Cessationist is a 2023 documentary that walks straight into one of Protestant Christianity's longest-running arguments: whether the miraculous gifts described in the New Testament are still active today, or whether they ended with the apostolic age.
What is Cessationist about?
Director Les Lanphere builds the film around a single, pointed question — tongues, prophecy, healing, and raising the dead: real and ongoing, or closed chapters of church history? Rather than staging a debate, the documentary sits with pastors and theologians who hold the cessationist position, letting them lay out their case in their own words and their own order. Joel Beeke, Steven Lawson, and Justin Peters carry most of the runtime, each approaching the subject from a slightly different angle — biblical exegesis, church history, and pastoral experience with charismatic practice. The film moves through Scripture passage by passage rather than relying on anecdote, and it treats the audience as capable of following a theological argument at length. At 113 minutes, it has room to slow down on the passages that matter most to its case, and it uses that room rather than padding toward a runtime.
About the cast
Joel Beeke, Steven Lawson, and Justin Peters are the film's primary interview subjects and, in each case, established voices within Reformed and conservative evangelical circles; the documentary lets their individual arguments stand rather than blending them into a single composite position.
Context & significance
The cessationist-versus-continuationist split has run through Protestant theology since the early twentieth-century rise of Pentecostalism, and it remains a live dividing line between denominations and seminaries. Filmed as a UK production, the documentary approaches the topic from within that ongoing internal church debate rather than as outside commentary on it, aiming its argument at viewers already fluent in the terms of the discussion.
Watching Cessationist on Ktime
Cessationist is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login. The platform is built around a Farsi-first interface for the Iranian diaspora, and titles like this one sit alongside a wider documentary catalogue, with no separate charge or trial period required beyond signing in.