I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.
1 Corinthians 14:18-19 NIVUK
In all of Scripture, there is no issue more divisive, yet comparatively rarely mentioned, as tongues.
But that doesn’t mean that we can't have a little fun with it.
I remember standing at a bus stop in Romania, after having preached at a Pentecostal church, when a dear sister said to me, ‘You preached well today, brother. But have you ever prayed for the gift of tongues?’
‘Yes, I have, sister.’ I replied. ‘I prayed for the gift of the Romanian tongue, and I got it too.’
She made sure to tell me that was not what she meant.
On another occasion, I was setting up the technology for Sunday School and getting a little stressed finding a key for a cupboard. I thought I was alone, so I gave myself a little talking-to in Romanian. I muttered ‘What am I doing?’ under my breath.
Now, I should explain that ‘What am I doing?’ in Romanian sounds pretty bad in English. In fact, it resembles a pretty serious cuss word.
I was overheard by one of the church’s worship leaders.
When I told my wife what had happened, she told me, ‘Well, that’s what you get for speaking in tongues in church!’
Laughter aside, speaking in tongues was quite the controversial issue when I was a student.
The Toronto Blessing had happened in Canada. Charismatic renewal was really spreading at the time. Pentecostal churches were booming.
But not every church greeted it with open arms. Some recognised the over-emphasis on ‘gifts’ and ‘signs’ and ‘wonders’ and the under-emphasis on sound thought and theology. Some had real problems with certain people insisting – absolutely incorrectly – that if you didn’t speak in tongues you were either less of a Christian or not a Christian at all.
The result was a huge rift among Evangelical churches and between denominations.
My own church was not unaffected by this. Before I became a member, there had been a deeply acrimonious split over the issue.
I don’t want to pour salt into old wounds, but the issue of speaking in tongues is one we have to deal with, even if the Toronto Blessing took place at least thirty years ago.
Firstly, because it's in the Bible. That much we can agree on – as much as some of us might wish it wasn’t.
Secondly, charismatic renewal is still controversial and can still divide churches even now, so we need to make sure that our thinking on the issue is correct.
Before I go any further, I need to be straight with you. I am a Baptist. Most of my family are Pentecostals. I have nothing against genuine speaking in tongues, provided the rules laid down on 1 Corinthians 14 are adhered to. I do not have the gift of a heavenly tongue. I am fluent in two earthly tongues. And yes, from Scripture, I believe that counts.
There are three massive pieces of information we need to know about speaking in tongues.
Firstly, it isn’t a major deal in the Bible. It’s recorded in only two – that’s right, only two – books of the Bible (Acts and 1 Corinthians). In neither of them is it written that you need to speak in tongues to be a Christian. In fact, Paul makes it plain in 1 Corinthians 12:30 that not everyone has that particular gift.
In Acts, we only have incidents of speaking in tongues recorded three times:
At Pentecost (Acts 2:1-11)
When Cornelius’ household received the Gospel (Acts 10:46)
When Paul met with some disciples of John the Baptist in Ephesus (Acts 19:1-7)
And that’s it. That’s all.
In each of these occasions, the Gospel crossed a significant cultural barrier: to pilgrim Jews celebrating Pentecost in Acts 2, the first Gentile household in Acts 10 and to the culturally mixed population of Ephesus in Acts 19.
Also, we do not have sufficient evidence that any of these speaking in tongues events were the equivalent of modern ecstatic tongues, or glossolalia. Only two Greek words were used in Acts to describe ‘tongues’: glossa – which, as well as referring to the physical tongue, refers to the language spoken by a tribe or nation, and diakletos – from which we draw our modern word ‘dialect’.
In Acts 2, a text which is so famous that I have heard it cheered in Pentecostal churches, tongues (glossa) of fire fall from heaven and touch the disciples, causing them to speak in tongues (glossa), which are perceived by the pilgrim Jews as being their native languages (diakletos).
What seems to be happening is that the Holy Spirit inspired speech that was understood as being human languages.
In fact, the only time in all the Bible that an ecstatic, or angelic, tongue is mentioned explicitly is 1 Corinthians 13:1, and then unpacked in the verses on which we are meditating.
In other words, the three events in Acts are being fantastically overblown and used as a tool to divide the church, when Paul, himself a speaker in tongues (1 Corinthians 14:18), says plainly in 1 Corinthians 12:30 that not everyone will have this gift.
And that cannot be anything but wrong.
But why has it happened?
Well, firstly we have to understand the history of speaking in tongues.
It’s not mentioned in the Old Testament – certainly not in the canonical Old Testament. And there’s a reason for that: speaking in tongues was simply not part of Jewish practice.
Speaking in ecstatic tongues was part of pagan Graeco-Roman religion. That is where it originated.
