Speaking in Tongues in Early Christian Worship

Speaking in tongues is not a natural gift or talent for languages but a gift from God, a supernatural endowment. Tongues are not ecstatic utterance but an activity under the control of the speaker, offered in obedience to the prompting of the Spirit.

Introduction

The pneumatika, “spiritual gifts,” are “supernatural” manifestations of the Holy Spirit. They are not “natural” talents. They are supernatural inasmuch as the operation of any and all of them is contingent upon the divine initiative. Miracle working, except it be a manifestation of divine initiative and power, is mere chicanery; the word of wisdom is simply human perspicacity; the word of knowledge is but the product of human intellectual effort. This distinction must be kept in the foreground of our discussion if we are to understand the nature of these supernatural manifestations of God’s Spirit.

Supernatural Nature of Tongues

Stated negatively, tongues are not to be confused with a natural facility for mastering foreign languages. The “gift of tongues” is not a shortcut to the mastery of a foreign language. “As the Spirit gives utterance” indicates that the vocabulary, syntax, and thought content expressed in “tongues-speech” are in the mind of the Holy Spirit and not in the mind of the individual speaking. Neither is the manifestation of interpretation of tongues a native ability to translate foreign languages. Much less is prophesying a natural talent for preaching the gospel in a persuasive manner. It is not a manifestation of mere human fluency of speech. It is rather an “intuitive” knowledge of the divine counsels supernaturally revealed and spontaneously uttered for the “edification and exhortation and consolation” (1 Cor. 14:3 nasb) of the assembled worshipers.

The supernatural nature of these gifts is verified by at least three lines of reasoning. First, the Holy Spirit is directly referred to nine times in 1 Corinthians 12:1–11 in relation to his manifestations: (1) “by the Spirit of God,” verse 3; (2) “by the Holy Spirit,” verse 3; (3) “the same Spirit,” verse 4; (4) “the manifestation of the Spirit,” verse 7; (5) “through the Spirit,” verse 8; (6) “the same Spirit,” verse 8; (7) “in the same Spirit,” verse 9; (8) “in the one Spirit,” verse 9; and (9) “the one and the same Spirit,” verse 11.

Second, a glance at the context in chapters 12–14 reaffirms the Spirit’s authorship of these charismatic enablements. In this context, the gifts of the Spirit are discussed in relation to the unity of Christ’s body, the church, chapter 12—observe the parallelism between one Spirit, many gifts, and one body, many members); the preeminence of love (chapter 13); and the use of the gifts of the Spirit in Christian worship, especially tongues and prophesying (chapter 14). In this context, the supernatural nature of these manifestations is reiterated in the definition appended to one of these gifts, “faith.” It is not saving faith but wonder-working faith “that can move mountains” (1 Cor. 13:2).

Third, the supernatural nature of these gifts is emphasized by the use of the term pneumatika, “spiritual gifts” (1 Cor. 14:1).

Tongues Not a Psychological Abnormality

A recognition of the supernatural origin of these gifts is necessary for a proper understanding of their true nature and function. Of all these spiritual manifestations, tongues are the most frequently misunderstood and misrepresented. The commonplace assumption that biblical glossolalia is the result of pathological emotional states simply ignores the fact that they are a supernatural manifestation of the Holy Spirit. To ascribe them to the abnormal working of a damaged psyche is to impugn the veracity of the biblical records, to say nothing of the integrity of multiplied thousands of tongues-speaking Christians whose emotional health is equal, if not superior, to that of their critics. Perhaps even worse than that, it is closer to blasphemy than to heresy to thus project the neurosis of a neurotic age into the Deity. It is an unwarranted assumption to say that the tongues at Corinth are “the gift of men, who rapt in an ecstasy and no longer quite the master of their own reason and consciousness, pour forth their glowing spiritual emotions in strange utterances, rugged, dark, disconnected, quite unfitted to instruct or to influence the minds of others” (J. H. Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament [New York: American Book Company, 1889], 188). Were this true, then the self-control counsel by Paul—“if there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and God” (1 Cor. 14:28)—would be impossible.

On the contrary, the tongues-speaker is in complete control of all his faculties at all times. His “mind is unfruitful” (1 Cor. 14:14) because he does not understand the words he utters in the Spirit, not because he has lost control of himself. The Holy Spirit never violates the integrity of one’s personality. He exercises no coercion save the coercion of love: “If you love me,” said Jesus, “you will obey what I command” (John 14:15). The fallacy in the interpretation quoted above is its uncritical correlation of the “gifts” of the Holy Spirit with the psychic phenomena encountered in pagan religions or in spiritism, the inspiration of which is demonic.

