A Relationship Only Some Can Have?

What this page is asking

Start with two Christians. Both are composed by this page.

The nephew may be a devout man. Nothing on this page doubts that some Christians experience inward promptings, that God can speak however he pleases, or that the first Christian has real faith. The question is narrower and sharper. Is the nephew’s experience the normal, expected mark of a mature Christian — so that the aunt, lacking it, is missing something essential? Or has something that was once regarded as exceptional, to be tested with great care, been turned into the entry requirement for being taken seriously as a Christian?

This page follows the lines of inquiry supplied by its author, set out in full in the prompt below: what historic sacramental Christianity says the baptised already have; whether the New Testament divides Christians into ordinary believers and an elite with special access, and what that division does to the people who accept it; the ordinary pattern of formation by the Spirit; whether the Spirit is portrayed as a private oracle; how discernment differs from divination; Austin Farrer’s illustrations from his own family; whether biblical revelation is identifiable as revelation; when ordinary Christians began to be taught to expect frequent individual messages; how the New Testament tells us to recognise love for Christ; why a claimed revelation cannot override the commands to love God and neighbour; the place of counsel and the danger of intermediaries; and whether any of this thinking is Gnostic.

So the question, as the page’s author put it: is the idea that a genuine Christian must experience a frequent, individualised, conversational stream of extra-scriptural messages from Jesus — and that this experience marks the spiritually mature — historic Christianity, or is it modern? And if the New Testament gives us a way of recognising love for Christ, what is it?

Three positions, labelled, and used consistently throughout

Arguments about this go wrong quickly because each side hears the other saying something it is not saying. One side hears “God does not speak, and a relationship with Jesus is a doctrine you agree to.” The other hears “unless you hear Jesus talking, you are not really his.” So the page labels three positions and keeps them apart to the end. Each is stated as a sincere holder would state it.

Notice where the fault line runs. U and O agree against D that Christ is living, present and personally known, and that the Spirit really dwells in believers. U and D agree against O that the ordinary means God has given — Scripture above all — are not the entry level of the Christian life but its substance. The single question on which U and O part company is this: is a frequent stream of individual extra-scriptural messages the normal mark of a mature Christian, or an expectation the New Testament never sets?

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so that you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest biblical and historical case that hearing Jesus speak personally and often is the normal Christian life, and see which texts it leans on and how it handles their context. Second, narrow it: ask for every decision recorded in Acts and Paul’s letters, with how each was made, and count them yourself. Third, turn it round: ask what the New Testament says a Christian should do when a respected person tells him that God has said something about his life.

Write a detailed, source-first investigation of the following question, in
British English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote
scripture from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other
quotation: give the work, the edition or translation, the section, and the
page where possible. Where a date, authorship, text or translation is
disputed by scholars, say so at the point of use. Where a source cannot
be verified, say so rather than guess.

  TITLE. A Relationship Only Some Can Have?

  THE QUESTION. The idea that a genuine Christian must experience a
  frequent, individualised, conversational stream of extra-scriptural
  messages from Jesus, and that this experience marks the spiritually
  mature Christian, is modern. Test that claim against Scripture and
  the historic Church. If the New Testament gives us a way of
  recognising love for Christ, what is it?

THREE LABELLED POSITIONS, used consistently:
  U - Union: every baptised believer is joined to Christ and formed by
      the Spirit through Word, sacrament, prayer and the Church. HELD.
  O - the Oracle: a real relationship with Jesus means hearing him
      speak often and specifically beyond Scripture; this is maturity.
      UNDER TEST.
  D - the Distant God: Christianity is correct belief and effort, with
      no real present communion with Christ. REJECTED outright.

LINES OF INQUIRY (group into themed Parts):
1. Historic sacramental Christianity: the baptised are objectively
   joined to Christ; relationship with Christ is not reserved for a
   spiritual class. Romans 6:3-5; Galatians 3:27; 1 Corinthians 10:16-17
   and 12:13; John 15.
2. The New Testament does not divide baptised Christians into those who
   have access to Christ and an elite with a special "personal
   relationship". Teaching otherwise creates dependence on people who
   claim unusual access to God's voice. 1 Corinthians 1-3 and 12-14;
   1 John 2:20-27; Ephesians 4:11-16; Hebrews 5:12-14; Colossians 2:18.
3. The ordinary pattern: lifelong formation by the Spirit through
   Scripture, prayer, the Church, instruments of grace, wisdom,
   vocation, providence and growth in holiness - not a stream of
   individual verbal instructions.
4. The New Testament does not ordinarily portray the Spirit as a
   private oracle supplying continual predictions and individual
   answers to everyday decisions. Examine every decision in Acts and
   Paul's letters, and the contexts of Romans 8:14, Galatians 5:18,
   John 10:27 and John 16:13. Biblical revelation is usually
   identifiable as revelation; Scripture does not teach Christians to
   treat internal impressions as God's speech because they feel
   spiritually significant.
5. Compare Christian discernment with divination, which Scripture
   condemns (Deuteronomy 18; Isaiah 8:19-20; Acts 1:26 and 16:16-18).
6. Austin Farrer, "Inspiration by the Spirit", in The End of Man, ed.
   C. C. Conti (SPCK, 1973; Eerdmans, ISBN 0-8028-1579-0), pp. 62-66:
   cousin Harriet, who refused an amputation because "the Holy Ghost"
   told her to, and was useless to herself for forty years; the young
   woman whose marriage was settled by a group leader's "guidance";
   and aunt Ellen, who became a missionary doctor in India through a
   slowly maturing conviction. Quote the sermon and expand.
7. "If ye love me, keep my commandments." John 14:15-26; John 15;
   1 John; Matthew 22:34-40. How does the New Testament tell us to
   recognise love for Christ? Examine obedience, love of neighbour,
   fruit, perseverance, confession of Christ, generosity and holiness,
   as measurable against claims of subjective experience.
8. A claimed private revelation cannot override Christ's revealed
   commands, especially love of God and neighbour. A message commanding
   what Scripture forbids is self-discrediting. No one may preach hatred
   and say God told him to.
9. Christians may seek pastoral counsel and the wisdom of mature
   believers, but need no spiritually elite intermediary who claims to
   discover God's private messages for them. Such claims are to be
   tested, not treated as divine authority.
10. Since when have ordinary Christians been taught to expect frequent
   individual divine communication as a normal part of maturity? Trace
   the history from Montanism through the medieval treatment of private
   revelation, the Reformers on "enthusiasm", the Quakers, Wesley and
   Edwards, the holiness movements, the Oxford Group, and late
   twentieth-century devotional and "hearing God" teaching.
11. Are aspects of this thinking Gnostic? Compare fairly with what
   Irenaeus reports of the Gnostics; say where the comparison holds
   and where it fails.
12. CLOSE with a positive account of the ordinary Christian's
   relationship with Christ, and a reader's exercise for testing any
   claimed word from God.

