Whether John MacArthur wanted it or not, his Strange Fire conference has re-ignited the long-standing debate about the miraculous within Protestantism. With its penchant to classify everything, contemporary Evangelicalism has labeled this debate as being between cessationists and continuationists. There is a tendency to treat the issue as though it were simply a matter of how one reads Scripture, but to do so is to fail to see the ghosts of the past that continue to haunt such discussions.
I have recently read claims that the Protestant tradition has held in the main that the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit listed in 1 Corinthians have ceased. Despite the fact that such a historical claim over steps the numerous debates about the nature of miracles and the miraculous in Britain during the Early Modern era, it also fails to grapple with the ghosts of anti-Catholicism that fueled this claim for centuries. One of the primary reasons why many Protestant writers rejected the continuation of the miraculous was because acceptance suggested that God was still at work in the church during the Middle Ages.
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