Today is Pentecost Sunday.
Christians across the world are reflecting on the coming of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the Church, and the extraordinary gifts that accompanied that event. It therefore feels like an appropriate day to reflect on a recent discussion sparked by Wes Huff's comments on speaking in tongues during his appearance on the Mikhaila Peterson podcast.
Wes later clarified that he is not a cessationist. He believes that tongues, prophecy and healing still occur today, though not normatively as they did in the apostolic era. He also argued that biblical tongues refer fundamentally to known languages, and that both Scripture and the Church Fathers support this understanding.
I appreciate his position. It is certainly preferable to hard cessationism. Yet I remain unconvinced, both exegetically and historically. More importantly, I question whether the Church should allow its expectations of the Spirit to be determined primarily by what appears common in its own experience rather than by Paul's repeated exhortation to "earnestly desire spiritual gifts."
Acts 2 Is Not the Whole Story
Wes's strongest evidence is Acts 2. At Pentecost, the crowd hears the disciples speaking in their own native languages - plainly a miracle of communication.
However, even this example is more ambiguous than it first appears. The disciples are declaring "the mighty works of God" - worship directed toward God, not evangelistic speech toward the crowd. That bystanders from many nations happened to understand looks almost incidental to the setting. The primary direction is Godward, not evangelistic - and in fact the spiritual utterances on their own were insufficient as evangelism, since Peter still had to preach to make things intelligible.
Acts 2 is one manifestation of the gift, not an exhaustive definition of it. The evidence from 1 Corinthians 12–14 makes this hard to avoid.
Consider what Paul actually says:
- "One who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God, for no one understands him."
- "My spirit prays but my mind is unfruitful."
- "He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself."
- "If the whole church speaks in tongues, outsiders will say you are out of your minds."
If tongues were simply miraculous foreign languages, why does no one understand? Why would outsiders conclude the church was mad rather than simply hearing unfamiliar languages? Why does Paul thank God that he speaks in tongues more than all the Corinthians, in a context where no interpreter seems to be present?
Pentecost and Corinth are clearly different contexts: one an outward-facing sign in a uniquely multinational gathering, the other a gift functioning primarily in private prayer and corporate worship. Neither context, however, supports the view that tongues and the other gifts should not be normatively expected in the church.
Meaning Does Not Require Ordinary Language
Much of this debate rests on an assumption worth challenging: that meaningful communication must take the form of ordinary propositional language.
It does not. Music, poetry, visual art, gesture, and symbolic action all convey genuine meaning without functioning like speech. A Bach cantata communicates grief, transcendence, or awe in ways that resist exhaustive verbal translation. Nobody concludes from this that Bach was saying nothing.
Meaning and language are related, but they are not identical.
Paul's wider theology of prayer makes the same point. Romans 8 describes the Spirit interceding with "groanings too deep for words." This is not about tongues directly, but it establishes that Scripture already recognises forms of prayer that transcend ordinary speech. Prayer is communion, not information transfer. Some experiences of adoration, lament, or intercession exceed what conceptual language can carry.
It is worth reflecting on whether our expectations of prayer and worship have been unconsciously narrowed. Thinkers such as Iain McGilchrist have argued that modern Western culture tends to privilege analytical and linguistic modes of knowing while undervaluing participatory, symbolic, musical, and relational ways of understanding. Whether or not one accepts his full framework, it raises a pointed question: have we assumed that what cannot be easily analysed, translated, and explained cannot be genuinely meaningful? Scripture itself seems to leave room for modes of communion that transcend ordinary language.
Paul, at least, seems more comfortable with mystery than many modern Christians. He insists on intelligibility where the gathered church is concerned - but he does not reduce all prayer to rational discourse. He says: "I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the mind also."
Not either-or. Both-and.
Interpretation Is Not Translation
The gift of interpretation is the most overlooked element of this debate.