CONSTRAINTS.
- Name no living person as an example of anything. Deceased figures
  and closed historical records may be named and quoted from dated
  published sources. Cite living scholars by their published work only.
  Compose all modern examples and label them as composed.
- Grant, for the sake of argument, that God can speak in extraordinary
  ways; take no side between cessationists and continuationists.
- Answer objections inside the argument where they arise, not in a
  separate section.
- Make no claim about any individual's sincerity, salvation or
  standing before God.
- Label every evaluative conclusion as opinion.
- Where the reader is asked to decide something, ask him to commit
  before he is told the answer.
- Repeat the most important point of each Part in a prominent box
  that a skimming reader can take in at a glance.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional and
readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, and giving the
reader something to do in every major section rather than only
something to read. Also produce a plain-English quick version of about
fifteen minutes with three short exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked against the editions listed in Part XV. Where a claim could not be verified against a published source, it was cut or flagged rather than softened. In three places the checking qualified the brief. First, the first version of the brief placed Farrer’s illustration in The Essential Sermons and described it as two aunts. It was located in the sermon “Inspiration by the Spirit” in The End of Man (1973), pp. 62–66, where it concerns a cousin, an aunt and a young woman in a religious group; the brief above has been corrected, and Part VI quotes the sermon directly. Second, the claim that the expectation is “modern” needs one honest exception: the early Quakers, from the 1650s, did treat immediate inward guidance as normal for every believer. Part XI says so and explains why it does not overturn the thesis. Third, the New Testament does record direct guidance in Acts (13:2; 16:6–10), and the page does not explain it away; Part IV counts it.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one of them yourself in Part XV. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XIV with the sources beside them. The score does not matter much. The point of answering first is that it is much harder to notice you have changed your mind if you never wrote down what you thought.

What follows

Joined, not graded

Begin with what the New Testament says every Christian already has. Not the advanced Christian; every one.

Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.

Romans 6:3–5 (Authorised Version).

“So many of us as were baptized.” Paul is not writing to an inner circle. He is writing to a church he has never visited, most of whose members he does not know by name, and he assumes that every one of them has been joined to Christ’s death and resurrection. The same assumption runs through the letters. “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body” (1 Corinthians 12:13). “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? … For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:16–17). The word translated “communion” is koinōnia: fellowship, sharing, participation. It is the same word Paul uses when he says God has called the Corinthians “unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord” (1:9).

Every New Testament picture of the relationship between Christ and his people is addressed to the whole church. The vine and its branches (John 15:1–8). The head and its body (Ephesians 1:22–23; Colossians 1:18). The bridegroom and his bride (Ephesians 5:25–32). The temple built of living stones (1 Peter 2:4–5). None of these images has a second tier. There are no branches that are more attached to the vine than other branches; no members of the body that belong to the head more than others do. Some members have different gifts — Paul is emphatic about that — but every member is a member.

Try it: to whom is it said?

Thirteen New Testament statements about what Christians have. For each, decide whether it is said of all the baptised believers addressed, or of some but not all. Commit before you are told. Two or three really are said of some; the reveal says which, and why the distinction matters.

0 of 13 answered.

The pattern is exact. Gifts vary; union does not. Paul could not be clearer that some Christians prophesy and others do not (“Are all prophets?”, 1 Corinthians 12:29), and that he himself had experiences he was not permitted to describe (2 Corinthians 12:4). But having the Spirit, being in Christ, being a member of his body, being a temple of the Holy Ghost, being a branch of the vine: these are said of everyone addressed, including the Corinthians Paul was rebuking for visiting prostitutes (1 Corinthians 6:15–19). The unusual experiences are distributed unevenly. The relationship is not.

What the historic churches said the baptised receive

The historic churches read these texts the same way, across every division that later separated them. They disagreed about a great deal. They did not disagree that the ordinary baptised Christian, fed at the Lord’s table, is joined to Christ.

If then you are the body and members of Christ, it is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord’s table; you receive your own mystery. … Be what you see, and receive what you are.

Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 272, to the newly baptised at Easter (c. 405–411; date approximate). Translation after E. Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine III/7 (1993).

To be baptized in God’s name is to be baptized not by men but by God himself.

Martin Luther, Large Catechism (1529), Part IV, “Baptism”, §10. Trans. T. G. Tappert, The Book of Concord (1959).

Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is regenerate, and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church, let us give thanks unto Almighty God for these benefits.

The Book of Common Prayer (1662), “The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants”. And from the Prayer of Humble Access, said by every communicant: “that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”

John Calvin, who differed from Luther and from Rome on the sacraments, wrote that baptism assures believers that they are “not only engrafted into the death and life of Christ, but so united to Christ himself that we become sharers in all his blessings” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559, IV.15.6, trans. F. L. Battles, 1960). In the East, Cyril of Jerusalem told the newly baptised in the fourth century that by the Eucharist they were made “of the same body and the same blood” with Christ (Mystagogical Catecheses IV.3, c. 350; the attribution of the Mystagogical Catecheses to Cyril rather than his successor John is debated).

Notice what these sources assume. They are written to ordinary Christians — catechumens, infants, the whole congregation at the rail. They describe a real, personal union with a living Christ. And the means by which it is given are public, identical for everyone, and not graded: the same water, the same words, the same bread and cup. A child baptised in 1662 and a bishop were grafted into the same body by the same act.

Two objections belong here. First: surely baptism does not work automatically. Plenty of baptised people show no sign of faith. True, and every tradition quoted above says so; the gift is received by faith and can be despised. Dossier 01 and Dossier 21 treat that question. The point here is structural: whatever a tradition says about how union is received, it offers the same union to every Christian in the same way. None of them adds a second, higher relationship available only to those who hear Christ speak. Second: is this not Position D, a relationship on paper? No. Position D says there is no real present communion with Christ. Every source above says the opposite: Christ dwells in his people, “and he in us”. Part XIII returns to what that communion is like. The disagreement with Position O is not about whether the relationship is real. It is about whether it comes in two grades.

The church with every gift

If the New Testament ever sorted Christians into the ordinary and the spiritually advanced by the richness of their revelatory experience, the place to look is Corinth. No church in the New Testament had more of it. Walk through what Paul says to them, one step at a time. At each step, commit before you are told.

