No Prophecy of Scripture

Doug Wilson is currently working his way through the book of Acts every Saturday on his blog. This week he’s in chapter 21, noting that as the apostle Paul made his way toward Jerusalem, he received prophetic warnings in every city to which he traveled concerning what would happen to him there.

That sort of thing happened often in the first century. If it happens at all in the twenty-first, it does so almost exclusively in Charismatic circles.

Recorded, Typeset, Printed and Bound

Advocates of the modern-day prophetic gift, says Doug, do not take their prophets very seriously:

“In debates with our charismatic brothers, who believe that the gift of prophecy is still operative today, I have often asked why nobody is taking notes. Why are the words of modern prophecies not recorded, typeset, printed and bound? Why are they not printed up as the sequel to the Holy Bible? When I ask this question, it is usually not long before Philip’s daughters come up. They were prophetesses, and none of their prophecies are in the Bible. So, the argument goes, we therefore know that not all prophecies need to be in the Scriptures.

This is certainly true, but that is not the issue. The issue has to do with who makes that decision. If it is prophecy, it is the Word of God, and He can dispense with it if He chooses. Say that Philip’s house burned down, and all the prophecies with it. He is the Lord. But if we are in possession of words that we believe to be inspired by God Himself, do we have the authority to toss them? No. We must treat them as the Word of God. We cannot think they are the Word of God and not treat them that way.”

Doug says if Charismatics really believed what their “prophets” call messages from God, then surely they would preserve and compile their prophecies, and we would be constantly adding to scripture. That’s what believers do with the word of God, right?

I’m not sure this follows, to be honest.

Inspiration vs. Prophecy

To start with, I would want to make a hard distinction between inspiration and prophecy that Doug doesn’t appear to note. I think it’s relevant to the argument.

Inspiration

“All Scripture,” Paul says, “is breathed out [that Greek word is where the concept of inspiration comes from] by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Here he is making a claim on behalf of the Old Testament canon — one Peter will shortly make on behalf of Paul’s letters — that goes well beyond the long-term value of the Old Testament prophetic books.

It is widely understood that “scripture” comprises both human and divine elements. It is prophetic in part, but it is not exclusively prophetic. Yes, in some cases, its writers copied verbatim things the Lord said to them personally. They were taking dictation. Other times — or so it appears when we compare one passage with another — they copied existing “uninspired” written histories or wrote down existing oral traditions in their own words, which the Holy Spirit then edited in some undisclosed fashion to produce the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic text we have today. This is true of the vast majority of the Bible.

If not, how is it that the Bible displays such a plethora of distinct writing styles? Nobody can convince me that the same mind (even the same divine mind) composed both Mark and Hebrews. Most Christians who have taken the time to look into the issue agree. As a result, the mechanical dictation theory, effectively debunked here, has very few serious adherents. I do not think Doug Wilson is one of them. Scripture was inspired, not dictated.

Prophecy

True Bible prophecy, on the other hand, is mechanical dictation or at very least an acceptable paraphrase. Word-for-word transcription did not exist in ancient times, yet those who preserved the words of the Lord made sure to do so with great care. They did not embellish or editorialize. It is “Thus saith the Lord.” That is the claim Peter makes about it. “No prophecy,” he writes, “was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Contrast that with, say, the book of Job, which contains truth mingled with all sorts of false statements and lame arguments from fallible human beings, all accurately preserved by the Holy Spirit to tell a story important to believers, or with Solomon’s observational treatise in Ecclesiastes. Both are full of truth, but are very far from “Thus saith the Lord.”

The apostle even makes a neat distinction for us between the two types of revelation, coining the important phrase “prophecy of scripture”, and enabling us to distinguish the two. They are not synonymous terms.

So then, the prophecies of scripture form a subset of the inspired word of God, they are not the entire thing.

On Handling Inspired Words

Let’s go back to Doug’s hypothetical scenario about tossing out inspired words. When we refer to inspired words, or words we believe inspired, we are speaking of scripture, and all scripture is both inspired and profitable to complete the training of the man of God. If we are doing it right, we will use the words “inspired” and “scripture” to designate what Paul meant when he wrote to Timothy and what the Lord Jesus meant when he said “Scripture cannot be broken”. That is to say the OT canon of the first century, supplemented with all else the apostles explicitly and implicitly sanctioned. By definition, the church benefits from “all scripture”, not just some of it.

