Dale, I agree with you that the history of Protestant claims in favor of continuing charismata should not be inadvertently denied, and that Protestant discussions of charismata should not become a stalking-horse for Protestant-Catholic controversies that are essentially irrelevant to the discussion. I do not share the desire of some of my more enthusiastic but less wise Reformed friends to cast charismatics beyond the pale of Protestantism; even when we turn from the less wise among my Reformed friends to the more wise, I think we still find an important growth need in this area—we have to stop talking as if all aspects of Reformed theology shared the status of those great central pillars that define Protestantism, such as justification without the works of the law.
Those central pillars, which are core to Reformed theology, are indeed paradigmatic expressions of the Reformation. But they are not paradigmatically Protestant because they are core to Reformed theology, and we have to stop talking about other aspects of our theology as if they, too, were core Reformation doctrines. Our Lutheran friends, to say no more, could raise a plausible objection! The real variety of Protestant belief and practice is too rarely accounted for in the way Reformed people use the term “Protestant.”
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