The Corinthian correspondence is the New Testament’s long answer to a church that had ranked itself by spiritual experience. Paul’s answer has three parts, and each bears on this page’s question.

First, the gifts are for the body, not for rank. “The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee” (1 Corinthians 12:21). “Those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary” (12:22). Prophecy, where it occurs, is for “edification, and exhortation, and comfort” of the church (14:3), and it is to be weighed: “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge” (14:29).

Second, love outranks every experience. Chapter 13 sits between two chapters on spiritual gifts because it is Paul’s verdict on them. “Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge … and have not charity, I am nothing.” He calls love “a more excellent way” (12:31).

Third, maturity is defined without reference to revelatory experience. This is the part most often missed. When the New Testament uses the language of maturity (teleios, “perfect” or “of full age” in the Authorised Version), it describes stability, discernment and love:

Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: that we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine … but speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ.

Ephesians 4:13–15.

But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.

Hebrews 5:14. “Of full age” is teleiōn; “by reason of use” is literally “through practice” or “habit”.

The mature Christian, on these texts, is the one who is not blown about, who has been trained by long practice to tell good from evil, and who speaks the truth in love. James adds that the mature man is the one who can bridle his tongue (3:2). Nothing in any of these descriptions is a frequency of messages. If anything, Ephesians 4:14 describes the opposite of maturity as being carried about by every new word.

“Ye know all things”: John against the spiritual elite

The first letter of John was written to a congregation that had just been through a split. A group had left (“They went out from us, but they were not of us”, 2:19), and the letter implies that they claimed a superior knowledge of God. John’s answer is addressed to everyone who remained:

But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. … But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

1 John 2:20, 27. Some manuscripts read “ye all know” in 2:20 rather than “ye know all things”; either way, the knowledge is ascribed to the whole congregation.

This does not abolish teachers; John is teaching as he writes. What it abolishes is the claim that some Christians possess an anointing, and a knowledge of God, that the ordinary congregation lacks. The anointing is given to all of them. And what it teaches them is not new information but to “abide in him” — to remain in what they had “heard from the beginning” (2:24).

Paul met a similar claim at Colossae. He warned against anyone who would “beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind” (Colossians 2:18). The textual tradition divides here: the Authorised Version follows manuscripts reading “which he hath not seen”; most modern versions follow older manuscripts reading “taking his stand on what he has seen”, that is, on visions. On the second reading, Paul is warning a church against a man who ranks himself by his visions. On either reading, the man is “puffed up”, and Paul’s answer is that in Christ “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (2:3), treasures the whole church already has.

What a two-tier faith does to people

Once a church accepts that some Christians have special access to God’s voice and others do not, a predictable thing happens. The ones without it begin to depend on the ones with it. They bring their decisions to the person who “hears from God”; they wait for a word about their marriage, their job, their future. The person who hears acquires an authority that no office, no ordination and no creed has given him, and that no one can check, because only he has access to the source. This is not a speculation about human nature. It is what Irenaeus described in the second century (Part X), what the Reformers called “enthusiasm” (Part XI), and what Dossier 15 and Dossier 30 examine in more detail. The New Testament’s refusal to create a spiritual elite is not an oversight. It is a protection.

Formed, not dictated

If the Spirit does not ordinarily run the Christian life by a stream of private instructions, how does he run it? The New Testament answer is not mysterious. It is spread across the letters, and once it is gathered it is striking how ordinary, and how thorough, it is.

Through Scripture. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). “Thoroughly furnished”: not partly equipped, awaiting supplements.

Through prayer. The prayer Jesus taught asks that God’s will be done, not that it be disclosed: “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). In Gethsemane Jesus knew the Father’s will perfectly well; what he prayed for was to do it (26:39).

Through the Church. The first Christians “continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42). The ascended Christ gave the church “pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints” (Ephesians 4:11–12).

Through the sacraments, which Part I has described, and which the historic churches call means of grace precisely because they are the ordinary, reliable places where Christ has promised to meet his people.

Through wisdom. “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (James 1:5). James does not say “if any of you lack instructions”. He says wisdom: the capacity to judge well. Paul prays that the Philippians’ love “may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; that ye may approve things that are excellent” (Philippians 1:9–10), and that the Colossians may be “filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that ye might walk worthy of the Lord” (Colossians 1:9–10).

Through a renewed mind. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2). The instrument of discernment is the believer’s own mind, transformed. The Spirit does not bypass it; he renews it.

Through vocation and providence. “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called” (1 Corinthians 7:20). “Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city … For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that” (James 4:13–15). James assumes Christians make plans. He tells them to make them humbly, not to have them dictated.

Through growth in holiness. And when the letters do state “the will of God” in so many words, what they state is overwhelmingly moral: “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3); “In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you” (5:18); “For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men” (1 Peter 2:15).

Try it: stated, or left to wisdom?

Twelve matters on which a Christian might want to know God’s will. For each, decide whether Scripture states God’s will for every Christian, or leaves the particular choice to wisdom within what it does state. Commit before you are told.

0 of 12 answered.

The result is the shape of the Christian life as the New Testament draws it. What God has stated is enormous, and it is mostly about character: holiness, thanksgiving, forgiveness, faithfulness, love. What he has left unstated — which city, which job, which house, often even which person to marry — he has left to wisdom, exercised within what he has stated, in humility before his providence. That is not a gap in the provision. It is the provision. A Christian who is working hard at the first list is not missing the second. He is doing what the second is for.

Wesley’s method, 1750

No one could accuse John Wesley of indifference to the work of the Spirit. He had felt his heart “strangely warmed” at Aldersgate in 1738 and spent fifty years preaching the Spirit’s inward witness. Which makes his sermon The Nature of Enthusiasm (1750) all the more telling. Among the kinds of “enthusiasm” — the eighteenth-century word for claiming divine inspiration one does not have — he names this one:

Such are they who imagine, they either do or shall receive particular directions from God, not only in points of importance, but in things of no moment; in the most trifling circumstances of life.

John Wesley, Sermon 37, The Nature of Enthusiasm (1750), §20. Text from the 1872 edition of the Sermons, free at the Wesley Center Online.

He then asks how “a sober Christian” is to know the will of God, and answers: “Not by waiting for supernatural dreams; not by expecting God to reveal it in visions; not by looking for any particular impressions or sudden impulses on his mind: no; but by consulting the oracles of God” (§22). Where Scripture does not decide the particular case, he applies its general rule, that “the will of God is our sanctification”, and asks with reason and experience: in which of these states “can I be most holy, and do the most good?” And he insists that this is not a merely human process: “The assistance of His Spirit is supposed, during the whole process of the inquiry” (§§24–25).

