(031) Does God Still Speak Today?|Why We Started Thinking that God Stopped Talking - a podcast by Tania Harris

Does God still speak today? I grew up in a church that didn’t believe he does. We were taughtthat as soon as the last pages of the Bible were written, God stopped talking (known as Cessationist theology). That may sound illogical for some - after all the Bible is full of God-conversations - surely if he spoke then, he would continue to speak now. But there was a good reason for it. People thought that if I claimed to hear God speak today, that would diminish the authority of what he had already said. The Scriptures gave us everything we need, so why would we need to hear anything else?

But then I heard God speak. He spoke prophetically, miraculously and in ways that resembled the way he spoke in the Bible. That left me with a whole lot of questions. How did my experience compare to the experience of the Bible writers? What authority did it have in my life? Is it okay to say ‘God told me’ as they did in the Scriptures? And what about those times when people claim to hear God’s voice, but then it doesn't happen? These kinds of questions are the subject of my current PhD study as well as today’s podcast.
1. The Questions of a Contemporary StoryMy questions arose directly out of personal experience - specifically when God spoke to me in 2000 about moving interstate. His words were clear and directive and were confirmed on multiple occasions through other people. They led me to uproot my life and move to an unknown city believing for God’s words to come to pass. But should I have trusted my experience? Could I guarantee that God would do what he said?

At the time I encountered a range of possible answers. Well known theologian Wayne Grudem in his book The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today1 suggested that my experience was not on the ‘same level’ as the Bible writers, and was therefore not considered authoritative or trustworthy. This position made my move questionable and brought little reassurance to me in the midst of a bold step of faith!A similar approach was reflected in my church at the time with the popular distinction between two Greek renditions for the meaning of ‘word’ in the Bible; rhema and logos. The ‘logos’ was understood to be the ‘written’ word and could always be trusted, but the rhema as the ‘spoken (contemporary) word'was far more subjective and therefore not to be trusted (eg. See Mark Virkler’s Dialogue with God 2 for an example of this). Such an understanding didn’t make sense to me since the written word of God was once the spoken word, tested and written down. Authority comes from the speaker so whether it was spoken or written wasn’t the point - the question was - did it originate from God?

Then there were other teachers like Joyce Meyer in her book, How to Hear from God3 who suggested that the ‘supernatural’ methods of hearing God’s voice were not as reliable as the more ‘non-supernatural methods’ like the ‘wisdom of counsel, commonsense and the circumstances’. That meant I couldn’t trust any of my experience, because it had largely come through those ‘supernatural’ methods: dreams, visions, and prophecies. Yet the Bible itself demonstrates that such experiences were normative for the early church.4 So why would they be seen to be questionable for me?The whole problem boiled down to one key question: How does the written word in the Scriptures relate to the spoken word of our contemporary experience?
2. Why This MattersSome would ask why this question matters. When I look back at my Christian walk before I heard God’s voice compared to my own experience now, they are worlds apart. Growing up with Cessationist theology meant that my spiritual life was dry and secondhand. I only knew God through intellectual study and the experiences of others. Like the Pharisees who had studied the Scriptures seeking to find him, I’d never heard God’s voice (John 5:39-40). Our theology of hearing God’s voice matters deeply because it impacts on our ability to know him for ourselves...

Further episodes of God Conversations with Tania Harris

Further podcasts by Tania Harris

Website of Tania Harris