Speaking in Tongues: The Evidence, Part 6 of 7
What happens when the people most trained to defend cessationism are the ones who walk away from it?
Not people who grew up Pentecostal. Not people who had some emotional experience at a revival and threw their theology out the window. Professors. Seminary faculty. Scholars with tenure, reputations, and every professional reason to stay exactly where they were.
They looked at the evidence.
And they moved.
These are their stories. Not my arguments. Theirs.
Jack Deere: The Professor Who Couldn’t Find a Single Verse
Jack Deere was a professor of Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary. If you don’t know DTS, it’s basically the flagship institution of dispensational cessationism. If there was a school where you’d expect someone to stay a cessationist for life, it was Dallas.
Deere was committed. Intellectually rigorous. He taught his students that the miraculous gifts had ceased after the apostles.
Then somebody challenged him: Show me one biblical text that explicitly teaches cessationism.
So he went looking. He was a scholar at a world-class seminary. He had the training, the library, the motivation. And he couldn’t find one. Not one text that clearly said the gifts had stopped.
After re-examining everything, he concluded that his cessationism had been built on theological tradition and philosophical assumptions, not Scripture. He left Dallas Theological Seminary on December 18, 1987, exactly twenty-two years after he gave his heart to Jesus.
Later, Deere sharpened the point in a way that still stings:
“There is one basic reason why otherwise Bible-believing Christians do not believe in the miraculous gifts of the Spirit today. It is this: they have not seen them.”
— Why I Am Still Surprised by the Power of the Spirit (Zondervan, 2020)
And then the reversal:
“It is common for charismatics to be accused of building their theology on experience. However, all cessationists ultimately build their theology of the miraculous gifts on their lack of experience, not on Scripture.”
Read that again.
The accusation that continuationists rely on experience? Deere flipped it. It’s cessationists who are building on experience. The absence of it.
Sam Storms: Reformed, Calvinist, and Done with Cessationism
Sam Storms was raised a cessationist. He served as visiting associate professor of theology at Wheaton College, and if you know the world of evangelical academia, Wheaton is about as credentialed as it gets. Storms is Reformed. A Calvinist. Not the profile most people associate with speaking in tongues.
He started reading the biblical texts without the cessationist framework he’d been handed. And what he found surprised even him: the biblical case for cessationism wasn’t just weak. It was built on inference, not direct textual support.
Storms’s own words: “What has or has not occurred in church history is ultimately irrelevant to what we should pursue, pray for, and expect in the life of the church today. The issue is not what has God done, but what has God promised” (Practicing the Power, Zondervan, 2017).
That distinction matters. Cessationism often leans on the argument that certain gifts haven’t been seen for centuries. Storms says that’s the wrong question. The right question is what Scripture promises. And Scripture doesn’t put an expiration date on the gifts.
J.I. Packer once observed that the Puritans he most admired believed in the ongoing power of the Spirit but lived in a culture that had no framework for it. Storms took that seriously. He became what some call a “Reformed Charismatic,” proof that you can hold to the sovereignty of God, the authority of Scripture, and the continuation of the gifts all at the same time.
Augustine: When the Greatest Church Father Changed His Mind
This one might surprise you.
Augustine of Hippo is arguably the most influential theologian in Western Christianity. Catholic, Protestant, Reformed. Everyone claims him. And early in his career, around 407 AD, he held cessationist views. He wrote in his Homilies on 1 John(6.10) that certain miraculous gifts had passed away with the apostolic era.
Then he started paying attention to what was happening in his own diocese.
He personally witnessed and documented almost 70 verified miracles in Hippo. Healings. Events he couldn’t explain away. And in his Retractions (1.13.7), written near the end of his life around 426-427 AD, he publicly walked it back: “But what I said should not be understood as though no miracles should be believed to be performed nowadays in Christ’s name.” He then spent an entire section of City of God (22.8-10) cataloging what he’d seen.