That last sentence is Position U in miniature. The Spirit is not absent from the decision. He is present in the whole of it — in the Scripture consulted, the reason exercised, the experience weighed, the circumstances brought to mind — rather than arriving at the end as a voice that overrides them.

Austin Farrer, two centuries later, put the same point in an image: the Spirit’s work is like a good pair of spectacles. “My spectacles do not inform me, they make my sense perfect, so that the visible world may inform me” (“Inspiration by the Spirit”, 1973, p. 65). Part VI gives the sermon in full.

One objection belongs here. But Proverbs says, “In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths” (3:6). It does, and the verse is a promise about outcome, not a method of communication: the Hebrew is closer to “he will make your paths straight”. The verse before it tells the reader not to “lean unto thine own understanding” (3:5), and the verse after tells him to “fear the LORD, and depart from evil” (3:7). Trust, humility and obedience; and God makes the road straight. Nothing in it says he will narrate the road in advance.

What the Spirit is shown doing

The strongest case for Position O comes from Acts, and it deserves to be met on its own ground. The Spirit does speak in Acts. “The Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot” (8:29). “The Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul” (13:2). Paul and his companions were “forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia” and then saw a vision of a man of Macedonia (16:6–10). Any honest account must count these.

So count them. Below are eighteen decisions recorded in Acts and in Paul’s letters. For each, decide how the text says it was made. Commit before you are told.

0 of 18 answered.

Look at what the count shows, and what it does not. It does not show that God never guides directly. He does, in Acts, unmistakably. It shows four things about how he does it.

The direct guidance is a minority of the recorded decisions. Most of the decisions of the apostolic church are made the way Christians have always made decisions: by argument, by counsel, by judgement, by circumstance. Paul, who had more visions than anyone in the New Testament, writes “we thought it good”, “I supposed it necessary”, “I determined this with myself”, and changes his travel plans without apology (2 Corinthians 1:15–17).

The direct guidance is identifiable. An angel speaks (8:26); a vision is seen three times (10:16); the Holy Ghost speaks while the church is worshipping (13:2); a man appears in a vision of the night (16:9); the Lord speaks in a vision (18:9). None of these is a faint impression that the recipient must decide whether to count as God’s voice.

It concerns the mission, not the domestic. Philip is sent to an Ethiopian, Peter to a Gentile household, Barnabas and Saul to the nations, Paul to Europe. The recorded guidance is almost entirely about carrying the gospel across a boundary it had not yet crossed. None of it concerns a route to work, a purchase or a feeling.

It is often corporate, and even then it is weighed. Acts 13:2 comes to five named leaders fasting and worshipping together, and they fast and pray again before acting. At the council of Acts 15, the decision is reached by “much disputing”, testimony and the exposition of Amos, and announced as “it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us” (15:28): the Spirit’s leading discerned in, not instead of, the church’s deliberation. After the Macedonian vision, Luke writes that they went “assuredly gathering” that the Lord had called them (16:10): the Greek symbibazontes means concluding, putting things together. And in Acts 21, when disciples told Paul “through the Spirit” not to go to Jerusalem, Paul weighed it and went anyway, and the church concluded, “The will of the Lord be done” (21:4, 14).

Four verses, read in their places

Four texts are most often quoted for the expectation of a continual private voice. Each reads differently in its setting.

“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God” (Romans 8:14). The verse before reads: “if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (8:13). Being led by the Spirit, in Paul’s argument, is putting sin to death. The verse after speaks of crying “Abba, Father” (8:15). It is about sonship and holiness, not route-finding. Galatians 5:18 (“if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law”) is set between the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit (5:19–23); its leading is moral.

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). The chapter contrasts Jesus with thieves and hirelings, and the sentence answers people who have just asked him to say plainly whether he is the Christ: “ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep” (10:24–26). Hearing his voice is believing and following him. It is said of all his sheep, which makes it the strongest possible text against a two-tier faith: there are no sheep who have not heard.

“When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13). Spoken to the eleven apostles on the night before the crucifixion, about the truth concerning Christ: “He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you” (16:14). Two chapters earlier the same promise is put this way: he “shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (14:26). The Church has always read this as fulfilled first in the apostolic witness, and then in the Spirit’s leading the Church into the truth of that witness — not as a promise of new private information for each believer.

“I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17, quoting Joel 2:28). The emphasis falls on all flesh: sons and daughters, old and young, servants and handmaidens. Peter’s point at Pentecost is that the Spirit, once given to a few prophets, is now given to the whole people of God. That is the opposite of a spiritual elite.

“The word of the LORD was precious in those days”

One more feature of biblical revelation matters, because Position O often assumes its opposite. When God speaks in Scripture, it is usually identifiable as revelation, and it is frequently described as rare. The story of the boy Samuel is sometimes told as a lesson in learning to recognise God’s voice. It begins: “And the word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open vision” (1 Samuel 3:1). What Samuel then hears is an audible voice, calling his name four times, confirmed by the priest, and followed by a public prophetic ministry whose words did not “fall to the ground” (3:19). Elijah’s “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12) came once, to a prophet, at Horeb.

Scripture treats the confusion of one’s own thoughts with God’s word as a serious matter. “They speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD” (Jeremiah 23:16). “The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the LORD” (23:28). The distinction the passage insists on is between a man’s own dream and the word of the Lord, and it assumes the two can be confused. Nothing in Scripture tells Christians to treat an inner impression as the speech of God because it feels spiritually significant. Where it addresses such impressions at all, it tells them to test them.

And the letter to the Hebrews sets all of this in its frame: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). The sixteenth-century Carmelite John of the Cross drew the conclusion, in a passage the Catholic Church now quotes in its Catechism (§65): in giving us his Son, God “spoke everything to us at once in this sole Word — and he has no more to say”; and anyone who now asks him for some vision or revelation offends him, “by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ” (The Ascent of Mount Carmel, II.22.3–5, written c. 1579–85; translation as in the Catechism).

Discernment and divination

Scripture condemns one way of seeking guidance in the strongest terms it has:

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. … The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.

Deuteronomy 18:10–12, 15. The promised Prophet is identified with Christ in Acts 3:22–23.

Notice the structure. The law does not forbid divination and leave Israel without guidance. It forbids divination and gives them something else: the word of God through the prophet, whom they are to hear. Isaiah makes the same move: “And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits … should not a people seek unto their God? … To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:19–20).

No Christian who asks Jesus to speak to him is consulting a medium, and the page does not suggest it. The comparison is not about the source. It is about the shape of the request. Divination, in the ancient world, was a technique for obtaining hidden information on demand: which road to take, whether a venture would succeed, what the future held. It asked the gods to disclose. It did not ask the enquirer to become wise or good. The question the page puts to Position O is whether some modern practices have quietly taken on that shape while changing the name of the one being asked.

