God the Holy Spirit, Mentor's Guide, MG14

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G O D T H E H O L Y S P I R I T

gifts so confidently. It is not too much to say that not one of the gifts can be identified with complete confidence.

~ New Testament Theology . p. 78.

The point is not that we have to throw up our hands in frustration but that we need to be careful about dogmatism. Understand that the gifts are given to help the Church in its mission and that the empowerments necessary to prepare the Church for mission may change from culture to culture and from place to place. Too much definition may be harmful to the free moving of God the Holy Spirit to meet changing human needs. God’s purpose and message is unchanging but his methods (including his empowerments) are graciously and freely adapted to the human condition. In the New Testament Scriptures and in the long history of the Church, there are numerous examples of people who believed that because they possessed a leadership gift, or a word gift, or a power gift, they were more spiritual than someone else who did not have this. The Apostle Paul says that this is absolutely untrue. In 1 Corinthians 12 and 13, he takes this wrong idea on directly. For many at Corinth, “one particular manifestation of the Spirit, the gift of tongues, was the sure evidence of their being pneumatikos (a person of the Spirit, hence ‘spiritual’)” (Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, The New International Commentary on the New Testament , Gen. Ed. F. F. Bruce, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987, p. 666.). Against this view Paul makes the following argument: First, he emphasizes that all Christians were baptized into one body by one Spirit and all were given the one Spirit to drink (1 Cor. 12.13). Then he makes sure that they understand that the possession of differing spiritual gifts is a normal, healthy part of the diversity found in the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12.14-31) and therefore these differences cannot be used to elevate the spirituality of some members at the expense of others (1 Cor. 12.21-25). Finally, in chapter 13, he proposes that true spirituality is not measured by what gifts we possess but by how much love we possess. He says with great eloquence: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have

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