Paul does not describe it as a linguistic ability. He lists it among the spiritual gifts distributed by the Holy Spirit. The interpreter is not someone who happens to know Parthian or Persian - someone who could simply recognise the language. The interpreter is someone enabled by God to receive and communicate what has been uttered.
That is not translation. It is spiritual discernment.
A common argument runs: tongues contain objective meaning, therefore they can be interpreted, therefore they must be ordinary languages. But the third step does not follow. Dreams, visions, symbols, and prophetic imagery all carry genuine meaning without being reducible to propositional speech - and their interpretation in Scripture is consistently treated as a divine gift, not a linguistic skill. If meaning can be spiritually discerned rather than merely decoded, the gift of interpretation points toward a broader understanding of tongues, not a narrower one.
The Fathers Prove Less Than They Seem
Wes also appeals to history - and it is a fair point to raise. The Church Fathers do generally read tongues as known human languages. But before we treat that as settled consensus, it is worth asking who these Fathers are, when they were writing, and what had already happened to the church by the time they put pen to parchment.
The Fathers most commonly cited on this question - Augustine, Chrysostom, and others - wrote centuries after the apostolic age, at a time when charismatic manifestations had become far less common. Their testimony may therefore tell us as much about what had become normal in their own experience as about what Paul originally intended. More critically, these writers - Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory Nazianzus - belong to the late fourth and early fifth centuries, more than 150 years after Tertullian. By that point the institutional church has already made its decisive moves. The canon is fixed, the creeds are being hammered out, episcopal authority is thoroughly entrenched, and - critically - the Montanist prophetic controversy has been adjudicated against. These Fathers are not neutral observers reporting on a live practice. They are inheritors of a tradition that had already made institutional decisions about where authority resided, and prophecy had lost that argument. To use them to correct Tertullian on the ongoing reality of spiritual gifts is to beg the very question at issue. The witnesses are not independent. They represent a settlement, not a consensus arrived at through the full participation of all the ministries Paul described as necessary for the church to reach maturity.
Tertullian himself stands in a very different position. Writing in the late second and early third centuries, far closer to the apostolic period, he appeals to ongoing prophecy, visions, inspired prayer, and interpretation of tongues as living evidence of God's approval of orthodox Christianity against the heresy of Marcion. He does not describe such gifts as exceptional remnants of a fading age. He treats them as normal enough to function as proof - as credentials the church can produce and the heretic cannot.
This creates a significant problem for the patristic argument. The Fathers cited to show that charismatic gifts declined are writing from within a tradition that had already institutionally marginalised those gifts. Tertullian, writing before that settlement was reached, assumes the opposite. The historical witness is therefore not a single, unambiguous testimony to decline. It is a church in the middle of a contested and consequential transition - and the question of whether that transition represented faithful development or institutional loss remains very much open.
What Paul Actually Cares About
Paul's concern in 1 Corinthians 12–14 is not the mechanics of tongues. It is love, edification, and order - that worship builds up the body of Christ rather than exalting the individual.
Within that framework, he does not discourage tongues:
- "I wish you all spoke in tongues."
- "Earnestly desire spiritual gifts."
- "Do not forbid speaking in tongues."
These commands are difficult to reconcile with treating tongues as a first-century missionary tool with little relevance to ordinary Christian prayer today.
Conclusion
The real question is not whether tongues are meaningful. They are.
The question is whether meaningful communication with God must always take the form of ordinary human language. Paul's own writing - on tongues, prayer, worship, and interpretation - suggests not. He describes a reality richer and more mysterious than a straightforward linguistic miracle: one in which the Spirit enables prayer that transcends ordinary speech while remaining genuinely edifying and open to interpretation within the church.
Ultimately the normative guide for the church should not be determined by what happens to be common in its experience at any given moment - otherwise there would be nothing to change, ever. The normative desire for the church should be Paul's: "I wish you all spoke in tongues" - from the man who spoke in tongues more than any of them, and who had the confidence to say "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ."
The question is not whether we have moved beyond that.
The question is whether we have ever reached it.
Comments
Post a Comment