On the frequency of dreams and visions in the early church

I wanted to pick up on something I saw in a recent article looking at the question of dreams and visions.  I’m not going to unpack the whole question of dreams and visions here except to say that I believe that these are available for Christians today.  As I’ve mentioned previously, we talk about God speaking both through Special Revelation and General Revelation.  Dreams, vision, prophetic words, Tongues etc belong in the latter category meaning that they are always subject to the authority of Scripture.

The article’s author wrote:

“A few years ago, I did a brief study on dreams and visions in light of Scripture, and I shared some thoughts on the subject. When looking at Joel 2:28, I noted these observations, “When reflecting on this particular verse in Acts, it is interesting to note that there is little mention of the occurrence of dreams in the early church coinciding with this verse. Other than the account in Acts 16:9 of Paul’s night vision of the Macedonian man urging Paul to come and help them, there are no other New Testament passages (in Acts) mentioning the occurrence of dreams. Therefore, it would appear that this reference to visions and dreams found in Acts 2:17 and Joel 2:28 is referencing a time to come coinciding with the Day of the Lord.””

Elsewhere they comment that we should be careful not to make descriptive Bible passages prescriptive.  Now, I have two thoughts on this.  I am not personally convinced that there isn’t anything prescriptive about descriptive/narrative Scripture.  We often use stories to make points and those events have been chosen to make specific points and be applied.  However, we need to handle them carefully so that we don’t miss the point. 

However, that care and caution is not just about how we can rush to say that people should do things seen in Scripture, it is also about the kind of prescription that rules things out based on an interpretation of descriptive Scripture.

The author adds:

“When we look at Scripture, we find that the occurrences of dreams and visions was not as common as some would claim today, and this is not a normative thing in the life of a Christian. “

It reminded me of listening to a Christian radio show discussion some years ago where one person was arguing that infertility was common in Bible times, they listed the examples of Sarah, Hannah and Elizabeth.  The other person countered that this amounted to three examples over many many years so in fact infertility was uncommon. 

The point is this.  We cannot judge how common something was by how frequently it is mentioned in Scripture.  This is because the specific examples are chosen for a reason, for the part they play in special revelation.  There may have been a few or there may have been many thousands of dreams and visions in the early church, we know that there are instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 about how to handle multiple prophecies in one church gathering.  The narrative doesn’t inform us as to frequency.  As someone once said “An absence of evidence is not the same as an evidence of absence.”