Warfield, Anti-Catholicism, and Exorcising the Past

Greg
thank you for engaging my original
post with such charity. In many ways, you were harsher on your own tribe
than I would have been. Moreover, although I invoked Warfield my primary target
was not the Reformed tradition per se, which I agree is broad and deep and has
much to commend it. Instead, my primary concern was to exorcise a ghost behind
claims that the Protestant tradition in the main does not hold to the
continuation of the gifts.

Your generous response prompts me to clarify my own position
and raise some questions about your defense of Warfield.

First, I was not claiming that any contemporary Evangelical
holding to a cessationist position was somehow anti-Catholic. Instead, as you
rightly note, I was pointing toward a historical claim about Protestantism. The
scholar I have found most associated with the claim in more recent Evangelical literature
is Anthony Hoekema, an irenic Reformed scholar to be sure, but one who
nevertheless has said that “it has been the almost unanimous conviction of the
mainline Protestant churches that these miraculous gifts ceased at the close of
the Apostolic Age.” This was made in Holy Spirit Baptism and Hoekema then
proceeded to utilize Warfield as part of his argument. While the claim is not
original to Hoekema, his writings have been influential with Millard Erickson
and Carl F. H. Henry both citing him on this debate. When Thomas Shreiner
concluded his post
on cessationism at The Gospel Coalition with the statement that “the
Reformers and most of the Protestant tradition until the 20th century believed
the gifts had ceased,” I thought that this historical claim needed to be
discussed.

My point was that this claim is historically problematic
because Protestant rejections of the miraculous were bound up with an
anti-Catholic polemic. Thus any claim about the Protestant tradition not
holding to the continuation of the gifts must reckon with this part of the
history. It is this ghost lurking behind assertions about most of the
Protestant tradition being largely cessationist that I want to exorcise. I take
it as a historical claim about Protestantism as a whole, but you seem to
suggest that it is a theological claim about what is central to Protestantism,
which, if that were the case, would be a little more troubling.

As you no doubt understand, my selection of Warfield was
quite intentional. He casts a rather long shadow in Evangelicalism within the
U.S., especially in its Reformed and Baptist wings where this debate has been
the most vigorous. Richard Gaffin, one of the architects of the contemporary
Reformed position on cessationism has said that his own position “stands
squarely in the tradition of Warfield.”

Second, I should also clarify that the patristic and medieval understanding of the miraculous included what today falls under the
label charismatic. Most patristic and medieval writers preferred to talk about
miracles and miracle workers rather than charismatic gifts for a number of
reasons such as the dominant gift list being Isaiah 11, not 1 Corinthians 12
and Jerome’s translating charismata
as “graces” (gratiae). Even though
the contemporary debate within Evangelicalism concerns charismatic gifts, it
corresponds to the patristic and medieval understanding of miracles and miracle
workers through whom these “graces” flowed. Warfield understood this quite well
because his opening chapter in Counterfeit Miracles is “On the
Cessation of the Charismata.”

Now, to my questions about your defense of Warfield.

1. Is it really the case that Warfield’s discussion of the patristic and medieval periods is not about Catholicism? I ask this for three
reasons: 1) Warfield begins the chapter with Edward Gibbon’s conversion to
Catholicism, which was related to Gibbon’s belief in the continuation of the
miraculous; 2) he spends several pages in the same chapter critiquing another
famous convert to Catholicism, John Henry Newman, noting what he sees as
Newman’s shift toward the miraculous; 3) even though he knows that Gregory of
Nyssa, Athanasius, and Jerome all wrote about saints in which the miraculous
was prominent, he still makes the claim that these “saints’ lives” follow other
Christian romances and thus represent an infusion of Heathenism into the
church. Augustine escapes only because Warfield traces his embrace of the miraculous
to his time at Milan and speculates that Augustine, along with
other Fathers, betrays a subtle awareness that these miracles had ceased even
though he reports them.

As an aside, I find it fascinating that Warfield rejects the
longer ending of Mark, first in the chapter on patristic and medieval miracles
and then more extensively in his criticism of A. J. Gordon. Part of his
reasoning is that the longer ending has Jesus claiming that miraculous signs
shall follow believers, which, for Warfield, “bear an apocryphal appearance.”
Apparently the longer ending of Mark is akin to a Christian romance too.

2. If Warfield is not concerned with Catholicism, then why
in his discussion of the kind of “faith healing” promoted by men like A. J.
Gordon does he claim that it creates a class of “professionals” who stand
between the soul and God and that “from this germ the whole sacerdotal evil has
grown”? It sure seems like Warfield is concerned about an encroachment of
Catholic ideas of the priesthood.

3. Your points about Warfield’s use of “class of men” and
“permanent endowment” are suggestive, but is that what he means? I confess I am
unsure. Does Warfield mean to say that Protestants do not have saints in the
Catholic sense? He certainly spent a lot of time talking about saints and
saints’ lives in the previous chapters. If so, I would agree, but then not even Catholic saints are canonized because they are viewed as
possessing a permanent endowment of miracle-working power during their earthly
sojourn. At least this is not the case in the Middle Ages in which prophecy,
healing, miracles, etc., tended to be viewed as graces at work in the
individual, some of which may be permanent and some of which may not be
(depending on the theologian discussing the matter). This is no doubt related
to Jerome’s translation of “graces” for charismata.

You suggest that Warfield might intend to highlight a
difference between Protestant and Catholic understandings of holy orders. If this
is the case, then, given what Warfield says about professionalization and faith
healing, it seems he does think that it introduces a Catholic view of the priesthood
into Protestantism.

My questions cause me to think that Warfield still operates
with the idea that embracing the miraculous leads one dangerously close to
Catholicism as it did Gibbon and Newman, and this is part of the reason why the
Protestant position has been and should be that all miracles have ceased. As I
said before, I think this debate is healthy for Evangelicalism and I deeply
appreciate the generous spirit with which you engaged my post. My concern
remains that we exorcise this ghost of anti-Catholicism from the debate by
recognizing that historically the claim that “the Protestant tradition as a
whole was cessationist” is bound up with anti-Catholic polemics.