Thursday, December 29, 2022

Charles Gore on Prophecy in Early Christianity

  

The words of Jesus Christ, ‘all the prophets and the law prophesied until John,’ are clearly not to be understood as excluding prophecy from His kingdom. If His own language is not without ambiguity, yet in the apostolic writings the evidence is abundant. There are prophets in the Church who rank only next to apostles: Eph. Vi. 11; iii. 5; ii. 20; 1 Cor. xii. 28; Acts xiii. 1, xiv. 4, and xv. 32. We should gather that not all persons who received at one moment or another the gift of prophecy, as in Acts xix. 6, would have ranked as prophets. The prophet would have been a person who habitually possessed the prophetic inspiration. There was an abundance of the prophetic gift in the Corinthian Church (1 Cor. xiv. 29-36), and the prophets appear here as members simply of the local community; but speaking generally they long to the general, as opposed to the local, ministry and rank with apostles and evangelists and teachers (see esp. Eph. iv. 11, iii. 5, ii. 20, and Acts xiii. 1, where Barnabas and Saul rank amongst prophets and teachers). . . . We should gather form the Acts that Christian prophets foretold, like Agabus; see Acts xi. 28, xxi. 11. So St. Peter exercises prophetic power (Acts v. 3-10) and the Spirit guides the Apostles on critical occasions by specially communicated directions of prohibitions (Acts x. 19, xiii. 2, xvi. 6, xx. 22, 23, xxiii. 11, xxvii. 23) . . . The gift of prophecy continued as a recognized endowment of the Church into the second or third centuries. Certain people were recognized as prophets, e.g. Ignatius, Polycarp, and Quadratus, already referred to (cf. Euseb. H. E. v. 1.49 on Alexander the Phrygian). As in the apostolic Church. As in the apostolic Church there had been prophetesses, so too they had their late representative in Ammia at Philadelphia (Euseb. H. E. v. 17). St. Irenaeus, besides denouncing false prophets (adv. Haer. iv.33.6) protests against those who would banish prophecy form the Church under pretense of exposing such pretenders (iii.11.9: ‘propheticam . . . gratiam repellent ab ecclesia’) and witnesses like Justin Martyr to the continuance of prophetic gifts in his day (ii.32, 4, v.6.1; Justin c. Tryph. 82). Even an opponent of the false prophets of Montanism recognizes that prophecy must continue in the whole Church to the end (ad. Euseb. H. E. v. 17). The Montanist prophets were rejected by the Church specially on account of the ecstatic and irrational character of their supposed gift. Their rejection involved no slight at all on the gift of prophecy and no denial of its claims. As a matter of fact, however, the genuine gift seems to have become exceedingly rare; Origen speaks of slight traces of it remaining to his time (c. Cels. i. 46, vii. 8). (Charles Gore, The Church and the Ministry [5th ed.; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902], 359-60, 361)