Corinth was a Greek city, occupied by the Romans. It stands to reason that their worship practices would be less Jewish and more Greek.
We know from Acts 18 that there were also Jews in Corinth. Paul led them to Christ first and then the Greeks.
So the Christian Church would have a combustible mix of Greeks, who worshipped using ecstatic tongues, and Jews, who did not.
We also have to understand that speaking in ecstatic tongues have often been a part of great movements of the Holy Spirit – Revivals – from Pentecost onwards. But these revivals are not weekly. They don’t occur every Sunday.
Thus it is my belief that there is a clear comparison to be made between revivalist charismatic services and services where we sing ancient hymns and talk about ‘the good old days’. Both types of service are not looking to God to do a new thing or to seek out a blessing that is ‘new every morning’. Instead, they are driven by backward-looking nostalgia: remembering what God has done in the past and longing for Him to do it again.
They are both like Peter, who wanted to build tents on the Mount of Transfiguration and linger there, instead of facing the fight in the valley below (Matthew 17:4).
The Body of Christ can’t function like that.
We are more than yesterday’s blessing.
What we see here, then, is not Paul outlining why ‘all the best Christians speak on tongues’. And neither is he outlawing it entirely as a ‘work of the devil’.
No: he is accepting speaking in tongues as a legitimate expression of worship and permitting its use in church under certain circumstances. And he’s doing so using the same principles that we saw in Acts 6.
Firstly, he shows understanding of the issues on both sides of the argument: the Jewish side, who would have seen speaking in tongues as chaotic and incomprehensible; the Greek side, who saw it as a perfectly legitimate way to worship God. He tells both sides that they should apply the white-hot truths of 1 Corinthians 13 in their dispute (1 Corinthians 14:1).
Secondly, he understands his priority, and that priority is his calling to make disciples by preaching the Gospel.
Thirdly, he takes decisive action.
Now we reach the part of these verses that is both decisive and controversial. Paul provides us with a simple rule here:
But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.
1 Corinthians 14:19 NIVUK
Paul provides us with a simple standard: everything done in church must be intelligible, both to regular attenders and to outsiders. Hence his argument in verses 22-24 that tongues are a ‘sign’ (which should be interpreted here as meaning ‘something out of the ordinary and a bit strange’, given the context) for unbelievers.
For many in more traditional churches, this means that tongues cannot be used in public worship. Paul does not say that. In fact, he forbids us from forbidding them (1 Corinthians 14:39). But, as we will see later, they must be interpreted so that the service is intelligible. If there is no interpreter, speaking in tongues cannot take place.
However, what if we applied the same standard to traditional forms of worship? Much of the theological jargon we use and the Shakespearian language of our old hymns are as alien to modern generations as speaking in tongues. Now, it’s not our place to pity this situation and try and change it. We are not defenders of an ancient culture. Our job is to communicate the Gospel in as clear a way as possible – no more, no less. So we ought to work hard to ensure that our acts of public worship are intelligible to all who see them.
Do you see what happens as a result?
Paul knows that there are genuinely spiritual people in the Corinthian church. There are also those who are, to be quite frankly, fakes. When a spiritual gift like speaking in tongues becomes a spiritual badge of honour, then there are those who will seek the honour rather than the gift.
This phenomenon can be seen within the modern charismatic movement. Paul states plainly that ecstatic tongues can't just be the same sound repeated over and over – it has to be perceived as a language. There has to be structure and grammar. There has to be meaning (1 Corinthians 14:6-11). It is this meaning that must be interpreted for the congregation.
Paul also states that since our primary goal should be to build up the church and strengthen it to do its job better (1 Corinthians 14:5,13-19; Ephesians 4:11-16), we should seek to excel in gifts that fulfil this aim rather than gifts that are for private devotional worship.
So what am I saying?
Paul is addressing a divisive issue here: a Greek and Hebrew culture clash. This particular issue is wildly overblown in the modern church. Paul provides with a neat, elegant and correct solution.
Speaking in tongues cannot and should not ever be forbidden. But neither should it be seen as the preserve of a spiritual elite or something every Christian has to do to be a ‘real’ believer, or even something we should seek out (sorry, bus stop sister in Pitești!). Instead, it’s an act of private devotional worship that should only see the light of day in public worship if an interpreter is present.
That is how Paul tells us to handle the issue. And as someone who spoke in tongues himself, I think we ought to listen.
Questions
How do you feel about the fact that speaking in tongues is such a minor issue in the Bible? Is it a minor issue in your church or is it blown out of proportion?
Had you thought that the division regarding speaking in tongues in the Corinthian could be due to a culture clash? How does this help you understand the divisions about this issue in the modern church?
How can we apply the principle Paul uses here to other sources of cultural division within our churches?
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