The manifestation of spiritual gifts in Church history
Part 2
TERTULLIAN. Of Carthage in North Africa. About A.D. 160 to 220.
Tertullian was educated as a Lawyer, and was a very earnest advocate for the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Tertullian wrote a large number of works, and made many quotations from the New Testament. He was a Montanist, that is, a follower of Montanus, A.D. 171, who “began to teach the necessity of new inspiration to quicken the decaying life of the Church.” Montanus taught fasting, self-control, and purity of life after baptism. Tertullian opposed Marcion the Gnostic heretic and wrote five books refuting his heresies. Tertullian wrote his great work against Marcion in A.D. 207; and in it he invites Marcion to produce evidence of the gifts of the Holy Spirit being manifested among his followers as they were among Tertullian's Christians. “Let him exhibit prophets such have spoken, not by human sense, but with the Spirit God, such as have predicted things to come, and have made manifest the secrets of the heart; let him produce a psalm, a vision, a prayer, only let it be by the Spirit in an ecstasy, that is in a rapture, whenever an interpretation of tongues has occurred to him.”
Tertullian said that in the name of Jesus miracles had occurred throughout the Roman Empire, and had produced many converts in spite of the persecutions. He said in his time, about 200 A.D., that the Christians in a single province were more numerous than the Roman army. Some estimate that this means there were at least nine million Christians in the Roman Empire. Some historians say this estimate by Tertullian is conservative, they calculate that Christians comprised as many as one in six, or even one in five, of the population.
ORIGEN. A.D. 185 to 254.
In defending Christianity from the attacks of Celsus, an arch opponent of Christianity; Origen tells how he had seen with his own eyes the healing of grievous diseases and the insane by invocation of the name of God and Jesus, he states in, “Against Celsus.” 3.24. “And some give evidence of having received, through their faith, a marvellous power, by the cures which they perform, invoking no other name over those who need their help than that of the God of all things, and of Jesus, along with mention of his history. For we too HAVE SEEN many persons freed by these means, from grievous calamities and from distractions of mind and from madness and from countless other ills which could not be cured either by men or devils.”
ANTHONY. Of the Thebaid in Egypt. A.D. 251 to 356.
Anthony has been called the father of monasticism, he went from Alexandria into the Thebaid in Egypt, and organised a community from scattered companies of recluses. They called the community Coenobia, from “koinos bios,” “a life in common;” and as a result were called Coenobites. They bound themselves by a vow of poverty, chastity, and manual labour for the common good. This was in sharp contrast to the wealth that Anthony gave up for this life of prayer. Anthony became well known for his healing ministry, and also experienced bilocation. After nearly killing himself with too much fasting and prayer in his early life, Anthony lived to the great age of 105.
Anthony was born in A.D. 251 and died at the age of 105 in A.D. 356. He was a comparatively illiterate man, who rose to a great heights of spiritual wisdom and power, which was sustained by long periods of solitary communion with God. Anthony's spirituality made him of far more use to God than the highly educated churchmen of his day. In his earlier years, Anthony led such a rigorous ascetic life that his health was badly impaired and he almost died. He later realised that God requires a relationship of love more than anything else, however, he still kept up a disciplined life. Anthony was frequently used by God to heal the sick, but he always pointed people from himself to God, and said it was the work of God alone. Anthony inspired the rise of other monastic settlements; the largest being formed by Pachomius at Tabennae, an island on the Nile; when Athanasius visited it, 3,000 monks singing hymns and litanies greeted him.
The monasteries were centres of learning and scholarship, and some valuable work was done in them. Jerome spent many years in a cell at Bethlehem preparing for the translation of the Latin Vulgate; and Athanasius wrote his works against the Arians while hiding with Anthony and his monks in their monastery in the Thebaid desert. Many Christian leaders received their training in the monasteries. Unfortunately the monks often suffered mental breakdowns, partly through the heat, but mostly through loneliness; for though they lived in community, their ascetic lives and the solitude of their cells brought about morbid fears, hallucinations, and in some cases mental derangement and lunacy. The concentration upon their own spiritual improvement tended to produce the evils of spiritual pride and self-righteousness. Concern and care for other people's spiritual welfare is the way to true humility and spiritual growth.