That last row has a biblical case study. When Saul faced the Philistines, “the LORD answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets” (1 Samuel 28:6). The next verse: “Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit.” Saul’s sin began as impatience with divine silence. He would rather have a voice from the wrong source than no voice at all.

The lots

Israel did have a sanctioned way of asking God yes-or-no questions: the lot, and the Urim and Thummim. “The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the LORD” (Proverbs 16:33). The apostles used it once, to choose between two men already judged qualified, to replace Judas (Acts 1:23–26). That is the last time the New Testament records it. Pentecost follows in the next chapter, and afterwards the church chooses its officers by counsel and qualification (6:3; 1 Timothy 3). Many interpreters have read the silence as significant: the lot belonged to the time before the Spirit was poured out on all. And Gideon’s fleece (Judges 6:36–40), often cited as a model, is the request of a man who had already been told what to do and asked for a sign because he did not believe it; he apologises for asking twice (6:39).

Augustine is an instructive witness here, because he himself famously opened the Scriptures at random at the moment of his conversion (Confessions VIII.12, c. 397–400). Yet writing to Januarius around 400, he said of those who seek fortunes from the pages of the Gospel that, although it was better than consulting demons, he disliked the practice of turning the divine oracles, which speak of another life, to worldly business and the vanities of this life (Letter 55.37; paraphrased from the translation in NPNF 1st series, vol. 1). One extraordinary moment did not make it a method.

Try it: which shape?

Ten practices a modern Christian might use in making a decision. All are composed by this page. For each, decide whether its shape is closer to discernment or closer to divination. The page is asking about the shape, not the sincerity of anyone who does it.

0 of 10 answered.

For book-length treatments from within evangelical scholarship, see Bruce K. Waltke, Finding the Will of God: A Pagan Notion? (1995; Eerdmans edition 2002) and Garry Friesen, Decision Making and the Will of God (1980; revised 2004). Both are cited here as scholarship; readers should judge their arguments for themselves.

Cousin Harriet and Aunt Ellen

Austin Farrer (1904–1968) was an Anglican priest and philosopher, for many years chaplain of Trinity College and then Warden of Keble College, Oxford. His sermons are among the finest in twentieth-century English. In one of them, “Inspiration by the Spirit”, he tells this page’s whole story out of his own family, and it is worth hearing in his words.

The sermon opens in a house in Hampstead:

I had five aunts who lived together in a Hampstead house known to their nephews and nieces as the Aunt-Heap. They were extremely charitable …

Farrer, “Inspiration by the Spirit”, The End of Man, p. 62.

One object of the aunts’ charity was a bedridden cousin, Harriet Barker. A doctor had recommended amputating her leg at the knee, and had promised to set her upright on a wooden peg.

‘But’, said cousin Harriet, ‘that very night the Holy Ghost said to me, “Miss Barker, don’t you have it off.” ’ With the result that she was useless to herself, and a care to others, for the remaining forty years of her life. No doubt an edifying conclusion.

Farrer, p. 62.

Farrer then gets “on the time machine” and comes forty years nearer. A young woman joined “an enthusiastic religious group which ran like wildfire round the world in the twenties and thirties”, and fell in love with a man the group had converted from a bad life. As the wedding approached she was seized with misgivings, and shared them with the group, as it taught its members to do:

Theirs was a meeting of communal quiet. They laid it before the Lord and they waited for guidance. The leader uttered the oracle; and it was the current saying in the group, that the leader’s guidance was always right. The Spirit declared that the marriage was to go forward. The girl’s fears were groundless. … Very edifying; but the husband quickly relapsed into his evil life, cursed the Christian group with all his heart, brought his mistresses into his house, and drove out his two children and his wife.

Farrer, pp. 62–63. Farrer does not name the group. His description — worldwide in the 1920s and 30s, shared quiet times, waiting for “guidance” — matches the Oxford Group described in Part XI; that identification is this page’s, not his.

Farrer is exact about what went wrong. Harriet’s “Holy Ghost” was, he says, animal fear of the surgeon’s knife; the group’s “guidance” was the leader’s calculation of what would help his evangelistic campaign. “So, in the one case the heart seized control, in the other the head.” Neither heart nor head was the problem; “there’s no folly in attending to either.” The problem was what happened when either was called God:

The common error in the two cases was simply a mistaken belief in inspiration. You could not argue with cousin Harriet’s fear, and what was worse, she couldn’t argue with it herself. For she must not resist the Holy Ghost, lest she be found to be fighting against God. And so with Dick’s guidance: once it was acclaimed as the voice of God, it was irresistible. … The trouble about an indiscreet belief in inspiration is that it smothers reason. A man who declares ‘This is what the Spirit directs’ is not required to give a reason; surely God does not argue his cases. But I say to you, always suspect claims to inspired guidance which bypass reasoned argument.

Farrer, pp. 63–64.

Then Farrer asks the question this page asks, and his answer is Position U’s, almost word for word:

Is the Christian inspired? Yes, he is indeed. Just as inspired as he is Christian, and just as Christian as he is inspired. … The Christian who seeks in prayer and sacrament the company of Christ, who puts himself into the acts and concerns of Christ, is drawn quite without consciousness, perhaps, into the attitudes of Christ.

Farrer, p. 64.

“Just as inspired as he is Christian.” There is no second tier. Every Christian is inspired, and the inspiration is not a stream of sentences but a sharing, through prayer and sacrament, in Christ’s own faith, hope and love. Farrer’s image for it is a pair of spectacles:

Between getting one’s spiritual eyes, and claiming oracular inspirations, the difference is wide. Oracular assurances are a substitute for intellectual sight, whereas what we are talking about is a clearing of intellectual sight. A good pair of spectacles is not a substitute for the use of one’s eyes. … My spectacles do not inform me, they make my sense perfect, so that the visible world may inform me. … Heaven help the Christian whose prayers do not make him quicker of eye to appreciate another’s need, and to hear the call of duty as it arises in every circumstance of life!

Farrer, p. 65.

And then, honestly, he raises the hard case. Does God not sometimes give his servants special inspiration about their calling, showing them things they could never have gathered from looking round the world? “Well, yes, he does.” And to show what that looks like, he fishes out one more aunt:

There was my little old aunt Ellen. … She was the tiniest creature — as small as a mouse, and as timid. In her girlhood she fainted at every sight of blood. But steadily through her teens the conviction grew in her that Christ would have her to go to India as a missionary doctor. Not that there were any missionary doctors of her sex then; the medical schools only opened to women in the year she was ready to enter. So she went … I have only to speak now of her resolution, or conviction about her calling, slowly maturing in patience and fidelity, with no excitement, no tension, no oracles from the skies, but a growing sense of what God meant to make of her, and through her.

