Speaking in Tongues

A television programme, based on an evangelistic course run by a famous city church, showed non Christian people who had no apparent conviction of their sin or of their need of Christ asking God to help them speak in an unknown tongue. They were taught to say aloud any sound that came to mind whilst they were praying. This ‘gift of tongues’ was emphasised as if it was a major piece of evidence for Christian faith being true.

Yet studies have shown that ‘speaking in tongues’, the making of meaningless noises, is a ‘learned phenomenon’.

History of ‘tongues’

The making of meaningless sounds has been a feature of mystic religion since the earliest times. Several of the mystery religions of ancient races were known to speak in unknown languages when they worshipped their gods. No one could understand them. These included the mystery Graeco-Roman religions, the worshippers of Mithras in ancient Persia, and the worshippers of Osiris in ancient Egypt. Plato wrote about several families whose members made strange utterings that could neither be understood nor translated. The Oracle at Delphi, which started around 400BC, was based in a shrine of the Greek god Apollo. In response to questions, a priestess would go into a frenzy and start babbling. An attendant priest would then 'translate' the babble into intelligible but often vague phrases that could in some way be understood as an answer. This oracle continued to be asked for guidance for over 500 years, well into the Roman era. Church members in Greece and Asia Minor would have been very familiar with this practice. Virgil tells us that, one century before Christ, a Sybilline priestess was worshipping the god Apollo in a cave on the island of Delos when she spoke in an ecstatic unknown language. The cult of Dionysis used rhythmic music, whirling dances, alcohol and/or herbal drugs to send peoples' souls out of their body (Greek ek stasis ) and into the presence of whatever deity or sub-deity was involved and this state could be associated with the production of strange sounds.

When Paul first visited Philippi he was met by a very disturbed slave girl. Luke wrote,

"As we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination ...  Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, 'I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.'" Acts 16:16-18

The Greek used here for a 'spirit of divination' is ‘pneuma puthona’ or literally, "spirit of the python".  This phrase 'spirit of the python,' was the same as that associated with the Delphic oracle in Greece. The Python was a mythical beast which was said to guard the Oracle of Delphi, near Corinth.  People would come to the Oracle of Delphi to receive a prophecy about the future, either for themselves or for their country.  According to some historians, the Pythoness (priestess) would cry out in unintelligible sounds which were then interpreted by another person to form ambiguous prophecies.  To have a spirit of the Python would be to be like the Pythoness — a person who was filled with the evil spirit of the oracle where someone who would crying out in unintelligible sounds which another would ‘interpret’.

Today ‘babbling’ is practiced in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Siberia, Arabia, Burma, and Arctic regions just to name a few. It is found among Eskimos, Japanese séances in Hokkaido, Tibetan monks, the shamans in Ethiopia and in Haitian Voodoo. It is also found extensively in African tribal religions.

Although sometimes the practice of making strange noises is associated with being in an ecstatic state this is not always the case. It is however always associated with being in a mindless state – many people claim that their god is speaking through them when they stop thinking rationally.

Biblical References

Tongues amongst Christians are only mentioned in three books of the New Testament. The last miracles recorded in the New Testament were the healings on Malta that occurred around AD58. Miraculous gifts such as tongues and healings are mentioned in 1 Corinthians, which was written about 55AD. It is notable that when gifts of the Spirit are discussed in two later epistles, Ephesians and Romans, there is no mention of either tongues or healing. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that these miraculous signs that the apostles performed were (past tense) the testimony of God.

“This salvation which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.” Hebrews 2:3-4

When Paul wrote his second letter to the Corinthians, probably late in 55AD he does not mention tongues, probably to divert interest away from this subject.

Mark

The reference in Mark (Mark 16:17) is in a disputed section at the end of the book which is not found in the best early manuscripts. Even if valid, this section, in describing some of the features that will accompany the apostles’ ministry says they will ‘speak in new tongues’ (languages). From the context these languages could well be normal languages of the countries they would visit as missionaries

Acts chapters 2,10,19

Acts has been used as the main theological basis for the modern use of ‘tongues’. It is argued that if this gift was given to the early church, should we not expect to see it today?