As Doug’s Charismatic debating partners point out when they bring up Philip’s daughters, prophecy is not like that. Certain sorts of prophecies were far less “preservation worthy” than others. All scripture is both inspired and profitable. The man of God in this era needs it all. That does not hold true for all prophecy.

Prophecies of Scripture

We may argue that prophecy is just as inspired as scripture if we like, but we cannot argue that all prophecies are equally profitable or equally universal. Some prophecies were merely local. They had their time, their place and their intended audience, which may have been quite specific and time-sensitive, after which many became either redundant or irrelevant.

When Paul tells the Galatians, “The gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ”, what he is saying is most definitely universal. It is a prophecy of scripture, and as such, it must be applicable to every believer throughout the Church Age. The man of God needs it to be complete and trained in righteousness. The church needs it. We cannot be without it. If we do not believe Paul’s version of the gospel, as opposed to, say, the first century Judaized gospel, Christ is of no advantage to us. That’s what he tells the Galatians.

Prophecy of Not-Scripture

On the other hand, we have Philip’s daughters, or the other things Agabus may have said that were specific to individuals and local circumstances. Whatever they may have prophesied, it was not equally profitable to us. It had a local application, it served a purpose, and it passed away. We do not need it, or the Holy Spirit would have preserved it. We know these people existed, we know they prophesied, and we accept that we do not have a single word of what they said, just as we do not have a single word from any of the apparently numerous prophets in Corinth to whom Paul gave instructions about decent and orderly gathering.

I would argue that’s just fine. To the extent we know about it at all, it is only in the service of a historical narrative, to explain why a certain person did this or that. David inquired of the Lord by ephod, “Shall I pursue?” The answer was yes, so he did. The word he received was useful to David, but its only value to us is to advance the storyline. It is descriptive, not prescriptive, possessing no implications for life and godliness that we cannot equally derive from a hundred other places in scripture where men asked the Lord for direction and received “yes” or “no” answers.

I suspect the vast majority of prophecy that occurred in Bible times, OT or NT, was of this temporary, local sort.

Philip’s Burning House and Other Hypotheticals

So then, the Charismatics are right in this respect: not all prophecies need to be in the scriptures. Only a tiny fraction are. Doug says the issue has to do with who makes the decision: in or out, God or man. He uses the example of Philip’s house burning down, and his carefully preserved transcriptions of his daughters’ prophecies with it. Doug would take that as God acting to delete prophecies from the record. Frankly, I’m not the least bit surprised that a Calvinist would interpret events that way. I would say Philip’s house burned down, but maybe that’s just me.

Frankly, he is making assumptions here that I’m not sure hold at all. One is that we might ever come into possession of extra-scriptural words we believed came from God and have to decide whether to retain or dispose of them. That would first require someone to write them down. Who would take such a thing upon himself? Did first century Christians diligently copy down everything somebody thought to have the gift of prophecy said? There’s zero evidence of that.

Another assumption is that they treated the product of the NT prophetic gift as if it were on the same level of the prophecies of scripture. Not so. Rather, they tested all these prophecies by the existing scripture and rejected those that did not conform. They did this even in the earliest days of the early church. Where prophecies were local and concerned events to come, such as those of Agabus, the test was surely time: did what he predicted come true? If not, why would anyone preserve them?

Moreover, the same early NT scripture that requires the testing of NT prophecy also implies there was a lot of fakery going on. If not, Paul would never have had to instruct the Thessalonians, “Do not despise prophecies.” But if NT prophecy was generally considered on the level of scripture, no such instruction would ever be required: nobody despises a faculty that regularly produces accurately fulfilled predictions. We are better to view the spiritual gift of prophecy as a crutch necessary to the churches for a few decades during the period that the NT was being written, circulated and compiled.

Consistency, Consistency

For the record, I’m with Doug: I’m convinced these people are not genuine prophets and that their words have zero authority from God. They are not binding on anyone anywhere. At best they are deceived and at worst they are charlatans, pawns and/or servants of the enemy.

Nevertheless, if the words of many first century prophets were only locally and temporarily profitable, and the Lord and his church declined to preserve them, why would those who believe in twenty-first century “prophets” expect their own “work product” to be treated any differently?