Kenneth Berding, What are Spiritual Gifts?: Rethinking the Conventional View. Kregel Publications, 2006.
Referenced in: Spiritual Gifts
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
The popular view of spiritual gifts sees them as God’s unique endowments to each individual. People are encouraged to discover their gifts through profiles and/or other exercises, then activate those gifts in Christian service. Usually this is based on combining the lists of spiritual gifts in Ephesians 4, Romans 12, and 1 Corintians 12. In this scholarly but accessible work, Berding, in a counterpoint style, contends that the first task should be discerning how one may best serve, and this may be limited to a specific context. Gifts then become a way of clarifying how one engages the service set before them. This involves shifting the question from “What are my unique gifts?” to “Where does God want me to serve?” See a similar perspective in the introductory essay on Strengths-Based Leadership.
From the Publisher
In this groundbreaking work, New Testament scholar Kenneth Berding suggests that we have misunderstood the spiritual gifts themselves and how they function, and thus have embarked on a misplaced search to find individualized spiritual gifts.
About the Author
Kenneth Berding (Ph.D., Westminster Theological Seminary) is associate professor of New Testament at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, La Mirada, California. He is the author of Polycarp and Paul (Brill) and has extensive ministry experience both overseas and in the local church.
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