When the Holy Spirit came upon the early church,

“They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them” Acts 2:3

Jesus had earlier told them to remain in Jerusalem until they receive this gift that would enable them to be witnesses about Jesus first in Jerusalem, then in Judea and Samaria to the ‘ends of the earth’.

“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave enabled them.” Acts 2:4

The multinational listeners in Jerusalem were amazed as these Christians were speaking real languages that they could understand.

“Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language . . . we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.” Acts 2:7-11

In 1976 there was a multi-national conference held in Jerusalem, organised by some Pentecostalists. It was called “The Ongoing Miracle of Pentecost”. Significantly the delegates had to wear headphones to hear translations of the talks in their own tongues. The gift described in Acts was not available!

The original Pentecostal gift of tongues was a truly significant miraculous sign that proved God was at work in the early church. It was not the production of meaningless sounds. This occurred at the beginning of the missionary drive that the book of Acts describes. Why did the Holy Spirit come symbolically as ‘tongues of fire’? Surely it was because the tongues of Christians are to be ‘on fire’ in telling others the great news about Jesus and the salvation he gives to His people. Throughout the rest of the book of Acts this is what we read about.

“Day after day, . . . they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ.” Acts 5:42

In the book of Acts ‘tongues’ were not a form of prayer to God but were a meaningful way to share the gospel with foreigners.

It is important to remember that the book of Acts is the story of the early expansion of the church. It is not meant to be normative for doctrine. It is widely accepted that this book is descriptive and not prescriptive. We do not think that we must select church leaders by lot, nor do we do not insist that all Christians ‘sell their possessions’ and ‘have all things in common’. It is a serious mistake to expect God to work in the same way as he did at the beginning. It is therefore wrong to selectively choose verses from the book of Acts to support a contemporary doctrine that has primarily come from extraordinary experiences.

There are four descriptions of the Holy Spirit coming on new groups of Christians in the book of Acts. In two of these the Spirit is given at the time of their salvation (Acts 10, 19) and in two they receive the Spirit after salvation. In three instances the gift of languages (tongues) was associated with the receiving of the Spirit (Acts 2, 10 and 19). As these are all mentioned in one continuous story, the meaning of this miraculous sign must be the same as when first described in chapter 2 – they spoke in other languages that people from other nations understood. God’s missionary Spirit was for all Christians and by a remarkable supernatural miracle God made this very clear.

1 Corinthians chapters 12-14

Paul established the church at Corinth and then spent eighteen months teaching them. After he left some new teachers came in and within a few years the church was troubled with divisions, sexual problems, materialism and worldliness. In chapters 12 to 14 Paul discusses the use of spiritual gifts in the local church paying particular attention to the use of tongues and prophecy. He was critical of the way they were being used and he set out principles for their right use. They seemed excited about their gifts but were not stressing what God saw as important, the gifts of love, faith and hope. Paul reminded them that the miraculous use of languages without love or concern for others was useless and only pandered to build up people’s pride. If we use a gift of language in any way contrary to that which honoured the Lord and built others up, then we are just like ‘a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.’ (1 Cor 13:1) – a meaningless noise.

Corinth was notorious for the cult prostitution associated with the temple of Aphrodite. There the priestesses engaged in ritualised sexual orgies often associated with ecstatic frenzies. In this state the priestesses would worship the heathen gods in ‘ecstatic tongues’. This may be the reason why the use of ‘tongues’ had entered the Corinthian church. When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church he expressly forbids women to speak in tongues or prophesy in church services. This association with the behaviour of the cult priestesses may well be the explanation for this apostolic command.

Clearly Paul is trying hard to reduce the impact that tongues and prophecy had at Corinth. In his comparison of love with tongues and prophecy in 1 Corinthians 13 he tries to persuade the Corinthians to get their priorities right.

