glossolalia
1. RELIGION Same as speaking in tongues
2. nonsense speech: nonsensical or invented speech, especially resulting from a trance or schizophrenia
Source: Encarta Dictionary
The subject of speaking in tongues has come up on several blogs in recent days. Peter Kirk has two posts on the topic (1 and 2). And Chris Tilling, though not referring to speaking in tongues does poke fun at a related topic: prophetic words of knowledge (1 and 2).
If you’re interested in this topic check out Peter’s posts and the other bloggers that he links to. Also, read Chris’ posts for a good laugh.
Glossolalia is widely practiced by Christians in this part of Africa. In fact, I once had an amusing experience in this regard at a Baptist church. I was invited to preach and quite enjoyed the lively but certainly not “wild and charismatic” service. Then afterwards I returned home where I realized that I needed to speak with the pastor. So I returned to the church and discovered all the doors and windows closed and people inside praying in tongues in loud voices. Apparently they had waited for me to leave and then the real church service began.
I pray in tongues on occasion. But I have to say that it is not a vital part of my religious experience. I’d like to explore why that is and I might blog about it in the future in more detail. But I will say that in my denomination, the Assemblies of God, speaking in tongues is taught to be a normative experience for a believer. It is expected according to tradition that all believers will have an experience subsequent to salvation at which they are imbued with power and evidence of this will always be speaking in tongues. This has created a real crisis in our churches since in real life not everyone does have this experience. The result is a two-tiered church in which some people, usually older and/or ministers, have “got it” and the rest are ashamed of their lack of spirituality. And another result is “tongues factories” in which young people or men’s groups or whatever are herded together and “taught” how to speak in tongues. This is how I learned how to speak in tongues. I won’t say it wasn’t a spiritual experience but it was certainly a high pressure environment that encouraged conformity and I’m not sure that was Jesus’ idea when he asked the disciples to wait for power to come on them from on high.
I’m glad to hear about people like Peter and Tim who have had a positive experience with speaking in tongues but without the peer pressure. My policy is certainly “forbid not” but also “force not.” The Comforter promised by Jesus comes to all who are born again. Subsequent experiences are to be expected. And I really think that we miss out in our worship gatherings when we don’t allow more unstructured time and more experimental time. I think there will be flub-ups and embarrassments but I also think there are rich rewards for an intimate group of believers who meet together and try to exercise the spiritual gifts spoken of in the New Testament.
A blog name like lingamish and a preaching style that knocks the people from their pews! and forced glossolalia! augh!
Here’s what one of my characters said in a little (true) story: Who knows what direction to go in when the words are unintelligible – but our intelligence, gift though it is, is no match for what we don’t know. I sought the unknown and found it was beautiful.
Just in case you missed it the link is here
http://stenagmois.blogspot.com/2007/10/music-and-tongues.html
ps to my prior comment which has not yet showed up on your blog – but Doug’s article on tongues is also of interest.
http://www.metacatholic.co.uk/2007/10/tongues-and-translations-art-xxiv/
My prior comment must have been lost in a cyber muon shower. I was reflecting on disappointment to hear of your negative experience. It is not surprising though. All are afraid of the freedom that God exercises. Though why is a mystery!
I think tongues teaches the mind something and reaches the body where the mind will not: that God is in us and with us always – that our prayer in the Spirit is continuous and can be expressed even when we ‘know’ nothing. This is not to make us proud but to bring us to know that love that was from the beginning and is in us through the consecration that Jesus has accomplished for us.
I also think it is possible to learn all this knowledge without tongues – but for some of us, that gift ‘under the Christmas tree’ was worth opening.
Thanks for the link and your comments. I’m sorry your first comment was swallowed up.
I found your comment! Akismet thought you were SPAM.
David, you and I have joked about blogging in tongues before, but now I realise that most of your blogging is in fact glossolalia, definition 2! For once this post certainly is not that. And the speaking in tongues I am talking about is also not that, at least I don’t think so, but only definition 1.
Great story about the African Baptist church. I would expect this of Pentecostals with a Baptist visiting preacher, but not vice versa! Some of the Baptists in the city where I used to work similarly speak in tongues but semi-privately. Well, that’s often true in the UK as well.
As for Chris Tilling, I can understand why Jim gives him such a hard time! But his Post Charismatic? post is good. I’m more into “charismatic culture” than he is, but that is or at least should be a cultural issue which is a matter of free choice for Christians, as long as we don’t give offence.
I can understand your own ambivalence about tongues in the context you describe. It seems to me that the US Assemblies of God have got themselves into a bit of a hole on this one. I don’t think the UK branch of the denomination takes the same definite line, and I am almost sure the Australian branch, dominated by Hillsong, does not. I think the churches need to realise that many people receive the full blessing of the Holy Spirit (whatever they might call it) as soon as they believe, and indeed that should be the norm! I would also teach that speaking in tongues is good evidence of this full blessing but not the only possible evidence. But of course it is not for me to set a denomination’s policy.
The only question that remains is whether my nonsense is provoked by trance or schizophrenia. Thanks as always for a provocative topic.
I just heard that the cessationist very staid Reformed church has asked me to preach on Pentecost Sunday. Any guesses on how that will go?
Staid Reformed church… Pentecost Sunday?
Choices include:
1) Tongues of fire
2) Single bolt of lightning at pulpit
3) lots of Zzzzzz
Tough call.
