Speaking in tongues

Glossolalia is commonly called "speaking in tongues". For other uses of "speaking in tongues", see Speaking in Tongues (disambiguation).

"Tongues" redirects here. For the body part, see Tongue, for other uses, see Tongue (disambiguation).

Glossolalia (from Greek γλωσσολαλιά and that from γλῶσσα - glossa "tongue, language" and λαλεῖν (lalein) "to talk") or speaking in tongues is the vocalizing of fluent speech-like but unintelligible utterances, often as part of religious practice. Its use (including use in this article) sometimes also embraces Xenoglossy - speaking in a natural language that was previously unknown to and that is not understood by the speaker.

Frederic William Farrar first used the word glossolalia in 1879. .

Christian practice

In contrast to glossolalia, the Christian scriptures describe the ability to communicate to others (from many different places) in languages previously not studied.

New Testament

In the New Testament, the book of Acts recounts how "cloven tongues like as of fire" descended upon the heads of the Apostles, accompanied by the miraculous occurrence of speaking in languages previously unknown to them, but recognizable to others present as their own native language.

The phenomenon described in the Book of Acts (2:1-11) is variously interpreted either as religious xenoglossia, the speaking of an actual foreign language, or as the gift of interpretation being given to those present: the ability to understand the tongues (each person in his own language).

Some of the Orthodox hymns sung at the Feast of Pentecost, which commemorates this event in Acts, describe it as a reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel as described in Genesis 11. In other words, the languages of humanity were differentiated at the Tower of Babel leading to confusion, but were reunited at Pentecost, resulting in the immediate proclamation of the Gospel to people who were gathered in Jerusalem from many different countries.

The Apostle Paul commands church brethren, "Do not forbid speaking in tongues" (1 Cor 14:39), and that he wishes those to whom he wrote "all spoke with tongues" (1 Cor 14:5). He further claims himself to speak with tongues more than all of the church at Corinth combined, though indicates in the church more value is found in understandable teaching so that the church may receive edifying, saying that with speaking in tongues, only the individual is edified (1 Cor 14:18-19). Paul discourages simultaneous speaking in tongues in the presence of unbelievers or the unlearned; believers are to prophecy and be understood rather than speak unintelligibly. As 1 Corinthians 14:22-25 says, "Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not: but prophesying serveth not for them that believe not, but for them which believe. If therefore the whole church be come together into one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad? But if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all: And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth." In 1 Cor 12:7-11 and 1 Cor 12:28-30 some find that Paul indicates that not all believers speak in tongues, although some state that Paul was talking about a gift of "diverse tongues", not all tongues, as the gift of "faith" is also here mentioned, and all believers must have faith by definition. There are some who believe that many followers have the ability to speak in tongues (Mark 16:16-17) as a form of prayer, based on 1 Cor 14:14, Eph 6:18 and Jude 20. Paul also refers to the prophecy of speaking in tongues written by Isaiah (Isa 28:11-12).

Some connect this prophecy in Isaiah with Christ's promise of "rest" (Matthew 11:28-30), thereby stating that speaking in tongues was the sign of conversion, or spirit baptism. Following Christ's description of "the new birth" (John 3), that "you hear the sound" of the spirit, some state that this was the evidence to which the apostle John was referring in 1 John 4, to tell believer and unbeliever apart.

Biblical descriptions of persons actually 'speaking in tongues' occur three times in the book of Acts, the first two coupled with the phenomenon of the Baptism with the Holy Spirit, and the third with the laying on of hands by Paul the Apostle (at which time they 'received the Holy Spirit'), which imbued them with the power of the Holy Spirit.

• Acts 2:4
• Acts 10:46
• Acts 19:6

Church History (A.D. 30 to 1900)

Twentieth-century Pentecostalism was not the earliest instance of "speaking in tongues" in church history; rather, there were antecedents in several centuries of the Christian era, e.g.

