Ken Schenck wrote a blog post that may have come from him telepathically reading my mind and uploading my thoughts onto his blog. Amazing!
Anyways, whenever I consider the cessationist/continuationist debates (and personally, as a continuationist, I just wonder why this is a debate, but I have my grave suspicions).
Enter Schenck:
Yes, there may have been a sense in the post-exilic period that Israel didn’t have prophets like in the “good old days” of Isaiah. But I feel the same way–boy, I wish we had stuff going on like when Jesus and Paul were around. So have we been living in a period of silence since the NT was finished? Certainly a lot of Protestants treat the period from the NT to Martin Luther in exactly the same way.
In the end, the idea of a period of silence probably says more about us than it does the people who lived during this period. We don’t know about this period. We may not know that a flurry of writing emerged in the 100s BC, books like 1 Enoch that Jude quotes and some of whose stories may stand in the background of 1 Peter. We may not know of the wealth of prophetic type writing that emerged among the Essenes of the first century BC.
I would like to add, no, we do not have prophetic literature from those “400 years of silence” but what we do have is WISDOM literature that Protestants conveniently have left out of their canon for, oh, say, a little less than a couple hundred years. You know, the Apocrypha.
#justprayin’
Read Ken’s post HERE.
Plus some of our books actually probably are from this period, like Daniel. Prophecy turned into wisdom lit and apocalyptic.
I agree, Travis.
Telepathically agreeing with you
Ha!
Thanks for stopping by, Ken!