What are the gifts of the Spirit, and have they changed with Christ's ascension?

What is settled, and what is not

Almost everything on this subject is in the first column, which is why the argument in the second is smaller than its noise. Nothing in the left column is disputed between any of the four views set out further down.

What the text says

• Paul’s definition is three lines long and every line is about the giver Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone (1 Corinthians 12:4-6). Three words for one thing, and each is paired with a person of the Trinity: gifts with the Spirit, service with the Lord, workings with God. Then the purpose clause that governs everything after it: to each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good (12:7). Before a single gift has been named, Paul has ruled out three ideas: that a gift is an achievement, that it is a possession, and that it is yours.
• The lists are samples, and reading them as a catalogue causes the trouble Five passages name gifts and no two agree: Romans 12:6-8, 1 Corinthians 12:8-10, 1 Corinthians 12:28-30, Ephesians 4:11, and 1 Peter 4:10-11, which sorts rather than lists. Prophecy appears in four, teaching in three, and a good half of the items appear exactly once. If the Spirit were issuing a fixed set of categories, one of these five would have named them all. What the variety suggests is that God’s varied grace (1 Peter 4:10) is wider than any of the lists, and that hospitality, or the ability to sit with the dying, is not disqualified by missing the roll call.
• The ascension is not where the gifts stopped; it is where they were handed out This is the answer to the second half of the question, and it is one sentence. When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men (Ephesians 4:8), and then, in case anyone should wonder what the gifts were: and he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers (4:11). The picture behind the quotation is a victorious king coming up to his capital with the spoil and scattering it. The going up and the giving out are the same act. Paul is quoting Psalm 68, where the line reads receiving gifts among men, and the difference is worth knowing rather than hiding: the usual explanation is that a conqueror receives tribute precisely in order to distribute it, and that the psalm’s own conclusion is that God takes the spoil that the LORD God may dwell there, which is exactly what Paul says happened.
• Two texts say the Spirit could not be given until Jesus had gone up As yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7:39), written by a man who had been standing there. And from Jesus, the night before he died: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you (16:7). To your advantage. The disciples plainly did not believe it, and the whole of Acts is the argument that he was right. Peter completes the logic at Pentecost by treating what the crowd can see as evidence of something they cannot: being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing (Acts 2:33). The gifts are not leftovers from before the ascension. They are its receipt.
• Change one: from a few people, to all of them In the Old Testament the Spirit comes upon named individuals for particular jobs, and the first man in Scripture said to be filled with the Spirit of God is not a prophet but a craftsman: Bezalel, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship (Exodus 31:3). Then seventy elders, judges, kings, prophets. Moses saw the limitation and prayed against it: would that all the LORD’s people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them! (Numbers 11:29). Joel promised the answer, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh (2:28), and named the people nobody would have picked: sons and daughters, old and young, male and female servants. Peter stood up at Pentecost and said this is that. Now the mark of being a Christian at all is having him: anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him (Romans 8:9).
• Change two: from something that could be taken away, to a seal The Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul (1 Samuel 16:14) in the same verse that reports the Spirit rushing upon David, and David, who had watched it happen to the man he replaced, prayed cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me (Psalm 51:11). That prayer belongs to the old arrangement. Jesus promised another Helper, to be with you forever (John 14:16), and Paul says believers were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it (Ephesians 1:13-14). A guarantee is a down payment on a purchase that is going to complete.
• Change three: from a job to a body The old gifting was task-shaped and ended when the task did: build the tent, kill the lion, lead the nation. The new gifting has a stated destination and it is a person: to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:12-13). Notice who does the ministry in that sentence. The gifted people equip the saints; the saints do the work. And the measure of any gift is therefore not how remarkable it is but what it builds: since you are eager for manifestations of the Spirit, strive to excel in building up the church (1 Corinthians 14:12).
• Corinth is the standing proof that a gift is not a certificate of character Paul opens the letter by telling them you are not lacking in any gift (1 Corinthians 1:7). He then spends the letter on their factions, a lawsuit between believers, a man sleeping with his father’s wife, drunkenness at the Lord’s Table, and a meeting so disorderly that a visitor would think them mad. The most gifted church in the New Testament is the worst behaved church in the New Testament, and Paul’s response is not to withdraw the gifts but to put chapter 13 in the middle of them. Whatever a gift proves, it does not prove maturity, and the fruit of the Spirit is not optional for anyone (Galatians 5:22-23).
• On whether some ended with the apostles, here is the map and no verdict The old cessationist proof text will not carry the case: when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away (1 Corinthians 13:10) is defined two verses later as then face to face and then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known (13:12), and nobody holding a finished Bible knows as he is known; careful cessationists now say so themselves. The serious cessationist argument is elsewhere and is a real one: the church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2:20), a foundation is laid once, the gifts in question authenticated the men laying it, the signs of a true apostle were performed among you (2 Corinthians 12:12), and Hebrews describes that attesting in the past tense to a second-generation audience (2:3-4). The serious continuationist reply is also textual: no sentence announces a withdrawal, the commands are still addressed to churches, earnestly desire the spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 14:1) and do not forbid speaking in tongues (14:39) and do not quench the Spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:19), and the foundation argument proves that no new apostles are being appointed rather than that ordinary Corinthians exercising gifts were themselves foundation stones. Both cases stand or fall on Ephesians 4:11, which names the five in one sentence, and the sentence does not say whether it may be split.