• 150 AD - Justin Martyr wrote "For the prophetical gifts remain with us, even to this present time." and "Now, it is possible to see amongst us women and men who possess gifts of the Spirit of God;"
• 156-172: Montanus and the women that followed him - Maximilla and Priscilla - were speaking in tongues and were trying to prove that they were true prophets. For this purpose they used a list with prophets from the times of the New Testament. But anti-montanists declared that no prophet ever had such attitude and that Montanists were moved by the spirit of deception.
• 175 AD - Irenaeus in his treatise Against Heresies speaks (positively) of those in the Church "who through the Spirit speak all kinds of languages."
• circa 230 AD - Novatian said, "This is He who places prophets in the Church, instructs teachers, directs tongues, gives powers and healings, does wonderful works, often discrimination of spirits, affords powers of government, suggests counsels, and orders and arranges whatever other gifts there are of charismata; and thus make the Lord’s Church everywhere, and in all, perfected and completed."
• After the 1st, or 2nd century there is no record of "speaking in tongues" in any Eastern Orthodox source. except for Augustine of Hippo, who is venerated in Eastern Orthodoxy.
• circa 340 AD - Hilary of Poitiers wrote, "For God hath set same in the Church, first apostles…secondly prophets…thirdly teachers…next mighty works, among which are the healing of diseases… and gifts of either speaking or interpreting divers kinds of tongues. Clearly these are the Church’s agents of ministry and work of whom the body of Christ consists; and God has ordained them."
• circa 390 AD - Augustine of Hippo, in an exposition on Psalm 32, discusses a phenomenon contemporary to his time of those who "sing in jubilation", singing the praises of God not in their own language, but in a manner that "may not be confined by the limits of syllables" .
• 1100s - Franciscan order of monks.
• 1100s - Hildegard of Bingen is reputed to have spoken and sung in tongues. Her spiritual songs were referred to by contemporaries as "concerts in the Spirit."
• 1265 - Thomas Aquinas writes Summa Theologica. In Question 176, he wrote two articles concerning the gift of tongues. Whether the gift was active or inactive, it was still being discussed.
• 1300s - The Moravians are referred to by detractors as having spoken in tongues. John Roche, a contemporary critic, claimed that the Moravians "commonly broke into some disconnected Jargon, which they often passed upon the vulgar, 'as the exuberant and resistless Evacuations of the Spirit'" .
• 1600s - The French Prophets: The Camisards also spoke sometimes in languages that were unknown: "Several persons of both Sexes," James Du Bois of Montpellier recalled, "I have heard in their Extasies pronounce certain words, which seem'd to the Standers-by, to be some Foreign Language." These utterances were sometimes accompanied by the gift of interpretation exercised, in Du Bois' experience, by the same person who had spoken in tongues.
• 1600s - Early Quakers, such as Edward Burrough, make mention of tongues speaking in their meetings: "We spoke with new tongues, as the Lord gave us utterance, and His Spirit led us" .
• 1817 - In Germany, Gustav von Below, an aristocratic officer of the Prussian Guard, and his brothers, founded a charismatic movement based on their estates in Pomerania, which may have included speaking in tongues.
• 1800s - Edward Irving and the Catholic Apostolic Church. Edward Irving, a minister in the Church of Scotland, writes of a woman who would "speak at great length, and with superhuman strength, in an unknown tongue, to the great astonishment of all who heard, and to her own great edification and enjoyment in God" . Irving further stated that "tongues are a great instrument for personal edification, however mysterious it may seem to us."
• 1800s Sidney Rigdon will have disagreements with Alexander Campbell regarding speaking in tongues. In 1830 leaves Campbell's movement and joins the Church of Christ (which will become the Latter Day Saint Tradition Churches). The Church of Christ embraces speaking in Tongues and the Interpretation of tongues. At the 1836 dedication of the Kirtland Temple the dedicatory prayer asks that God grant them the gift of tongues and at the end of the service Elder Young speaks in tongues, another elder interprets it and then gives his own exhortation in tongues. Many other worship experiences in the Kirtland Temple prior to and after the dedication included references to people speaking and interpreting tongues. In 1842 in describing the beliefs of the church Joseph smith will identify a belief of the "gift of tongues" and "interpretation of tongues".

Outbreak of Glossolalia, 1901 to 1906

Main article: Azusa Street Revival

The modern Christian practice of glossolalia is often said to have originated around the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States. The city of Topeka, Kansas is often cited as the center of the Pentecostal movement and the resurgence of glossolalia in the Church. Charles Fox Parham, a holiness preacher and founder of Bethel Bible College in 1900, is given the credit to being the one who influenced modern Pentecostalism. During what has been called a sermon by Parham, a bold student named Agnes Ozman asked him for prayer and the laying on of hands to specifically ask God to fill her with the Holy Spirit. This was the night of New Year's Eve, 1900. She became the first of many students to experience glossolalia, coincidentally in the first hours of the twentieth century. Parham followed within the next few days, and before the end of January 1901, glossolalia was being discussed in newspapers as a sign of the second advent of Pentecost.

Parham now found himself as the leader of the movement and traveled to church meetings around the country to preach [in the terminology of that era] about holiness, divine healing, healing by faith, the laying on of hands and prayer, sanctification by faith, and the signs of baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire, the most prominent being speaking in tongues.

