Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 137:546 (Apr 1980)
Article: Periodical Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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BSac 137:546 (Apr 80) p. 170

Periodical Reviews

“Seek the Giver Not the Gift,” Harry Lunn, Charisma, December, 1979, pp. 51-56.

Lunn “has been actively involved in the Pentecostal movement for forty years and the charismatic renewal for twenty. His observations come from first-hand experience” (p. 56). Lunn is a committed adherent to and advocate of the Pentecostal/charismatic position, and yet he and apparently also the editors of Charisma—is disturbed that speaking in tongues has become a status experience which has fostered increasingly deliberate as well as unconscious counterfeiting.

It must be remembered that the article represents the charismatics’ viewpoint. The conviction of this reviewer is that the Pentecostal/charismatic position of a special baptism in the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues as its sign is unbiblical. To talk about counterfeit and true Pentecostal experiences, therefore, is meaningless, since all such experiences are contrary to the teaching of the Bible. But for charismatics such distinctions are valid, and many of the leaders, like Lunn, are concerned about the proliferation of what they consider shallow and counterfeit experiences.

This immediately raises an important question. How is a true Pentecostal experience distinguished from a false one? If a person is uttering “unintelligible syllables” (Lunn’s phrase, as is “unintelligible gibberish”), how is the supernatural gift of tongues recognized in distinction from deliberate fakery or psychological autosuggestion or even demonic imitation? Distinguishing is apparently difficult if not impossible. In Lunn’s opening illustration (pp. 51-52) the experience of the man who was deliberately faking was accepted by his hearers as genuine until he told them he was faking.

BSac 137:546 (Apr 80) p. 171

Lunn seems to imply that a high level of spiritual living serves to distinguish the true charismatic experience from the false. At least he complains that he has “repeatedly encountered charismatics whose lives show no change whatever except for tongues” (p. 53) and he reports approvingly the diagnosis of an unnamed full-gospel leader that the charismatic movement needs “an infusion of old-fashioned holiness” (p. 53). And yet Lunn fails to explain why many godly individuals have never spoken in tongues or experienced the baptism in the Holy Spirit in the charismatic sense. On the other hand the Corinthian Christians who exulted in their speaking in tongues and other sign gifts were rebuked by Paul as “carnal” and as “babes in Christ” (1 Cor 3:1) who “walk as men” (1 Cor 3:3). Paul’s rebuke of these “carnal charismatics�...

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