I need to be honest with you here. Augustine’s retraction covered miracles and healings. He still maintained that tongues specifically had ceased as a widespread phenomenon. I’m not going to pretend he became Pentecostal.
He didn’t.
But think about what did happen. The most towering intellect in Western church history held a cessationist position, ran into evidence that contradicted it, and publicly said, “I was wrong about that.” In a written work literally called Retractions.
A partial retraction from Augustine still carries weight. The instinct to follow evidence wherever it leads, even when it costs you? That’s not new. Scholars have been doing it for 1,600 years.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Preacher’s Preacher Said “We Disagree”
If Augustine is the most influential theologian, Martyn Lloyd-Jones might be the most respected Reformed preacher of the twentieth century. He pastored Westminster Chapel in London for thirty years. Reformed to the bone. When Reformed pastors today talk about great preaching, his name comes up before almost anyone else’s.
And he rejected cessationism.
Flat out.
In Joy Unspeakable, sermons he preached at Westminster Chapel in 1964-65 (later edited and published by his grandson Christopher Catherwood), Lloyd-Jones addressed the cessationist argument directly: “Joseph Smith regarded such things as being peculiar to the age of the apostles only. We disagree with him concerning that.”
We disagree. Not “we have questions.” Not “we see both sides.”
We disagree.
His grandson confirmed it in the introduction to the book: “He believed that all the gifts existed today.” And described Lloyd-Jones as “both reformed and charismatic, in the biblical senses of the terms.”
But the quote that still gets me is the warning. Lloyd-Jones saw where the church was headed, and he didn’t mince words:
“Our greatest danger, I feel today, is to quench the Spirit. This is no age to advocate restraint; the church today does not need to be restrained, but to be aroused, to be awakened.”
That’s not a Pentecostal evangelist. That’s the pastor of Westminster Chapel, speaking to his Reformed congregation, telling them the real danger isn’t excess.
It’s silence.
The Pattern You Can’t Ignore
So step back.
Every one of these scholars was trained cessationist. Every one of them had professional, social, and theological reasons to stay put. And leaving cost them. Deere lost his seminary position. Storms had to navigate a Reformed world that didn’t know what to do with him. Augustine had to publicly admit he’d been wrong. Lloyd-Jones stood apart from many of his Reformed peers.
Nobody pressured them into this.
They looked at the text, looked at the evidence, and couldn’t defend the position they’d been handed.
That’s not a weakness. That’s integrity.
What They Didn’t Become
And I want to be straight about this part too.
These scholars didn’t become Pentecostals. Not in the denominational sense. They became continuationists: people who believe the gifts of the Spirit continue today and should be pursued, practiced, and tested by Scripture.
They still held to the authority of the Bible. Still believed in testing everything. Still valued theological rigor. They just couldn’t find the biblical basis that cessationism required.
If you’ve been told that questioning cessationism means abandoning serious theology, these four men are the answer to that. You can be Reformed and continuationist. You can be an academic and believe in the gifts. You can hold the highest view of Scripture and still conclude that the Spirit hasn’t stopped working the way He worked in Acts.
Changing your mind when the evidence demands it isn’t something to be embarrassed about.
It’s the most honest thing a scholar can do.
Sources
The following scholars and works informed this post:
- Jack Deere, Why I Am Still Surprised by the Power of the Spirit (Zondervan, 2020)
- Sam Storms, Practicing the Power (Zondervan, 2017)
- Augustine of Hippo, Retractions (426-427 AD); City of God (426 AD); Homilies on 1 John (407 AD)
- D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable (Kingsway, 1984)
- J.I. Packer, cited in Wayne Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today (Crossway, 2000)
Full citations with page numbers are available in the free research guide, which you can download from the overview post.
This post is part of the “Speaking in Tongues: The Evidence” series. For the full overview, the free research guide PDF, and links to every post in the series, visit the overview post.
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