“Love never fails. Where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled . . . when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.” 1 Corinthians 13:8-10

There has been considerable debate about what ‘when perfection comes’ means. Some have argued that it means the full canon of Scripture, others suggest it will not be till heaven. However the next verse makes it clear what was in Paul’s mind. He was worried about the immature mysticism being encouraged at Corinth so he goes on to say,

“When I was a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” 1 Corinthians 13:11

In the following chapter Paul again contrasts tongues with prophecy, the gift of making God’s will clear to others. He emphasises that untranslated language helps no one except the speaker. This is interesting as in modern tongues the speaker himself does not know what he is expressing except in the vaguest of ways. Later in this chapter he says,

“But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue. Brothers stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.”

Paul then stresses that tongues are a ‘sign for the unbelievers’, possibly those visitors who hear the gospel in their own language.

Other New Testament Scriptures

It is clear that tongues did cease very early on. In the twelve epistles Paul is known to have written after 1 Corinthians, tongues are never mentioned again. There is no mention of tongues in any of the epistles of Peter, John or Jude.

False teachers who had the appearance of being spiritual troubled the church at Colossae. They taught that becoming a Christian was only the first step to experiencing ‘fullness’. The book of Colossians is a major critique of those false teachers. Paul stressed that a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ was all we need,

“For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ.” Colossians 2:9

Christians are called to become like Jesus, to have his emphases as our emphases. The whole Bible stresses that obedience to the Word of God is the way to holiness. Jesus stressed the importance of his people behaving in a godly way, with a passion to win people for the kingdom of God. He does not emphasise a mystical faith and he did not teach his people to practise ‘glossalalia’. We can approach God as our Father and share our concerns with him. This is enough.

Early Church Fathers

Tongues is not mentioned in any writings of the early church fathers as being a current practice of mainline Christian churches. Augustine did refer to the practice in the very early church saying,

“How then, brethren, because he that is baptised in Christ, and believes on Him, does not now speak in the tongues of all nations, are we not to believe that he has received the Holy Ghost? God forbid that our heart should be tempted by this faithlessness . . . . Why is it that no man speaks in the tongues of all nations? Because the Church itself speaks in the tongues of all nations. Before, the church was in one nation, where it spoke in the tongues of all. By speaking then in the tongues of all, it signified what was to come to pass; that by growing among the nations, it would speak in the tongues of all.”

Montanus was a heretical second century church leader who said that the Spirit had sent him to reform Chrisianity. He advocated asceticism, the use of tongues and continued prophetic revelation. His ideas were promoted by two ‘priestesses’ who ‘had the Spirit’ and who were regarded by the sect’s followers as being more important than the apostles and in some regards than Christ. The church father Eusebius, when describing these two women, said that when they were ‘spirit filled’ they ‘uttered demented, absurd and irresponsible sayings’ and it has been suggested that they practised a form of glossalalia. Tertullian in later years joined the Montanists and he described one of their services,

“We have among us now a sister who has been granted gifts of revelations, which she experiences in church during the Sunday services through ecstatic vision in the Spirit . . .And after the people have been dismissed at the end of the service it is her custom to relate to us what she has seen. . . .”Among other things,” says she, “there was shown to me a soul in bodily form, and it appeared like a spirit, but it was no mere something, void of qualities, but rather a thing that could be grasped, soft and translucent and of ethereal colour, in a form at all points human.”

Although much of their teaching seemed orthodox, this was a schismatic movement. The Montanists were widely criticised and were condemned as being heretical by the Council of Constantinople. Yet one of the leaders of the modern tongues movement has described themselves as being ‘neo-Montanists’.

Modern Experiences

Some years ago I had a patient who came from a very rough background. In her early twenties she had attended, for a short while, a local Pentecostal church. One day she asked one of their leaders how she could know if she was a real Christian – if she was ‘saved’. A very good question. His response was “Let me hear you pray”. She knew how to make those utterances so common in that church.

“You’re alright,” she was told, you have the gift of tongues so you must have been baptised in the Holy Spirit.”

It was several years later, when she developed cancer, that this question again haunted her. She had returned to taking drugs and was no longer involved in any church. She seemed to understand nothing about sin, the cross and repentance. It was a thrill to explain the simple gospel of what the Lord Jesus had done for her on the cross and this was life changing. She died confident of the victory the historical Jesus had won for her.

