In case you haven’t heard, there’s been a rumpus in the charismatic Evangelical world over one of its mega-stars, Shawn Bolz. He is famous for receiving so-called supernatural ‘words of knowledge’ from God, to the amazement of vast crowds of worshippers. But an exposé now alleges that he was deep mining social media data to find personal information about people he’d never met and then pretending it was divine revelation.
Bethel Church in Redding, California, platformed Bolz many times. They have now apologised for failing to sound the alarm when his wrongdoing was first made known to them. Other allegations against Bolz regarding further moral failings have also been made. At the time of writing, the details are still being debated, and so I’ll say no more about the Bolz story for now.
But I do want to say something about the charismatic movement as a whole. There is, of course, a great difference between a charlatan who knowingly dupes people and someone who, mistakenly but sincerely, believes in the continuance of the charismatic gifts of prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues and so on.
This newspaper holds to the historic Reformed cessationist belief that these gifts ceased with the apostolic age. Therefore, whether one is a charlatan or a sincere charismatic, we have to say the whole movement is based on a serious theological error. But probably not the one you’re thinking of.