Word of the outpouring of the Spirit spread to other Holiness congregations. Parham wrote, studied, traveled, preached, and taught about glossolalia for the next few years. Parham and others who believed in or manifested tongues were persecuted from both inside and outside of the church. In 1905, he opened a Bible school in Houston. It was there that William J. Seymour became indoctrinated. It is notable that Seymour was black, and Parham was white. It is further notable that Seymour did not speak in tongues while in Houston.

When Seymour was invited to speak in Los Angeles about the baptism of the Holy Spirit in February 1906, he accepted. His first speaking engagement was met with dispute, primarily because he preached about "tongues" being a primary indication of the baptism of the Spirit, yet he did not himself speak in tongues. It was not until April that his preaching and teaching about glossolalia paid dividends, first to a man named Edward Lee, and later to Seymour. Similar to the experience of Parham in 1901, Seymour's students received the ability to speak in tongues a few days before he did.

Headline about the "Weird babel of tongues" and other behavior at Azusa Street, from a 1906 Los Angeles Times newspaper.

By May 1906, indeed only one month after the Great San Francisco Earthquake which was seen as an "act of God", Seymour was leading a major movement of the Spirit known as the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. It has been characterized as an inter-denominational, inter-racial, inter-sex Pentecostal revival during a time in the United States in which women and non-whites were not afforded the same civil rights as white men. People from many denominations and races gathered daily to see and hear, to preach and pray, to sing and shout, and to speak in new tongues. Newspapers, clearly biased against the movement, reported the happenings as a wild and weird group of mostly "colored" people acting as if they were pretty disturbed, exhibiting behavior unheard of in most Protestant churches of the time: intense shouting, vigorous jerking, dancing, passing out, crying, howling, emotional outbursts, and speaking gibberish. Many religious leaders in Los Angeles and other places were quick to disparage the goings on at Azusa Street, informing their flocks that the new Pentecostal movement was (at worst) sensational, Satanic, Spiritualism, and (at best) too overly focused on the Holy Spirit instead of Jesus Christ. The matter of glossolalia was then (as it is now) hotly debated within the Church as being either heresy or exemplary and necessary for a spiritual rebirth in Jesus Christ.

Witnesses at the Azusa Street Revival wrote of seeing fire resting on the heads of participants, miraculous healings in the meetings, and incidents of speaking in tongues being understood by native speakers of the language. According to the first issue of William Seymore's newsletter, "The Apostolic Faith," from 1906:

A Mohammedan, a Soudanese by birth, a [m]an who is an interpreter and speaks six[t]een languages, came into the meetings at Azusa Street and the Lord gave him messages which none but himself could understand. He identified, interpreted and wrote [a] number of the languages.

Contemporary Christian, 1915 to present

The revival at Azusa Street lasted until around 1915. But from it grew many new Protestant churches and denominations, as people visited the church in Los Angeles and took their new found beliefs to communities around the US and abroad. Many denominations rejected the doctrines of Parham and Seymour, while some denominations adopted them in one form or another. Baptism of the Holy Spirit was a doctrine that was embraced by the Assemblies of God (est. 1914) and Pentecostal Church of God (est. 1919) and others. Glossolalia became entrenched into the doctrines of many Protestant churches and denominations in the twentieth century. The later Charismatic movement was heavily influenced by the Azusa Street Revival and Pentecostalism's glossolalia.

Some Christians practice glossolalia as a part of their private devotions; some accept and sometimes promote the use of glossolalia within corporate worship. This is particularly true within the Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions. Both Pentecostals and Charismatics believe that the ability to speak in tongues, and sometimes the utterance itself, is a supernatural gift from God.

Three different manifestations or forms of glossolalia can be identified in Charismatic / Pentecostal belief. The "sign of tongues" refers to xenoglossia, wherein one speaks a foreign language he has never learned. The "gift of tongues" or "giving a tongue" refers to a glossolalic utterance by an individual and addressed to a congregation of, typically, other believers. This utterance is believed to be inspired directly by the Holy Spirit and requires a natural language interpretation, made by the speaker or another person if it is to be understood by others present. Lastly "praying in the spirit" is typically used to refer to glossolalia as part of personal prayer.

The discussion regarding tongues has permeated many branches of the Christian Church, particularly since the widespread Charismatic Movement in the 1960s. Many books have been published either defending or attacking the practice. The issue has sometimes been a contributing factor in splits within local churches and in larger denominations. The controversy over tongues is part of the wider debate between conservative, evangelical Christians whose approach to the Christian Scriptures requires addressing the texts that endorse glossolalia. Within that debate are continuationists who believe that glossolalia has a role to play in contemporary Christian practice and cessationalists and dispensationalists who believe that all miraculous gifts, including glossolalia, were featured only in the time of the early church.