Interesting questions as some look past Paul and his letter to the Corinthian Greeks into some reformed future we call the church of now.
What about them back then? How did they understand his use of γλώσσαις λαλοῦσιν and γένη γλωσσῶν? Would Paul have been reading the LXX (say Psalm 5:10, 13:3, 30/31:21? or Daniel 4:1, 6:21/25?) Would they have been listening to the characters in the Greek plays (say of Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, or Aristophanes)? God and the gods here influence loose tongues.
Would Paul have been thinking of Genesis 11 (LXX) or they of Illiad 4 (“Since there was no speech nor language common to all of them but their tongues were mixed [γλῶσσ' ἐμέμικτο], these men who were called there from many far places. Ares drove these on, and the Achaians’ grey-eyed Athene, . . .”)?
Now what? Has logic, and enlightenment, and modernism, and reformation ended something else? Have we heard Aristotle speaking, who in the Rhetoric, respectively quotes Euripides and Sappho on tongues to disparage them?
“As for Chris Tilling, I can understand why Jim gives him such a hard time!”
What the Blue Blazes?! Right, P *spit* eter, the gloves are off. I’m going to have to give you a dose of righteous karate kid “wax on, wax off” in the face region for that lip.
They don’t give you a lot of advance notice to preach, do they? Try giving them a spot of Lloyd-Jones, the quote about if they’ve got it all where is it? Or you could always do a swap with your doctor in Paris friend.
Kurk, was the average Corinthian, of the kind described in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, really into already ancient philosophers and playwrights like Aristotle and Sappho? Wouldn’t this be like expecting modern street people to appreciate Shakespeare and Spenser?
Ok, Chris, I’m ready for a fight! And I thought you were taking me too seriously on your own blog when I suggested that people were prophesying in the parts of the flesh removed by circumcision – or did you not look up the verse?
I agree it should not be pressured – I remember camp days where that was the end goal of camp – get as many kids speaking in tongues as possible. A lot of kids left hurt and feeling alienated.
Peter, you ask:
was the average Corinthian, of the kind described in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, really into already ancient philosophers and playwrights like Aristotle and Sappho? Wouldn’t this be like expecting modern street people to appreciate Shakespeare and Spenser?
Good questions. Plato and Aristotle didn’t have the influence that they would’ve have wanted, on the Corinthians Paul wrote to anyway. They have huge influence on us in the church today–which is my point: Aristotle would have forbade the speaking in tongues that Paul does not forbid.
The influence of Homer, Sappho, Euripides, and others was huge. Their was no cultural literacy as cultural literateness (something British aficionados of Shakespeare and Spenser might acquire)–rather, it was a cultural influence by orality, a cultural heartbeat and mindset that worked against Plato’s ideal republic and Aristotle’s preferred politics. Don’t the Republic and the Politics give us today some kind of indication that the two great philosopher/scientists were disgusted by the pervasiveness of the poets and the playwrights, a very common pervasiveness.
Eric A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato: A History of the Greek Mind is a very clear and comprehensive work making the argument that Plato (and his students, namely Aristotle) were working to reform the mindset common man (and woman) in all of Greece. Havelock says, the “in a society of oral preservation it is therefore the epic, in the main, which provides the cultural language. . . The Homeric epics constituted a body of invisible writing imprinted on the brain of the community” (page 141).
And, in Plato “the striking thing is his constant refusal to draw a formal distinction between epic and tragedy as different genres. . . . drama is a term by which to define all poetry, applying equally to ‘epic’ and ‘iambic’. It makes no difference, he seems to imply, whether we mean Homer or Aeschylus. He defines the subject matter of the target he is attacking [in the Republic as: ‘Human action, whether this action be antonymous, or as the result of external compulsion, and also including what men think or feel about their actions. . . This definition applies as vividly to the Iliad as to any stage play. . .
Plato speaks passionately in the tones of a man who feels he is taking on a most formidable opponent who can muster the total forces of tradition and contemporary opinion against him. He pleads, he argues, he denounces, he cajoles. He is a David confronting some Goliath” (pages 8-9).
If Havelock is reading Plato correctly, the Corinthians had a mindset, a cultural language. It was not tabula rosa when Paul wrote them.
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i really like the way it was handled by the church in which I grew up. Several – but not all – of the pastors prayed in tongues but it was never taught from the pulpit as it is FAR to divisive of an issue and none of us saw it as essential at all to salvation.
but if you ever got under the skin of the church you would find people doing it, and willing to teach you what they understand about it. and willing to pray for you to receive the gift..
it gets to backburner in my life and i wish it wasn’t so much… but still something i appreciate that I do.
Ecstatic utterance of languages was taught in the church I grew up in but I wasn’t given this gift or charism until later on when I saw it practiced by others.
It was a good experience for me and I never found anyone feeling left out. But I can see how some people might feel this way if it is not taught in a context that not everyone will receive it–it’s God’s timing.
the truth about speaking in tongues is that the Holy Ghost descended on Christs followers in order that they may preach the Gospel to the other nations of the world that spoke different languages, which they didn’t knew and were not able to learn; so they didn’t spoke gibberish, non-sense as you all do; i wonder how can you all be so deceived? please, stop moking what the early christians received from the Holy Ghost !
wow. Awesome response. Gottlieb please stop quenching the spirit!!!!