Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? Four Views
Edited by Wayne Grudem
IVP. 368 pp. £8.99
ISBN 0 85111 179 3
This is an important book. Four respected and articulate evangelical scholars (Richard B. Gaffin, Robert L. Saucy, C. Samuel Storms and Douglas A. Oss) offer carefully argued and eirenically expressed defences of their own views, interact with each of the others' viewpoints and offer a concluding reflection. Wayne Grudem helpfully sets the scene and offers a few concluding remarks.
The four views are the cessationist, (Dr. Gaffin), 'Open but Cautious' view (Dr. Saucy), 'Third Wave' (Dr. Storms) and Pentecostal (Dr. Oss). Several features characterise the volume. Each contributor demonstrates a desire to genuinely understand the other views and to eschew the fabrication of 'straw men'. In particular, the cessationist view advanced by Gaffin is not caricatured as it so frequently is in other literature of this sort. Equally manifest is a deep and genuine desire to be faithful to Scripture and this is accompanied by careful and scholarly (but readable) exegesis, exposition and application. A particular strength of several contributions (not least that of Dr. Oss) is the attempt to root discussion in a biblical theology.