Farrer, p. 66.

Put the two women side by side. Harriet heard a voice, in a single night, which could not be argued with, which spared her something she feared, and which left her “useless to herself, and a care to others” for forty years. Ellen heard no voice at all. She had a conviction that grew slowly over years, that asked her to do the thing she was most afraid of, that could be tested at every stage against her circumstances and her abilities, and that sent her to serve the sick poor of another continent. Farrer allows that Ellen’s was “a manner of inspiration”. It is exactly the manner Part III describes: vocation, providence, perseverance and love, with the Spirit in the whole of it.

Try it: which is led by the Spirit?

Before the page says anything more, answer for yourself. Walk through it one step at a time and commit at each step.

This also fits what Farrer argued throughout his philosophical theology under the name of “double agency”: that God’s action does not push aside our own free and reasoned action but works in and through it (Faith and Speculation, 1967). As he put it in another sermon, “God’s plans do not simply leave room for free operators, they employ free operators in carrying them out” (“Grace and Resurrection”, in The Essential Sermons, ed. Leslie Houlden, 1991; as quoted in the Marquette University study listed in Part XV). Aunt Ellen is double agency in a life. Dossier 12 sets out the Reformation doctrine of vocation, which is her theology: God serving the sick through a doctor’s hands.

“If ye love me”

On the night before he died, Jesus spent a long time telling his disciples what their relationship with him would be like after he had gone. John records it across four chapters (John 14–17). It is the most sustained teaching in the New Testament on exactly this page’s subject: how the disciples would know him, love him and remain in him when they could no longer see him. It is worth testing your memory of it before reading on.

Try it: finish the sentence

Ten sentences from John’s Gospel and his first letter, each about loving or knowing Christ. Choose the ending you think the text has. Commit before you are told.

Put the ten together and a single pattern appears. In the upper room and in John’s letter, love for Christ is recognised by keeping his commandments, and his commandment is love. “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me” (14:21). “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you” (15:12). “And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments” (1 John 2:3). “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous” (5:3).

And the commandments are not obscure. When asked which was the greatest, Jesus answered with two, and said that everything hung on them:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Matthew 22:37–40. John joins them: “And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also” (1 John 4:21).

What does the upper room say the Spirit will do? “He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26). “He shall testify of me” (15:26). “He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine” (16:14). The Spirit’s work, in Jesus’ own description, is to bring Christ’s words to mind, to bear witness to Christ and to glorify him. It is remembrance and witness, not novelty.

One objection belongs here, and it is the best one. But John 14:21 goes on: “and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.” Is that not a promise of personal revelation? It is a promise of personal presence, and the text immediately explains what it means. Judas (not Iscariot) asks how Jesus will manifest himself to them and not to the world, and Jesus answers: “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (14:22–23). The manifestation is the Father and the Son making their home with the one who keeps Christ’s words. That is union: Part I’s subject, and Position U’s. And notice the condition. It is not “if a man listen for me”; it is “if a man love me, he will keep my words”.

Jesus also said what would not count. “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? … And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:22–23). “And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46). Dossier 28 reads Matthew 7 in full; the point here is only that Jesus himself expected people to claim spiritual experiences in his name that did not correspond to knowing him.

What can be measured

Part VII gives the page something unusual: a test that can actually be applied. A claimed stream of private messages cannot be examined by anyone but the person who receives it. The evidence the New Testament names can be seen by others, and tested over time. Gather it, and it is a long list:

The great examiner of revival experience in Protestant history reached the same conclusion from the opposite direction. Jonathan Edwards, preaching in the middle of the Great Awakening, set out in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) to separate true religion from its imitations. Among the things he lists as no sign either way are that religious affections are very high, that a person is fluent and fervent in talking of religion, and that texts of Scripture come to the mind in a remarkable manner. The sign he treats at greatest length, and calls the chief of all, is that gracious affections “have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice” (Part II; Part III, sign 12; free at CCEL). Edwards had watched people in his own congregation mistake vivid inner events for the work of God, and he concluded that the only reliable evidence was a changed life.

Try it: named as evidence, or not?

Twelve things that might be taken as evidence that a person truly knows Christ. For each, decide whether the New Testament names it as evidence of knowing him, or does not. Commit before you are told.

0 of 12 answered.

The pattern is the whole of this Part. Everything the New Testament names as evidence of knowing Christ is something other people can see, and that shows over time. The things it does not name — experiences, messages, predictions, even prophesying in his name — are the things only the person himself can report. Paul put the whole contrast in one sentence: “Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

No word from God commands hatred

If Part VIII gives a test of love for Christ, Part IX gives its sharpest application. A claimed private revelation cannot override Christ’s revealed commands. And the commands it can least override are the two on which, Jesus said, everything hangs.

If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?

1 John 4:20.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.

Matthew 5:43–45.

The New Testament gives a concrete case. When a Samaritan village refused to receive Jesus, James and John asked, “Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?” They had a biblical precedent (2 Kings 1:10–12). “But he turned, and rebuked them” (Luke 9:54–55). Many manuscripts add: “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” — words the Authorised Version includes and most modern versions place in a footnote because the oldest manuscripts lack them. Either way, the rebuke stands. Two apostles, with Scripture in hand, proposed destruction in God’s name, and were corrected by Christ.

Jesus also warned that such things would be done in God’s name: “the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service” (John 16:2). Sincerity is not the test. Moses had already given the test, and it is severe: even if a prophet’s sign comes true, if his message leads away from the Lord, “thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet” (Deuteronomy 13:1–3). Paul applied it to the gospel itself: “though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8).

This is why the page calls such a message self-discrediting. A voice that tells a Christian to hate his neighbour has not merely failed to prove it is from God. It has proved the opposite, because it contradicts what God has already said with the greatest clarity. The Reformers made this the heart of their answer to the prophets of their own day. Calvin wrote that the office of the promised Spirit “is not to form new and unheard-of revelations, or to coin a new form of doctrine, by which we may be led away from the received doctrine of the gospel, but to seal on our minds the very doctrine which the gospel recommends” (Institutes I.9.1, 1559; trans. H. Beveridge, 1845).

