Objection 46

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. I was there. You are asking me to deny what God did in me.

Answer. No, and let this be said as carefully as anything in this study: the argument of these pages is with a doctrine about experience, never with the experience itself. Scripture says the Spirit divides His gifts "to every man severally as he will" (1 Corinthians 12:11), and nothing in that verse forbids Him to give one man what He withholds from another. If a believer has known hours of prayer in which his heart ran ahead of his vocabulary, this study has no quarrel with him and no license to audit him; "what hast thou that thou didst not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7) cuts in every direction, including this one.

The dispute concerns a single question: whether that experience is the mandatory evidence of the Spirit's indwelling, so that its absence in another believer is the absence of the blessing itself. On that question the chapter which governs the gifts has already ruled. "Do all speak with tongues?" (1 Corinthians 12:30) expects the answer no, and it is asked of people Paul has just described as baptized "by one Spirit... into one body" (12:13). A gift genuinely given can still be wrongly erected into a test; the error is in the doctrine, not necessarily in the experience, and abandoning the doctrine does not require the reader to conclude that God never met him.

But the reader is asked to remember the brother in the next pew, the one who fasted and prayed for the sign and never received it, and to weigh what the doctrine of mandatory evidence did to that man's assurance across twenty years. The chapter Paul placed between the listing of the gifts and the regulation of their use insists that tongues without charity are "sounding brass" (13:1), and Scripture's stated evidence of passing from death to life is not phonetic but affectional: "because we love the brethren" (1 John 3:14). Test the doctrine by whether it produced that love in the congregation, or a quiet ranking of the sealed and the unsealed. The experience may stand. The test built on it cannot.