Always and everywhere, the Bible distinguishes between the activity of the Holy Spirit and the activity of demonic spirits. The attempt to link biblical glossolalia with the cataleptic trance states of mediums or other pagan devotees of demonic spirits reflects unfavorably upon Paul’s spiritual discernment. It implies that he could not distinguish one from the other. Certainly Paul’s counsel to regulate the Spirit’s gifts of tongues and prophecy at Corinth indicates that he did not regard them as spurious. Paul never “regulated” demonic manifestations; he exorcised the “spirits” behind them (Acts 16:16ff.). Yet the attempt to correlate biblical tongues with the psychic counterfeits is repeatedly made. The following is another such example: “There is no doubt about the thing referred to, namely the broken speech of persons in religious ecstasy. The phenomenon, as found in Hellenistic religion, is described especially by E. Rhode … and Reitzenstein” (F. W. Arndt and W. F. Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957], 161). Behind this glib assumption is the erroneous a priori that superficial correlation proves mutual causation.

Tongues As Languages

The tongues of Pentecost were recognizable dialects or languages. They were not the incoherent ravings of men in a trance state. Neither were they kin to the maudlin mouthing of intoxicated men. When the wiseacres of that day tried to shrug it off as such, Peter was at pains to rebut their haughty rationalization, saying, “these men are not drunk, as you suppose” (Acts 2:15).

On the day of Pentecost, they spoke dialects known to many of their auditors “as the Spirit enabled them.” Luke ascribed these utterances to the direct agency of the Holy Spirit. In Corinth, they spoke “families of languages” (genēai glōssōn) as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. In both cases, the Holy Spirit is the one with whom the languages originated. If there was any difference in the nature or expression of the respective utterances, this difference originated with the Holy Spirit, not with the person uttering the language.

Paul further identified the languages at Corinth as the “tongues [languages] of men and of angels” (1 Cor. 13:1). They were the vehicle for expressing the praise and worship of men who, in full possession of all their faculties, had discovered that there are levels of communication with God that transcend the finite limitations of the merely rational. They are not, therefore, subrational; they are suprarational.

There is, furthermore, continuity in biblical glossolalia. There is no difference in kind in the various references to this phenomenon in Scripture. In commenting on the Pentecostal manifestation, A. T. Robertson wrote:

The gift of tongues came also on the house of Cornelius at Caesarea (Acts 10:44–47), the disciples of John at Ephesus (Acts 19:6), the disciples at Corinth (1 Cor. 14:1–33). It is possible that the gift appeared also at Samaria (Acts 8:18).… The experience is identical in all four instances and they are … for adoration and wonder and worship (Word Pictures in the New Testament, [Nashville: Broadman Press, 1932], vol. III, p. 22).

Henry Alford affirmed with equal candor that the tongues are “one and the same throughout” (The Greek Testament, 5th ed. [1865], vol. 2, 15, 122). In our own day, there is an increasing number of testimonies by Christians who have spoken known languages “in the Spirit.” On one occasion I was participating in a healing service in a church on the west coast of the United States. As I prayed in tongues, an Armenian Baptist woman listened to my “tongue” and identified it as prayer in Russian. Again, while I was praying with a small group for the healing of a missionary who speaks Spanish fluently, the missionary identified my “tongue” as a Spanish dialect. The vocabulary was clearly identified, but the inflections were strange to her. On another occasion, while praying for the healing of the little daughter of a Japanese Buddhist woman, I spoke a “tongue” she later identified to mutual friends as Japanese. Still more recently, in a ministry service in my own church, an Armenian man for whom I prayed identified two foreign languages spoken in prayer. One was a dialect spoken by the Indian colonial troops of the British Empire, which he had heard as a young man in the seaport cities of the Orient. The second language he described as Kurdish, a language he himself speaks. Most recently of all, in fact just a few weeks ago, the phenomenon was repeated again. While praying with a young man acquainted with both Spanish and Portuguese, I prayed in a language identified by the young man as Portuguese. When asked what was said, he replied: “You told God my need in high Portuguese.” Needless to say, all of these languages are unknown to me and consequently were spoken “as the Spirit himself gave utterance.”

On another occasion, I identified the last sentence of a song sung “in the Spirit” as biblical Greek, although the man singing knew no Greek. A Norwegian woman received the baptism in the Holy Spirit at a service in my church. The next day she prayed in tongues in the presence of some Italian friends who identified the “tongue” she was speaking as Italian, a language with which she is not conversant. In charismatic services in my church, other languages have been identified on several occasions. It is also significant to note that each participant in these services prays in a distinctive and clearly recognizable tongue. Vocabulary, inflections, intonations are all distinctive and clearly distinguishable. Such experiences lead the present writer not only to affirm Dr. Robertson’s words—“The experience is identical in all four instances” referred to in Scripture—but to add: the experience is identical with the biblical prototype whenever Spirit-filled Christians pray in tongues “as the Spirit gives them utterance.”