Today is St. Luke’s Day, and I am reproducing the collect for same from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. It specifically calls on God to “(m)anifest in thy Church the like power and love, to the healing of our bodies and our souls…”
Bodies? Recently we’ve been regaled on Twitter with a cessationists’ conference where they discuss what the Holy Spirit isn’t doing these days. One of those is supposedly divine healing. This brings up a good number of Scriptural problems, but it also brings up another question: was cessationism as understood today the faith of the Reformers? The short answer is no, and things like this–which date from the early years of the English Reformation–are evidence of same.
It also refutes people who think that, in typical Evangelical style, there was the Apostolic Age, then centuries of total darkness until ______________ showed up.
I discuss these issues in more detail in Born to be Alive: The Spirit PouredĀ Out.
Positive Infinity 