Does the gift of prophecy still exist in the Church?
Prophecy isn’t dead. It lives on in the Church—just not how most think.
Prophecy isn’t dead. It lives on in the Church—just not how most think.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How the Holy Ghost sustains a spirit of prophecy in the Church, revealing what lies ahead.
That this foresight belongs not to private visionaries, but to the Church’s supernatural instinct.
Why the future is shown to the saints—not as spectacle, but as preparation for fidelity and suffering.
He shows us that the Spirit’s gift of prophecy is part of Christ’s ongoing glorification in his Church.
The Holy Ghost and Our Lord
Passiontide, Part III, Chapter V
Chapter VI
St. John xvi. 12-15, Story of the Gospels, § 156
Burns and Oates, London, 1886
Fourth Sunday after Easter
Showing the future
‘And the things that are to come He shall show you.’
Another office of the Paraclete is here mentioned, namely, the keeping up in the Church the spirit of prophecy, not exactly as it was kept up in the elder dispensation, for in that there was a great and distinct work to be done, in order to prepare the holy people for the coming of our Lord by prophecies and figures and types, but, according to the spirit and character of the New Testament, one of the features was that familiarity of the saints with the ways of God which our Lord had spoken of earlier in this discourse when He had said that He called them His friends, ‘for the friend knows what his friend doth,’ the children of God being made acquainted with His designs and interests and projects, so that it is possible to say that His plans for the future are not hidden from them.
It is in something of this way that St. Paul writes about the intelligence of the saints:
‘We speak of the wisdom of God in a mystery, a wisdom which is hidden, which God ordained before the world unto our glory, which none of the princes of this world knew, for if they had known it, they would never have crucified the Lord of Glory. But, as it is written, that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love Him.
‘But to us God hath revealed them by His Spirit, for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of a man that is in him? Even so the things also that are of God no man knoweth, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of this world, but the Spirit that is of God, that we may know the things that are given us from God.’1
And as the carrying out of the great counsel of God for our redemption by the application of the merits and work of our Lord was committed to the Church after the Ascension under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, it would seem inconsistent with the high commission of the Church that she should not have among the fruits of the indwelling in her of the Holy Spirit, that of the instinct of discerning the future and preparing her children for the things which were to come upon her and on them in this world.