One objection belongs here. But the Psalms say, “Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee?” (139:21). They do, and the imprecatory psalms are part of the Church’s prayer. But they are prayers: they hand the enemy over to God’s justice rather than taking it into the worshipper’s hands, which is exactly how Paul uses them: “Recompense to no man evil for evil … Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves … Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not” (Romans 12:14–19). And Christ has spoken directly to “hate thine enemy”. No later voice can reverse what he said on the mount.

Try it: test the word

Nine things someone might say God has told them. Every one is composed by this page. For each, decide what it is: self-discrediting (it commands what Christ forbids); already said in Scripture (act on it, but the authority is the Scripture, not the messenger); or to be weighed as wisdom (it may be good advice, but it binds no one).

0 of 9 answered.

Counsel, not intermediaries

None of this means a Christian should make his decisions alone. Scripture commends counsel repeatedly. “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety” (Proverbs 11:14). “Without counsel purposes are disappointed” (15:22). The church is to bear one another’s burdens and restore the fallen “in the spirit of meekness” (Galatians 6:1–2); to confess faults to one another and pray for one another (James 5:16); to remember leaders “who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation” (Hebrews 13:7). A Christian who seeks the wisdom of a pastor or of older believers who know him is doing exactly what the New Testament expects.

What the New Testament does not provide is a class of Christians whose role is to discover God’s private messages for the others. It rules one out, in several ways.

There is one mediator. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Every believer may “come boldly unto the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:16). “Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9). “Be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren” (Matthew 23:8).

Every claim is to be tested, including the apostles’. “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). “Despise not prophesyings. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:20–21). The Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” — and they were testing Paul (Acts 17:11), and Luke calls them “more noble” for it.

Counsel gives reasons; it can be weighed. The difference between counsel and a claimed private word is not that one is from God and the other from man. It is that counsel lays its reasons on the table — here is the text, here is what I have seen, here is what I fear — and leaves the decision with the person responsible for it. A private word asks to be obeyed on the authority of a source no one else can check. Farrer’s warning applies exactly: a man who declares ‘This is what the Spirit directs’ “is not required to give a reason”, and so “always suspect claims to inspired guidance which bypass reasoned argument” (Part VI).

The early Church saw the danger clearly. Irenaeus of Lyon, around 180, described a teacher named Marcus who drew followers, many of them women, by persuading them that he could impart the gift of prophecy:

Open your mouth, speak whatsoever occurs to you, and you shall prophesy.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.13.3 (c. 180). Trans. A. Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (1885), modernised at New Advent.

Irenaeus goes on: the woman, “heated by an empty spirit”, says whatever comes to her, then “reckons herself a prophetess”, thanks Marcus for the gift, and repays him with her possessions and her devotion. Strip away the second-century setting and the sequence is recognisable: whatever occurs to you is treated as prophecy; the teacher who taught you to treat it so becomes the source of your spiritual standing; and dependence follows, with its costs. The early Church did not respond by abolishing the Spirit. It responded by insisting that the faith was public, apostolic and the same for everyone (Part XII).

Try it: counsel, or control?

Ten things a respected Christian might say to someone seeking guidance. All are composed by this page. For each, decide whether it has the shape of counsel (reasons offered, decision left with the person, open to testing) or of control (authority claimed from a source no one else can check).

0 of 10 answered.

Since when?

The brief asks a historical question: since when have ordinary Christians been taught to expect frequent individual divine communication as a normal component of maturity? The honest answer has two parts. Claims of immediate revelation are as old as the Church. The expectation that every ordinary Christian should have a daily conversational stream of it, and that this marks maturity, is not. Test your sense of the chronology before reading the timeline.

Try it: when did it first appear?

Ten developments. For each, choose the period in which it first appears. Commit before you are told.

0 of 10 answered.

The timeline

Put the two ends side by side. Before about 1875, the Christians who expected immediate private guidance as the normal life of every believer were distinct and contested movements; the mainstream of every tradition, including its mystics and its revivalists, warned against seeking it. Between 1875 and 1935, three things arrived that the earlier Church had not combined: a second tier of Christian experience (Keswick, the “carnal Christian”), a daily written practice of individual guidance (the Oxford Group), and a popular devotional literature voiced as Christ speaking in the first person (God Calling). The late twentieth century spread all three across denominations.

A note on the phrase itself. “A personal relationship with Jesus” is a good phrase if it means what Part I describes: every Christian personally united to a living Christ. The historic Church said the same thing in other words — union, communion, fellowship, abiding. The phrase is not the problem. The problem is when it is used to mark off a class: those who have “a personal relationship”, as opposed to the baptised, communicant, believing Christians who merely “have religion”. You can check how recent the phrase’s popularity is yourself: search it in the Google Books Ngram Viewer and see where the line begins to climb.

Is it Gnostic?

The word is thrown around carelessly, so the page will be careful. “Gnosticism” is a modern label for a family of second-century movements that Irenaeus and others opposed. Scholars now debate whether the label describes a single thing at all. But Irenaeus’s own descriptions are specific enough to test against, and they include features that bear directly on this page.

He reports that the Valentinians divided humanity into three kinds: the spiritual (pneumatikoi), who are saved by nature through knowledge; the “animal” or ordinary (psychikoi), among whom they placed the ordinary members of the Church, who must get by on faith and works; and the material, who are lost (Against Heresies I.6.1–2). He reports that when refuted from Scripture they claimed a truth delivered not in writing “but by living voice”, known only to the initiated (III.2.1). And he reports teachers like Marcus, on whom followers came to depend for their spiritual gifts (I.13; Part X).

His answer is the anti-elitist sentence at the centre of this page:

It is within the power of all, therefore, in every Church, who may wish to see the truth, to contemplate clearly the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.3.1 (c. 180). Trans. Roberts and Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (1885).

“Within the power of all … in every Church.” The truth about God is not held by a spiritual class. It is public, and open to everyone.

Try it: where does the comparison hold?

Seven features of the Gnostic systems Irenaeus describes. For each, decide whether it has a clear parallel in Position O as this page describes it: holds, partly, or does not hold. Commit before you are told; the page’s own answer follows each choice, and you are free to disagree.

0 of 7 answered.

The comparison, then, holds in shape and fails in substance. The Christians who hold Position O confess the Creator, the incarnation, the cross and the bodily resurrection, which the Gnostics denied, and it would be unjust to call them Gnostics. But three habits of mind that Irenaeus opposed recur wherever private messages become the badge of maturity: the division of believers into the spiritual and the ordinary; the treatment of a private, living voice as a higher knowledge than the public apostolic word; and dependence on those who claim to have it. Some writers have pressed the comparison much further — the literary critic Harold Bloom argued in The American Religion (1992) that American religion is at heart Gnostic, and Philip J. Lee argued a similar case in Against the Protestant Gnostics (1987) — but these are contested theses, and the page does not need them.