The Historian Neander, wrote of Anthony: “He could easily have acquired the fame of being a worker of miracles, since many, particularly of those who were thought to be possessed of evil spirits, were indebted to his prayers and to the impression of tranquillity and peace which went forth from him.... But he pointed those who applied to him for help, or had been indebted to him for it, away from himself to God and Christ.... They were to know that the power of healing belonged neither to him nor to any other man, but was the work of God alone, who wrought it when and for whom He pleased.”
CHRYSOSTOM, THE GOLDEN MOUTHED. A.D. 345 to 407.
Chrysostom was famed for his eloquence and spirituality, he was the greatest of the Antiochian school, and the finest orator of the Eastern Church, and a notable expositor; about 640 of his homilies are still extant. Chrysostom is by general consent the greatest of the bishops of Constantinople. His father Secundus was a general in the imperial army, who had considerable wealth, but he died while Chrysostom was an infant. Chrysostom's young widowed mother, Anthusa, trained him in Christian things. Chrysostom was placed under the tuition of the pagan orator Libanus, in his training for the legal profession; however, the corruption of the legal profession and the profligacy of the city disgusted him, so he returned home and turned to Christian things. John still carried on with his secular career, however, after a three-year probation he was received into the Church. A fellow student called Basil tried to get John to enter a monastery, but his mother persuaded him not to do so; however, when she died he entered a monastery and stayed there for six years. In A.D. 381, John was ordained a deacon, and in A.D. 386, he became a presbyter at Antioch. When Nectarius the patriarch of Constantinople died, Chrysostom was ordained in his place. John led a simple abstemious life, and Church revenues were spent on charity, not luxury.
The Empress Eudoxia and worldly-minded clergy violently opposed Chrysostom. The charged him with being a follower of Origen, and he was banished from office; but was quickly recalled as an earthquake made Eudoxia fear. John soon offended the Empress again and he was banished to Cucusus, a village in the Tauros, on the borders of Cilicia and Armenia. John's great work continued, though isolated his fame spread far and wide, by letters and the planning of missions. Gibbon says, “Every tongue repeated the praises of his genius and virtue, and the respectful attention of the Christian world was fixed on a desert spot in the mountains of Tauros.” John's opponents were again moved with jealousy and anger, they got John banished to the wild and desolate region of Pityrus in Pontus. The journey killed John; he died at Comana, some distance short of his goal, on Sept. 14th. A.D. 407. Thirty years later Chrysostom's bones were brought to Constantinople in honour. Emperor Theodosius the younger, publicly asked God to forgive the sin of his parents, Theodosius and Eudoxia.
In his “Libra Contra Gentiles” Chrysostom states that the greater works promised by Jesus in Jn.14v12., were fulfilled in the Acts of the Apostles, and then goes on to record that even the opponents of the Church recognised the miracles happening in his time. Chrysostom writes: “But if anyone should assert that those were mere smoke and a fictitious wonder unworthy of credit, let us view those of the present day, which are calculated both to stop and to put to shame the blaspheming mouth, and to check the unbridled tongue. For throughout our whole inhabitable world there is not a country or nation or a city where these wonders are not commonly spoken of, which, if figments, would never have occasioned so much admiration. And you yourselves indeed could testify to this. For we have no need to receive confirmations from others of what we assert, seeing that you yourselves, our opponents, supply us therewith.” End of quote.
It is sad that some Christian scholars have less historical integrity and faith than these heathen opponents of the Church.
LACTANTIUS. Of Nicomedia. Approx. A.D. 307 Apologies.
He wrote “Divine Institutions,” which attacked paganism and defended Christianity, probably in Diocletian’s reign. He was called in his old age to educate Crispus, the son of Constantine, and he dedicated several books to the Emperor. Lactantius wrote an unusual and remarkable work on the “Deaths of Persecutors,” which gave proofs for Christianity by showing the Divine judgements which fell on the enemies of Christianity from Tiberius onwards. So just as Herod was executed by God through the prayer of the Christians, judgement gifts took place during Church history too. Acts.12v1-23. N.B. v1,5,23.
AUGUSTINE. A.D. 354 to 430.
Emperor Constantine's “Edict of Toleration,” in A.D. 313, made the persecuted Christian Church an official religion of the Roman Empire. So hostility and violent persecution were suddenly replaced by worldly acclaim, wealth and influence. The Church, which had kept a great deal of its glow through the centuries of vicious persecution and suffering, began to backslide in the time of seductive prosperity and worldly acceptance. Three centuries of vicious persecution had forced the Church to pray in order to survive; when this pressure to pray was removed, the prayer life of the Church ebbed away.