How others have answered

Named only where the words were written about this passage. Quoted phrases are theirs; the summary around them is ours.

• John Calvin (Institutes IV.3.4; commentary on Ephesians 4) Reads Ephesians 4:11 as naming two kinds of office. Apostles, prophets and evangelists were not instituted in the Church to be perpetual, but only to endure so long as churches were to be formed where none previously existed, while pastors and teachers are the permanent ministry Christ gave for the whole age. He then adds the qualification his stricter heirs often drop, that God has since occasionally raised up Apostles, or at least Evangelists, in their stead, as has been done in our time. Calvin’s concern throughout is a church claiming apostolic authority it was never given, not a church expecting God to work.
• The Westminster Confession 1.1, and the 1689 Baptist Confession after it Confesses that God committed his revelation wholly to writing, those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased. Both sides of the modern argument hold this and read it differently: cessationists as the end of the whole category, Reformed continuationists as the end of revelation that binds the conscience, which is what the sentence is about, leaving room for a lesser gift that must be weighed. The Confession was written against Rome’s traditions and the radicals’ new revelations, so it does not settle a question it was not asked.
• B. B. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (1918) The book behind almost every cessationist argument since, and its logic hangs on one premise: the miraculous gifts were the authentication of the apostles, part of their credentials as God’s agents in founding the church, so their function confined them to the apostolic church and they necessarily passed away with it. The strength of the book is that it argues from the purpose of the gifts rather than from their improbability.
• Richard Gaffin (in Are Miraculous Gifts for Today?, 1996) The cessationist chapter of the four-view book the spectrum above follows, and the best modern statement of the case. He argues redemptive-historically rather than from 1 Corinthians 13: the gifts belong to the once-for-all founding of the church in Christ’s death, resurrection and Pentecost, and what belongs to a foundation is not repeated in the building. Gaffin is emphatic that this is not a claim that God has stopped working, healing, or answering prayer.
• Wayne Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today (1988) The argument most Reformed continuationists rest on, from his Cambridge doctoral work: that the New Testament knows two kinds of prophecy, the apostolic kind that is God’s own words and became Scripture, and a lesser congregational kind, fallible, which is why the church is told to weigh what is said (1 Corinthians 14:29). If that holds, the gift can continue without touching the closed canon at any point. Cessationists reply that Scripture never states the distinction and that the Old Testament knows only one kind of prophet, judged by whether he was right. That exegetical question is where the argument actually sits today.
• D. A. Carson, Showing the Spirit (1987) An exposition of 1 Corinthians 12 to 14, and the book that persuaded much of the Reformed world to give up the canon reading of 13:10. Carson argues that the perfect is the return of Christ, since the following verses define it as seeing face to face and knowing as we are known, and that on Paul’s own terms the gifts therefore run until then. He is equally hard on the charismatic excesses of his day and on settling the question by temperament rather than by the text.
• J. I. Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit (1984) The model for assessing a movement rather than a caricature of it. Packer credits the charismatic renewal with a long list of real virtues, Christ-centredness, joy, prayerfulness, generosity, while rejecting its two-stage account of the Spirit’s coming, in which some Christians have received something the rest have not. On the gift itself he declines both easy verdicts, treating claimed tongues neither as proof of the apostolic gift nor as fraud. His posture is the one usually labelled open but cautious, and it is summarised here rather than quoted.
• John Piper Among the teachers named in this site’s doctrinal standard, the plainest continuationist, and his argument is the simple one: 1 Corinthians 12:31, 14:1 and 14:39 are commands in the canon, addressed to a church, telling it to desire the gifts and not to forbid tongues, and he finds no verse cancelling them before Christ returns. That he and Sproul, both named in the same standard, land in different places is not an embarrassment to this page. It is the evidence for how it is weighted.
• Charles Spurgeon (Autobiography) Included because he complicates every tidy account, including this one. Spurgeon was a cessationist by conviction and had no patience for men claiming apostolic powers. He also stopped mid-sermon at the Music Hall, pointed at a stranger, and said he was a shoemaker who had kept his shop open the previous Sunday, taken ninepence and made fourpence profit. The man said afterwards that every detail was right, and was converted. Spurgeon said he could tell a dozen such cases and claimed a gift in none of them. Cessationists read it as God’s ordinary providence in preaching; continuationists read it as the thing Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 14:24-25. It is here for neither side, but because an honest account has to have room for it.
• A note on quoting Where a teacher’s position is summarised rather than quoted, that is deliberate and means we could not verify exact wording against a published text. We would rather describe an argument accurately than put a sentence in a man’s mouth.