I was invited some years ago to speak at a University Christian Union evangelistic event. Many of the active members of the group met together to pray for 45 minutes immediately before the talk. The prayer time had very little intelligible prayer. People were ‘singing in the Spirit’, and nearly all were making unintelligible noises at the same time. They claimed this to be the Biblical gift of tongues. Unfortunately these students brought hardly any friends to the outreach event.

It is disconcerting that at some prayer meetings those who make these utterances do so just loud enough for others to know what they are about. It is as if they want to be noticed for their gifts and ‘spirituality’. Often their faces, arms and general posture demonstrate that they are trying to feel the presence of God and all too often they are so preoccupied with their own worship that they do not join in the intelligible prayers of others with a lusty Amen. Surely this a return to mysticism instead of the joyful confidence Christians have in all that Christ has achieved and the confidence that in him we lack nothing.

Tongues and Science

In one study an individual's ‘speaking in tongues’ was tape recorded. This was then played back separately to a variety of individuals all of whom honestly believed that they had received the gift of ‘interpreting tongues’. However the interpretations they gave bore no resemblance to each other. One person said that "the utterances referred to a prayer for the health of someone's children." Another interpreted the speech as "praising God for a recent and successful church fund-raising effort."

Dr. William T. Samarin, professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Toronto has made a detailed study of ‘speaking in tongues’.  His conclusion is that glossolalia consists of strings of meaningless syllables made up of sounds taken from those familiar to the speaker and put together more or less haphazardly . He thinks glossolalia is language-like because the speaker unconsciously wants it to be language-like. Yet in spite of superficial similarities, glossolalia fundamentally is not language.

"When the full apparatus of linguistic science comes to bear on glossolalia, this turns out to be only a facade of language — although at times a very good one indeed. For when we comprehend what language is, we must conclude that no glossa, no matter how well constructed, is a specimen of human language, because it is neither internally organized nor systematically related to the world man perceives."

It is now possible to analyse which part of the brain is active when people ‘speak in tongues’. Andrew Newberg is a psychiatrist and the Director of the Centre for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania. He made a study of five African-American Pentecostal women who frequently speak in tongues.

Newberg gave these ladies an intravenous injection of a radioactive tracer that allowed him to measure localised brain blood flow and "see" which areas of the brain were most active during the tested activity. He found that whilst ‘speaking in tongues’ the frontal lobes of the brain are essentially shut down. These lobes are the brain areas where reason and self-control are centred. Conversely the parietal region of the brain, where the sense of self relating to the world is centred, becomes more active. Newberg thinks this makes sense, because speaking in tongues involves giving up control of oneself and having a "very intense experience of how the self relates to God." Newberg noted that the glossolalia responses were the opposite to those of people who meditate. In meditation, people lose the sense of self whilst focussing the concentration. In meditation frontal lobe activity increases, while parietal activity decreases.

Do Tongues Matter?

Can we not regard this issue as a secondary matter and just accept that people have different views? Up to a point this is wise advice. We should not seek to create divisions but work to bring people together under the authority of the teaching in the Bible. However when the ‘initiated’ start to emphasise their beliefs to other Christians, often targeting the young and immature then divisions inevitably grow. The fact is that in the last century the issues of tongues and the miraculous have been a major dividing feature in our churches. Most advocates of this new teaching will say that the Bible is their authority. However from their teaching and their emphases it is all too often apparent that experience holds a greater influence and the Bible is not ‘taught as it ought’. .

A Pentecostal minister told a group of local church leaders that there was a major difference between himself and the others – he spoke in tongues. He associated this with his belief in a second blessing after conversion, a baptism of the Spirit, which he thought was associated with ‘speaking in tongues’. He felt that all Christians needed the experience he had had. When there are such profound differences in essential doctrine, tensions and divisions are inevitable. This is why Christians need to be Biblically literate.

Perhaps the reason that these mystical ideas have permeated into the churches is because we have failed to faithfully teach people how to study and know the Bible. It is important that we all understand it as it was originally intended so that we can know the mind of God as Jesus revealed this to his apostles.

BVP

June 2009

Suggested Further Reading – John F MacArthur’s “Charismatic Chaos”, Zondervan Publishing House 1992 gives a Biblical and historical overview