it could be mistaken. Second, what this page will not do: her books are in copyright, so they are pointed to rather than quoted at length, the same way Lewis is handled on this site.

She is here for one narrow reason. The historical argument for cessation says the gifts are absent from serious Christian work after the apostles. That argument has to reckon with cases like this one, not by explaining them away in advance, but by looking at them. A man is entitled to conclude she was mistaken. He is not entitled to have never heard of her.

Where this lands

The honest position is smaller than either camp's banner.

God has not changed and Scripture nowhere announces a cutoff. There is no verse that says the gifts stopped when the apostles died. The verse used for it says something else, and six commentators across four centuries agree it says something else. If someone wants to argue cessation, the purpose and history arguments are available and they are serious. This verse is not.

And nothing here validates what is done under the name. Scripture supplies the tests, and they are demanding: try the spirits, judge the prophets, a failed prophecy is a false one, order over ecstasy, and above all the test of this very chapter, which is not power but love. A gift exercised without charity is, in Paul's own words, sounding brass. That is the sentence the Corinthians got, and it is still the one that sorts this out fastest.

So: do not forbid, and do not be credulous. Those are both commands, they are in the same letter, and holding one without the other is how this question produced two camps instead of one careful church. It is another line drawn through the middle of a tension, and both halves are still in the Bible.

The Holy Spirit, the whole set

These letters were written separately and belong together. Start anywhere; each one assumes the others rather than repeating them.

Neither side of this question is another gospel, and why that matters to the temperature of the argument is in What Makes a Teaching False. Related: Is Any Sick Among You? on James 5 and the four texts that will not let it become a guarantee, Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me, Who Believes What, Lines Drawn, Counterfeit, Providence, On Quoting Lewis. Commentary quoted verbatim from the public-domain editions in our library; Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Jackie Pullinger's own books remain in copyright and are described here, not quoted.