According to Moses, the nations of his day were dedicated to an evil and ugly quest for power through a variety of occult practices. These things represented a hostility to God and were gaining the judgment of God. Therefore,
When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee. Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God. For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the LORD thy God hath not suffered thee so to do. (Deut. 18:9-14)
The summary statement of this is Exodus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch (or sorceress) to live.” The word translated as witch or sorceress appears in the Septuagint version of Exodus 22:18 and other passages, as well as in the New Testament as pharmakos (in English, “pharmacy”), and had reference to the use of drugs and thus poisoning.
Haim Hermann Cohn, justice of the Supreme Court of Israel and a professor of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has observed, with respect to the biblical law against sorcery and related practices, that, according to the law,
It was to be the characteristic of Judaism that nothing would be achieved by magic, but everything by the will and spirit of God: hence the confrontations of Joseph and the magicians of Egypt (Gen. 41), of Moses and Aaron and Egyptian sorcerers (Ex. 7), of Daniel and the Babylonian astrologers (Dan. 2), etc., and hence also the classification of crimes of sorcery as tantamount to idolatrous crimes of human sacrifices (Deut. 18:10) and to idolatrous sacrifices in general (Ex. 22:19) and its visitation, just as idolatry itself, with death by stoning (Lev. 20:27). In a God-fearing Israel, there is no room for augury and sorcery (Num. 23:23; Isa. 8:19), and the presence of astrologers (Isa. 47:13) and fortune-tellers is an indication of godlessness (Nah. 3:4; Ezek. 13:20-23; et al.).183
One of the forms of occultism condemned in Deuteronomy 18:9-14 is divination, or various practices used to foretell the future; divination is closely associated with witchcraft or sorcery. In Acts 16:16-19, it is clear that divination and soothsaying are associated with demonic possession.
At the end of the Middle Ages and in the early years of the modern era, a widespread outbreak and revival of pagan and anti-Christian occultism was responsible for a massive assault on Christianity, an attack on tithing, the mainstay of Christian society, a sexual revolution aimed at destroying the family, and a revival of cannibalism, human sacrifice, and related acts.184
Subsequently, these occult practices returned as an ostensible Christian revival, in both Catholic and Protestant circles. Let us consider briefly the American aspect of this development. The witchcraft problem in Salem Village in 1691 began with the experimentation of youth, mainly girls, in occult practices. The origin of these practices was a new minister’s slave, one acquainted with West Indian voodoo faith and practice, who found a willing circle of followers in adolescent girls, including the Reverend Samuel Parris’s daughters. These experimentations became a major concern and passion to the girls, who met regularly.185 The results, however, were soon frightening rather than entertaining. “The magic they had tried to harness was beginning, instead, to ride them: visibly, dramatically, ominously.”186 The Reverend Samuel Parris, father of two of the girls and uncle of another, called in Dr. William Gripps, who saw no normal, natural cause for the affliction and suggested some sort of possession.
Instead of the girls being blamed, however, they were allowed to blame others for bewitching them. With this development, what had been an unpleasant affliction for the girls became an exhilarating and happy development, and accusations became, one later admitted, a matter of sport for them.187
Another development was also in evidence. The girls at times seemed to claim a divine rather than demonic source for their “fits” and spasms. Spectral evidence began to be regarded as valid, and the lines of evidence shifted from godly to occultist grounds.188 The girls were also accusing others of the very occult practices they themselves were guilty of.189 The girls were also claiming now to have angelic messengers and glorious visions.190
While these latter claims did not receive full acceptance, the way was prepared for such an acceptance when like phenomena appeared among youth in the Great Awakening. From that time on, these kinds of “charismatic” manifestations were less and less regarded as demonic and more and more as godly.
184 See Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages.
185 Payl Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins o f Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 1-2, 23-24, 181, 199.
186 Ibid.,1-2. 187 Ibid., 9, 23-24. 188 Ibid., 27-28., 148, 150-551. 189 Ibid., 211-12. 190 Ibid., 30.
The result of this invasion of Christianity by “charismatic” manifestations was the assault from within the church on basic doctrines. The sovereignty of God gave way to the sovereignty of man. The place of law in sanctification gave way to antinomianism, and the Great Awakening saw militant free-love preaching as a part of the “revival,” and as “proof” of salvation and freedom from the law.191 Although the main body of the clergy suppressed this antinomianism, it remained endemic to revivalism and led later to J. H. Noyes’s sexual communism and to various contemporary practices. Perfectionism and premillennialism also flourished as a result of these developments, as did “charismatic” manifestations as “proof” of conversion.
In the nineteenth century, such “charismatic” manifestations became virtual evidence of the Holy Spirit. Loud did not exaggerate when he wrote:
Involuntary twitchings, known as the “jerks,” would rack the body. The head would twist from side to side faster and faster till it spun the rest of the palsied frame. Rending cries burst from the lips of the “jerkers,” screams of anguish, shrieks of terror. Some howled and some, down on all fours, even barked like dogs. They leaped as if jabbed. They whirled like dervishes, rolled, wormed, hopped like frogs. And finally they plunged headlong, grovelling on the ground till they collapsed in cataleptic rigidity.192
Revivals, instead of leading to good results, were followed both by an increase in illegitimacy, and, as even C. G. Finney admitted, by a bitter, fault-finding, and denunciatory spirit. The Bible was put aside during revivals, because men wanted experience, not truth.193 Rampant humanism led not only to exalting man’s pretended sovereignty as against God’s, but to exalting man to ridiculous dimensions. Finney’s perfectionism led him, as Warfield has shown, to exalt the idiot, whose obligation, being limited by his ability, is perfect, doing nothing.
