I was living in Pensacola in the early 2000s, working on a paper about speaking in tongues, when I first came across Jon Mark Ruthven’s On the Cessation of the Charismata. I wasn’t looking for a fight. I had come out of a Plymouth Brethren upbringing less than two years earlier, which is to say I was still the guy who knew how cessationists thought.
What I found instead was one of the most unsettling pieces of theological scholarship I’d encountered — unsettling in the way that good theology actually is, where you find yourself going, “oh no, this is going to require me to revisit some things.” Or perhaps “this is good ammunition to use on friends back home.” I was young, immature and more combative in those days, what can I say?
I shelved it. I came back to it a decade later when I was writing Nine Lies People Believe About Speaking in Tongues, and it shaped how I argued my case there more than I gave it credit for at the time.
So, when the opportunity came up to narrate the official audiobook, I said yes before I finished reading the email.
What cessationism actually claims
If you’ve spent any time in charismatic or Pentecostal circles, you’ve bumped into cessationism — the position that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit ended with the apostolic age. No more tongues. No more healings. No more prophecy. Those gifts were just to inaugurate the early church. Supposedly, once the New Testament canon was finished, we didn’t need them anymore.
It sounds like a biblical position and gets presented as one. Cessationists will cite 1 Corinthians 13 or Hebrews 1 and argue that the age of miracles is behind us by design. Ruthven’s central claim is that this is not a biblical position. It’s a theological tradition — developed largely in post-Reformation Protestant academia — that has been retrojected onto Scripture. Dressed up as exegesis, and handed down.
The Warfield problem
The dominant voice in cessationist thought for the last hundred years has been B.B. Warfield, the Princeton theologian whose 1918 book Counterfeit Miracles set the tone for nearly everything that followed it. Warfield was brilliant, careful, and wrong. Ruthven spends a substantial portion of Cessation of the Charismata doing a systematic demolition of Warfield’s historical, philosophical, and exegetical arguments, and it’s the kind of demolition that you cannot look away from, even when you’d rather.
What Ruthven shows, painstakingly, is that Warfield’s case does not actually rest on what the New Testament teaches. It rests on what the post-apostolic church experienced — or more precisely, on Warfield’s selective reading of what the post-apostolic church experienced. When the miraculous appeared to dry up in certain streams of church history, Warfield built a theology to explain it, and that theology got handed down as though it were exegesis.
This matters for a reason that goes beyond the academic. A lot of evangelicals who would never describe themselves as cessationists have absorbed cessationist assumptions without knowing it. The reflexive suspicion of claims of healing. The vague feeling that tongues is probably just emotionalism. The assumption that prophecy closed with the canon. Most people did not arrive at these positions through careful Bible study. They inherited them, the same way I inherited a lot of what I believed before I had to start actually reading the text for myself.
What the New Testament actually says
Ruthven’s positive case is as important as his critical one. Working through the New Testament carefully, he argues that the gifts of the Spirit are not presented anywhere as being temporary. They’re presented as the normal, expected experience of the church until Christ returns. The Great Commission in Mark 16. The “greater works” promise in John 14. Paul’s entire framework in 1 Corinthians 12–14, which gives instructions for the orderly use of the gifts — not instructions for how to wind them down.
This is not a new argument in charismatic circles. What Ruthven does differently is make it with a level of historical and exegetical precision that takes the argument seriously on its own terms. He is not writing for people who already agree with him. He is writing to dismantle the intellectual case, from the ground up, using the same tools the other side uses.
Why I narrated this
I’ve narrated over fifty audiobooks to date. Most of them I come to cold and read for the first time when prepping for narration. I read the manuscript, find the voice, and record it. This one was different. I came to it with twenty plus years of history with this material, with convictions that Ruthven’s arguments helped shape, with the experience of having written a book of my own that leaned heavily on his work.
Recording it was not a neutral act. You’re alone in a booth reading someone else’s argument out loud for hours at a stretch, and when the argument is one you’ve been living with since you were twenty, that’s a strange experience.
If the topic matters to you — if you’ve ever had someone tell you the gifts ended with the apostles and found yourself without a good answer — this is the book that builds the answer. I won’t pretend it’s light listening. Ruthven doesn’t write for a popular audience, and there are sections that require you to slow down. But the argument holds, and it rewards the time it takes.
You can find it on Audible here: https://tinyurl.com/cessation-charismata