Other religions

Aside from Christians, other religious groups also have been observed to practice some form of theopneustic glossolalia. It is perhaps most commonly in Paganism, Shamanism, and other mediumistic religious practices.

Glossolalia was exhibited by the renowned ancient Oracle of Delphi, whereby a priestess of the god Apollo (called the Pythia) speaks in unintelligible utterances, supposedly through the spirit of Apollo in her.

Certain Gnostic magical texts from the Roman period have written on them unintelligible syllables such as "t t t t n n n n d d d d d..." etc. It is conjectured that these may be transliterations of the sorts of sounds made during glossolalia. The Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians also features a hymn of (mostly) unintelligible syllables which is thought to be an early example of Christian glossolalia.

In the nineteenth century, Spiritism was developed by the work of Allan Kardec, and the phenomenon was seen as one of the self-evident manifestations of spirits. Spiritists argued that some cases were actually cases of xenoglossia (from Greek,xenos, stranger; and glossa, language. When one speaks in a language unknown to him). However, the importance attributed to it, as well as its frequency, has decreased significantly. Some present-day spiritists regard the phenomenon pointless, as it does not convey any intelligible message to those present.

Glossolalia has also been observed in the Voodoo religion of Haiti, as well as in the Hindu Gurus and Fakirs of India.

Scientific perspectives

Linguistics

The syllables that make up instances of glossolalia typically appear to be unpatterned reorganizations of phonemes from the primary language of the person uttering the syllables; thus, the glossolalia of people from Russia, the United Kingdom, and Brazil all sound different from each other, but vaguely resemble the Russian, English, and Portuguese languages, respectively . Some linguists generally regard most glossolalia as lacking any identifiable semantics, syntax, or morphology. Glossolalia hababa rho fella hagag wuzza wazza bogaboo a la flipity flopity flupe has even been postulated as an explanation for the Voynich manuscript.

Psychology

Separate studies have shown support of both theories on the subject but have all found that glossolalia almost always happens during or before the beginning of a religious event.

Nicholas Spanos described glossolalia as an acquired ability, for which no real trance is needed (Glossolalia as Learned Behavior: An Experimental Demonstration, 1987). Supported by the fact that glossolalia church communities develop a sort of "dialect" for that community.

A 2003 statistical study by the religious journal Pastoral Psychology concluded that, among the 991 male evangelical clergy sampled, glossolalia was associated with stable extroversion, and contrary to some theories, completely unrelated to psychopathology.

Neuroscience

In 2006, at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers, under the direction of Andrew Newberg, MD, completed the world’s first brain-scan study of a group of individuals while they were speaking in tongues. The study concluded that while participants were exercising glossolalia, activity in the language centers of the brain actually decreased, while activity in the emotional centers of the brain increased. During this study, researchers observed significant cerebral blood flow changes among individuals while exercising glossolalia, concluding that the observed changes were consistent with some of the described aspects of glossolalia. Further, the researchers observed no changes in any language areas, suggesting that glossolalia is not associated with usual language function. One of the researchers is a practitioner of glossolalia and a self-described "born-again Christian".

Literature

Glossolalia plays a major role in Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash, in which those exposed to the patterns generated by the titular computer virus begin to speak in the Sumerian language, spreading a destructive mental meme associated with the goddess Ashurah.

Biblical references

• Mark 16:17
• Acts 2:4–15
• Acts 10:44–48
• Acts 19:2–6
• 1 Corinthians 12:8–11
• 1 Corinthians 13:1, 13:8
• 1 Corinthians 14:1–40
• Jude 1:20
• Isaiah 28:11: see with 1 Corinthians 14:21

See also

• Alpha Course
• Asemic writing
• Biblical hermeneutics
• Holiness movement
• Charismatic movement
• Covenant theology
• Dispensationalism
• Grammatical-historical
• Mystical language
• Pentecostalism
• Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship
• Toronto Blessing
• Aphasia
• Word salad

Further reading

• Mark J. Cartledge, ed. Speaking in Tongues: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives. Paternoster, 2006.
• Dave Roberson -Vital Role of Praying in Tongues

External links

• Glossolalia as Foreign Language by D. William Faupel
• Andrei Bely's Glossalolia {sic} with an English translation
• A Skeptic's Perspective The Skeptic's Dictionary on Glossolalia
• Catholic Encyclopedia: Gift of Tongues
• 1911encyclopedia.org: Gift of Tongues
• Speaking in Tongues by Linguist Karen Stollznow
• Glossolalia bible411.com