Not only is being 'slain in the Spirit' unbiblical, it is anti-biblical:
- The Holy Spirit would not cause anyone to lose control of themselves, when one of the fruits of the Spirit is self control.
- Paul commanded our services to be decent and in order. Is it really "decent and in order" to have people strewn all over the floor in church.
- Then there is the obvious risk of injury. Many people have been injured in these church antics. Churches have even been sued and ordered to pay compensation. How could it ever be the will of God that a believer can possibly be hurt in a worship service as a result of His activity?
- Seeing as there is no scriptural justification for this activity, the church will inevitably be divided. Yet according to scripture division is exactly what God seeks to avoid, so it is hard to believe that He would now introduce such a divisive manifestation without Scriptures to clearly support it.
Pentecostal hearsay is not proof. If hearsay is not good enough for the courts to be accepted as evidence then why should it good enough for me? What
is acceptable evidence would be peer-reviewed independent studies by well-respected experts. And those experts say it is not a language of any kind.
So you are saying that every movement throughout church history that had people falling down in the Spirit were false? You would have to condemn the Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, the Great Awakening, the Hebrides and Welsh Revivals, because they all experienced people falling down. Your comments are on the level of "Everyone is wrong, except you and me and I am not sure about you!"
As to tongues appearing "right throughout Church history"? Who are you trying to kid. Church history demonstrates that tongues ceased.
Get a life! Augustine in the Fifth Century reported tongues happening then, and later on the established Church, although teaching that if ordinary church members spoke in tongues they were demon possessed, if members of the eccesiastical hierarchy did, it was an evidence of sainthood! If that was the teaching hundreds of years after the last Apostle died, then the speaking of tongues must have still been practiced.
The Montanists were declared heretics and expelled from the church because they were false teachers and false prophets. They taught the heresy of modalism, and made bizarre claims such as Christ was sleeping with the women, and there were eight heavens, etc. And they made false prophecies and their prophets were known for sinful behavior (one of the tests of a false prophet).
They were declared heretics by the established church which had gone into corruption through formalism, decline in holiness, and pagan influences. Montanus sought to bring back the church as it was in the book of Acts. It was only years after he died that the movement went into error as they themselves started to go away from the foundations of the gospel. Tertullian joined the movement while it was going on for God, and left it only when it started to stray off into wacky doctrines. It is the same with the Anabaptists. While the founder was still alive, it was a sound, Bible believing, soul winning movement, but a couple of generations later, it had also gone into weird and wonderful doctrines that discredited the movement. I am the first to acknowledge that some areas of the Pentecostal movement have gone the same way, because when people get away from the foundations of the Gospel and sound doctrine, history repeats itself. It doesn't mean that Pentecostal theology in itself is unsound, but when people get into formalism, and, yes, there is a type of Pentecostal "formalism" where people start to do stuff because it is "the thing to do", instead of being truly motivated by the Holy Spirit.
In that case your original argument is moot. Observers would also have never known she was pregnant before they married to start with, so would never have made the accusation.
So, in the eyes of the observers of the time, she would have been just an ordinary married woman who was pregnant with her first child. Nothing more.
Then your argument is again moot. If nobody knew Jesus performed the miracle then how could a Pharisee accuse Jesus of bringing in wine and so accuse him of encouraging drunkenness. Not that there was any evidence of drunkenness anyway, certainly no more than any other wedding. Drinking wine is what people do at the wedding meal.
I was putting myself in the shoes of a strict Pharisee who had heard about the event. And the Gospel writer would not have given every detail of what went on at the wedding. Those people were just the same as anyone today who attends a wedding. Any wedding without alcohol usually falls a bit flat, and the Cana wedding was falling flat because the wine had run out. Jesus turned a number of very large pottery jars of water into wine, so there was a large quantity of wine produced and it was just as alcoholic as modern wine. There was no Temperance Union controlling that wedding!
So did they also accuse Moses of being a magician for parting the Red Sea, and Isaiah of operating through a demon because he raised the widow's son?
Any Pharisee who made that accusation about Moses would have been thrown out for blasphemy. The parting of the Red Sea was one of the greatest remembered and revered miracles of the Jewish faith. And you show a lack of knowledge concerning your second point, because it was not Isaiah who raised the widow's son, and I do not see anything in the Scriptural record that the guy who did it was accused of having a demon.
So, is that all you have got to try and refute my views? The cracks are starting to show. You need a bit more training in Biblical and Historical scholarship to improve your debates!