The ordinary Christian’s relationship

The page has spent twelve Parts saying what the relationship with Christ is not: not graded, not dictated, not an oracle, not a badge. It owes the reader an account of what it is. And it owes Position D a plain answer, because nothing here supports the idea that Christ is distant.

On the first Easter evening, two disciples walked to Emmaus and the risen Jesus walked with them. It is the New Testament’s fullest picture of Christ conversing with ordinary disciples after the resurrection. Notice how he did it:

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. … And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him. … And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? … And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread.

Luke 24:27, 30–32, 35.

The risen Christ, talking with his disciples, opened the Scriptures and broke the bread. Their hearts burned — there is nothing cold about this — while he opened to them what was already written. And he was known in the breaking of bread. That is where the Church has always expected to meet him: in the Word read and preached, and at the table. The Second Helvetic Confession put it boldly in 1566: “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God” (ch. 1). When the Gospel is read, Christ speaks. When the absolution is pronounced, Christ forgives. When the bread is given, Christ gives himself. This is not second-hand religion. It is the ordinary way the living Christ has promised to speak to everyone.

And the relationship is two-way. God has given his people words to speak back to him: the Psalms, the Lord’s Prayer, the prayers of the Church, and their own. “Ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:15–16). Position U affirms all of it: the Spirit’s witness, his illumination of Scripture, his conviction of sin, his comfort, his gift of wisdom, the burning heart. What it denies is only that these must take the form of a stream of new sentences to count, and that the Christian who has never heard such a sentence is missing the relationship.

Go back to the woman in the opening scene. She was baptised into Christ. She hears his word every week and has read it all her life. She receives his body and blood. She prays to his Father in the words he taught. She has kept his commandment to love, at great cost, for four years. By every test the New Testament provides, she is exactly the person of whom Jesus said: “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:23). She does not need to report a message. She is the message.

Your turn: test a word you have been given

Perhaps someone has told you that God has said something about your life. Perhaps you have had an impression yourself and are not sure what to make of it. This exercise applies the tests on this page. Write the word down if you like; nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere. Then answer the questions honestly.

One closing observation, offered as opinion

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped the quiz, this section will be empty. Go back to the top, answer them, and return.

Check it yourself

Sixteen items. Nearly everything this page relies on is out of copyright, free online, and short. If you read only three, read the first three. Together they take under an hour. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. John 14–16 and 1 John. Read this first. Forty minutes. Mark every sentence that says how love for Christ, or knowledge of him, is recognised. Then mark every sentence that promises new private information.
2. 2. 1 Corinthians 1–3 and 12–14. Read this first. Thirty minutes. The church with every gift, the evidence Paul gives that it is carnal, and the “more excellent way”.
3. 3. Acts, read straight through, noting every decision. Read this first (or at least chapters 13–21). Mark how each decision is made: by revelation, by judgement, or by circumstance. Compare your count with Part IV.
4. 4. Deuteronomy 13:1–5 and 18:9–22; Isaiah 8:19–20; Jeremiah 23:16–32; 1 Samuel 28:3–7. Twenty minutes. Divination, the test of a prophet, and the dream of one’s own heart.
5. 5. Romans 8:1–17; Galatians 5:13–26; John 10:1–30; Luke 9:51–56; Luke 24:13–35. Twenty-five minutes. Being led by the Spirit, hearing the Shepherd’s voice, fire from heaven refused, and the road to Emmaus.
6. 6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.6, I.13 and III.1–3. Forty minutes, free (Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1; New Advent). The spiritual and the ordinary, Marcus, and the faith “within the power of all”.
7. 7. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V.14–19. Twenty minutes, free (NPNF 2nd series vol. 1). The Church’s response to the New Prophecy.
8. 8. Augustine, Sermon 272; Confessions VIII.12; Letter 55, §37. Twenty minutes. The body on the altar; the random reading; and his later caution about using Scripture for lots.
9. 9. Luther, Smalcald Articles III.8; Large Catechism, “Baptism”. Calvin, Institutes I.9 and IV.15. Forty minutes, free (bookofconcord.org; CCEL). Enthusiasm, the external Word, and union through baptism.
10. 10. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II, chapters 22 and 29. Forty minutes, free (CCEL). The mystic’s warning against seeking visions and locutions. Catechism of the Catholic Church §§65–67 quotes and applies it, including the teaching that private revelations do not belong to the deposit of faith.
11. 11. The Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter I. Ten minutes. No additions by new revelations; inward illumination necessary.
12. 12. John Wesley, Sermon 37, The Nature of Enthusiasm (1750). Thirty minutes, free at the Wesley Center Online. Read §§18–26 on seeking particular directions and how to know the will of God.
13. 13. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections (1746), Part II and Part III, sign 12. An hour, free at CCEL. The “no signs”, and Christian practice as the chief sign.
14. 14. Austin Farrer, “Inspiration by the Spirit”, in The End of Man, ed. Charles C. Conti (SPCK, 1973; Eerdmans, ISBN 0-8028-1579-0), pp. 62–66. Read this if you read nothing else from the twentieth century. Fifteen minutes. Cousin Harriet, the group’s guidance, the spectacles, and Aunt Ellen. For Farrer’s sermons as a whole, see “Farrer in the Pulpit: A Systematic Introduction to His Sermons” (Marquette University, e-Publications@Marquette, free online); for double agency, Faith and Speculation (1967).
15. 15. The modern history. Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (1875) and Religious Fanaticism (1928); L. S. Chafer, He That Is Spiritual (1918); A. J. Russell, For Sinners Only (1932); God Calling (1935); D. Willard, Hearing God (1999); S. Young, Jesus Calling (2004), original introduction; T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back (2012). Read at least one in full and decide whether Part XI has described it fairly.
16. 16. One question, put to the Christian you most admire. Do this one. Think of the person whose faith you most respect, whose life has most looked like Christ’s over many years. Ask them, courteously and as a real question: how has Christ led you? Listen to what they say, and to what they do not say.

Every historical individual named on this page is deceased and is quoted or summarised from a dated, published source. Living scholars are cited by their published work only. No church, ministry or organisation now active is identified as an example of anything. Where a text, date or reading is uncertain, the page says so at the point of use: the identification of the group in Farrer’s sermon, the attribution of the Mystagogical Catecheses, the reading of 1 John 2:20, the textual variants in Colossians 2:18 and Luke 9:55, the date of Augustine’s Sermon 272, and the debated category “Gnosticism”. Every modern example of church speech or practice is composed by this page and labelled as composed.