The moral idiot—Finney does not hesitate to say it—is as perfect as God is: being a moral idiot, he has no moral obligation; when he has done nothing at all he has done all that he ought to do: he is perfect. God Himself cannot do more than He ought to do; and when He has done all He ought to do, He is no more perfect than the moral idiot is—although what He has done is to fulfil all that is ideally righteous and the moral idiot has done nothing.194
For Finney, self-gratification became virtue, because of his man-centered orientation.195
191
See C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740-1800 (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1962), 200ff.
192 Grover C. Loud, Evangelized America (New York, NY: The Dial Press, 1928), 102.
193 See B. B. Warfield, Perfectionism, vol. 2 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1931), 25. 194
Ibid., 69-70. 195 Ibid., 189-90.
Throughout the history of American revivalism, many godly pastors were at work in the revivals, but their efforts were, like those of Aquinas, who tried to put Aristotle to a holy use, a contradiction in terms. Even their successes thus were aspects of a real but diminished faith. It is not surprising that such a background leads to a strand in the charismatic movement of the twentieth century, with its antinomianism and its emphasis on experimentialism. The moral character of such charismatics is emphatically bad; where some moral character is in evidence, there is a background of mainline Protestant church upbringing. Pentecostal and non-Christian backgrounds give little evidence of moral stability.
Such charismatics misinterpret the gift of the Spirit, which in John 20:21-23 is clearly the commission to go forth and evangelize with the authority of Christ’s inscriptured word, with its binding and releasing power. The experience at Pentecost came as an aspect of this calling, as a witness to the continuing power of the risen Christ, but as temporary gifts which passed away, whereas the gift of the Spirit remains.
However, for these charismatics, not faith and obedience, saving grace and its moral character, are normative, but speaking in tongues. Moreover, the experience of tongues is made so beyond understanding by all others that even the witness of many tape recordings that actual languages are never spoken is set aside as worthless: “Linguists sampled tape recordings, and ex cathedra assured all and sundry that glossolalia is not really language.”196 Ervin later assures us that languages are spoken; are we to suppose that they cannot be taped?197 If it be said that the many, many hours of taping by Christian scholars simply missed an occasion when an actual language was spoken, then it follows that the great majority of tongues speakings are frauds, a conclusion Ervin would not like.
The mindless, meaningless babble of such worship is common to paganism, ancient and modern, where it is often associated with spiritistic possession. It is in any form alien to the biblical faith. It is a form of the “abominations” condemned by biblical law. It is not found with any faithful and consistent affirmation of the sovereignty of God and a full trust in the atoning blood of Christ.
The essence of false faith, St. Paul declares, is that false apostles transform “themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:13-14).
Moses’s condemnation of occult practices is a part of a longer statement, Deuteronomy 18:9-22, which, after defining all the false means of controlling or knowing the future, declares that only a prophet who speaks from God can declare the future. The prophets were proclaimers and interpreters of God’s law, who declared what God decreed specifically in various instances in
196 Howard M. Ervin, “These Are Not Drunken, As Ye Suppose” (Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1968), 2. Ervin is a professor at Oral Roberts University and sees no problem apparently in Roberts’s disregard for sound theology and easy affiliation with modernism. The “ test” for charismatics is experience, not Scripture.
terms of His already established law. God’s word remained always one word, to which men could neither add or diminish (Deut. 4:2).
This passage, moreover, is a part of one which also speaks of the priests (Deut. 18:1-8), so that Moses established as the God-given ministries the Levites and the prophets and excluded all other means of ascertaining the future, or of gaining power and insight. True authority is inseparable from God and His word. The rise of man-centered norms has been the decline also of Christian faith and power.
A contributory cause to the rise of experiential revivalism was the rise at the same time of modern science with its emphasis on experimentalism. Experimental or experiential religion, in terms of this new thought (and America was early in its vanguard, being close to the new scientific thought rather than to the Enlightenment), was true and evidential religion. Conversion was expected thus to have a dramatic physical effect.
There were strong elements of spiritualism in the Salem Village episode, and modern spiritualism had its birth in the claims of the daughters of John D. Fox, in 1848, when Margaret (1834-93) and Kate (1836-92) practiced supposed but fraudulent “spirit-rappings.” The excitement and interest they created was phenomenal. Close by, at Palmyra, New York, Joseph Smith had begun preaching Mormonism. The area had been heavily infected by the virus of experiential revivalism and became fertile ground for other aberrations.
Without agreeing with tongues, we can say that among God-centered charismatics, there are important movements astir. No doctrine of Scripture is more neglected than that of the Holy Spirit. Our emphasis, however, must be God-centered, not man-centered. All humanism is oc- cultistic. The development of faith and life among theocentric charismatics is one of the most promising aspects of twentieth-century Christianity. Its potentialities are very great.