Where it lands

The question asked whether something was lost when Jesus left. The answer the New Testament gives is that the leaving was the giving, and what he gave was himself.

Grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift (Ephesians 4:7). Not according to our capacity, our usefulness, or our seniority. According to his. And the gift he sent when he arrived on the throne was not a set of abilities detachable from him: it was the Spirit, the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba! Father! (Galatians 4:6). Everything called a gift in these lists is a piece of that one gift, showing up in a room where somebody needed it.

Which is why the destination in Ephesians 4 is a person and not a competence. The gifts run until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (4:13), and the body grows into him who is the head, into Christ (4:15). The point of your gift is not your gift. It is a church that looks more like Jesus than it did last year, and the parts of that work you can see are mostly unglamorous: somebody taught, somebody gave, somebody stayed up with a family on a bad night, somebody kept the accounts honestly. Paul calls those things manifestations of the Spirit.

And it means the ascension is not an absence. A man is on the throne of the universe, and what he has been doing ever since he sat down is handing out his own Spirit to ordinary people so that they can build each other into his likeness. He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things (4:10). He went up in order to fill everything, and he began with you.

Questions to sit with

For reading this with someone else, a family, a study, or a friend who asked in the first place.

1. Read Ephesians 4:7-13 aloud. If the ascension is when the gifts were handed out, what does that do to the idea that Jesus leaving was a loss?
2. Look at the five lists side by side in the table above. Which gifts did you assume were on the list before you read them, and which ones surprised you by being there?
3. The first person in the Bible said to be filled with the Spirit of God is a craftsman making furniture for the tabernacle (Exodus 31:3). What does that do to your instincts about what counts as spiritual work?
4. David prayed take not your Holy Spirit from me and a Christian does not have to. What changes about how you pray when the Spirit is a seal rather than a loan?
5. Paul says the Corinthians lacked no gift, and then corrects almost everything about their behaviour. Where have you seen gifting and character come apart, and what did the people around it do about it?