The simple structure and close fellowship based on homes, that had caused the Church to survive almost three hundred years of persecution, was replaced by financially demanding buildings and organisational structures; which carried little of the fire and love, which had been the norm in the home fellowships, during the centuries of persecution. The minds of Christians became diverted from Christ, the Head of the Church, to the institutional structure of the Church, and the constraint to conform became part of the civil law. Augustine started the Church down the road that ended with the horrors of the inquisition, he taught that Christians could be beaten and whipped to force them to stay in the religious organisation. The emphasis had passed from looking for a kingdom in heaven, to making a structure and kingdom in the style of men, which had influence on earth. There was a gradual replacement of New Testament power and truth and evangelical doctrines, with ecclesiastical structures and kingdom building. Scriptural conformity began more and more to be replaced by man-made traditions, and lacking the guidance of both a spiritual glow and the Scriptures, Christians became gullible and superstitious. Once a religious system and kingdom have been built, it becomes self-propagating, even when God has little to do with it.
In about A.D. 390, Augustine wrote the following in his treatise, “On The True Religion,” “For when the Catholic Church had been diffused and established through the whole world, those miracles were no longer permitted to continue in our time, lest the mind should always seek visible things, and the human race should be chilled by the customariness of the very things whose novelty had inflamed them.”
This was written about four or five years after Augustine's conversion, and it could be that the young convert accepted and quoted the views of some of the spiritual leaders around him. However, shortly before his death in A.D. 430, Augustine admitted that he had not told the truth, and in His work, “Retractions;” 1.13.7.; he retracted what he had written in, “On The True Religion,” and stated that even when he wrote it, he had known of a blind man being healed in Milan, and other miracles. What integrity! It was a good thing that he repented and decided to tell the truth. Some 37 years after writing, “On The True Religion,” Augustine wrote at length, in about A.D. 427, about miracles taking place in his day; he states in, “The City of God,” Book 22, chapter 8: “Even now miracles are wrought in the name of Christ ... but they are not so brilliant and conspicuous as to cause them to be published with such glory as accompanied the former miracles.”
In other words miracles were still happening, but not in the abundance, or in the power of the early Church. Augustine goes on to tell of a miracle at Carthage; he relates how Innocentius, an ex-advocate of the deputy prefect was healed, in answer to fervent prayer, of an inflamed fistula; Augustine states it completely disappeared, “in my presence and under my own eyes.” Augustine then tells how a woman, who had an inoperable cancer of the breast, was told in a dream by the Lord to ask the first woman who came out of the baptistry at Easter to make the sign of Christ upon the cancer; the woman did as the Lord instructed her and was immediately healed. Augustine gives two cases of healing at baptism. He tells of a Doctor who was instantly and permanently healed of gout at baptism; and that “an old comedian of Curubis was cured at baptism, not only of paralysis but also of hernia.” Augustine continues recounting miracles and then states: “What am I to do? I am so pressed by the promise of finishing this work that I cannot record all the miracles I know; and doubtless several of our adherents, when they read what I have narrated, will regret that I have omitted so many which they, as well as I, certainly know.”
This shows that even at the start of the spiritual decline in Augustine's day, miracles were still taking place. Healings by means of relics that Augustine and others relate, do have a question mark over them. However, the healing of two blind people through the bones of the martyrs, was witnessed by too many people to be rejected as false, and we should remember that Elisha’s bones raised a man from the dead; showing us that this kind of miracle, can and does take place. 2Kings.13v20,21. It is also difficult to rule out people being healed through water, when John's Gospel records that the first person who stepped into the pool of Bethesda, after an angel troubled the water, was healed of whatever disease they had. Jn.5v1-7. N.B. v4. Let us not limit the Holy One of Israel. Ps.78v41. However, healing by such means as Elisha's bones and the pool of Bethesda are the rare exception and not the rule, and are certainly not God's ideal method of working, but rather an indication of a state of unbelief. A person full of the Holy Spirit is God's best means of manifesting healing and the other gifts of the Spirit. Backsliding from God replaces personal faith, truth and Scripture patterns with superstition.
We will not consider here how Augustine corrupted Paul's theology, and the disastrous effects of his new theology on the doctrine and faith of the Church. We will just state, that Satan found it easy to corrupt Augustine's theology because of the bias to evil produced by his former licentious life, and his involvement and fascination with various false doctrines before he became a Christian; and also by his desire to obtain and retain influence and power for his church structure and himself.