Biblical Glossolalia - Thesis 3

By William Graham MacDonald

This article contains the third of seven theses proposed in defense of biblical glossolalia. Theses 1 and 2 contended that glossolalia is inaccessible to worldly comprehension because of its holiness, its “from heaven” dimension, and its inextricable connection with the glorified Jesus, and that in its inception and continuation the Pentecostal experience of the Spirit glorifies Jesus. Thus speaking in tongues by His direction results in greater awareness of Jesus, the living Lord, and enhances one’s overall relationship with Him.

Thesis Three

Biblical glossolalia has no antecedents, no precedents, and no parallels — in the Old Testament, or paganism, or pathology.

When did speaking in tongues actually first begin?

Glossolalia’s Defining Day

What Jesus did at Pentecost in empowering His people to represent Him and in demonstrating that empowerment in their speech became the initial defining moment for glossolalia. The linguistic phenomenon of scores of people speaking perfectly in languages they neither knew nor had studied was unparalleled in the history of the world. The Old Testament has a long prophetic continuum, but nothing there even remotely resembles glossolalia, where the mind is free to meditate (1 Corinthians 14:14–16) while one speaks articulately words given by the Spirit. The prophets spoke with supernatural knowledge and timely pronouncements, but always in the same shared language of the prophet and the people addressed.

Glossolalia’s Compatibility With History

Glossolalia began to be manifested in history at a specific, datable point in time. In that sense it is a datum of first-century history. The Bible contains much history and champions history as opposed to fiction and philosophy. The Bible conserves historical revelation in that it has recorded the acts of God, the basis for historical absolutes.

Glossolalia’s Incompatibility With Philosophy (Historicism)

On the other hand, the Bible is consistently opposed to philosophy, because philosophy is man’s autonomous stand-in for the Word of God. The people of God in the Old Testament epoch had no need for Greek or oriental philosophies since they had the Word of God to orient them to reality and to provide the answers to life’s great questions. The same principle is conserved in the New Testament as well, culminating in the apostle Paul’s grim warning that philosophy is vacuous, treacherous, and captivating (Colossians 2:8).

Historicism is the subjugation of history to a specific naturalistic philosophy known as historical relativism. The History of Religions School that has been pervasive in the university divinity schools and many seminaries for the last century assumes the veracity of historicism as a fulcrum for historical interpretation. In its sphere of influence, where there are no absolutes — such as the Word of God — to determine analysis of events, historicism is king, and man’s values the crown. Historicism reigns in a changing world of events where all is presumed to be relative, and for the most part cyclical, as oriental philosophies long have imagined.

When Pentecost with its astounding glossolalia is seen objectively through the lens of history, it stands alone without parallel or precedent in any of the world religions of antiquity, or for that matter in the Old Testament. Pentecost rides in on the waves of glory made by Christ’s resurrection and ascension as a first, a revelation and celebration of His celestial glory. But historicism is self-contained in a world of man’s own making and “cannot understand” (1 Corinthians 2:14) glossolalia’s defining divine moment. It must insist a priori, that no such event could occur without its having human historical precedents and parallels by which it can be understood. Definition demands precedents from within the circle of history. God is ruled out. Historicism must find antecedents at all costs, even if its “this is that” is not amenable to a rigorous historical critique and its assumed identifications are unsubstantiable.

Biblical Glossolalia — Not Ecstasy

Outbursts of ecstasy in the ancient world attract historicists’ attention as the scene where it is easiest to suppose superficial parallels to glossolalia. Pagan ecstasy was induced by drugs and intoxicants, loud and relentless drumming that evoked responsive and rhythmical movements of the body, and dissociation from one’s normal stream of consciousness under intense emotional agitation. Was any such factor characteristic of Pentecost? Not according to the apostles (Acts 2:13–l5).

But historicism’s search for parallels cannot confine itself to paganism; it must prove itself as well by parallels and precedents to glossolalia in the Old Testament’s 2,000 years of religious history between Abraham and Pentecost. Historicism saw the Old Testament religion naturally as no different from the pagan world and assumed glossolalia to be there too, or so goes the fallacious reasoning of the evolutionary History of Religions School. But when the historicist professors are pushed to document their discoveries of “unintelligible speech” in the Old Testament with chapter and verse locations, they can produce none that will stand up to rigorous scrutiny and must take cover in their general surmising of ecstasy there. Typical of such is Cyril G. Williams, except that he is more forthright than most in his admission: “While there is no direct evidence of unintelligible glossolalia utterance in Hebrew prophecy then, the ecstatic susceptibility of the prophets cannot be denied.”¹ But such ecstasy in the Hebrew prophets has been vigorously denied by evangelicals, and on good grounds.²

False Parallels To Glossolalia By Bogus Definitions

Finding defensible parallels to biblical glossolalia anywhere in the ancient or modern world is a frustrating assignment for anyone engaged in historical research. None exist. Therefore, the historicist can draw his parallels only by inflating biblical glossolalia to include a collection of mislabeled specimens:

(1) secretive magical or ritualistic abracadabras used by pagan priests, sorcerers, and witch doctors — such incantations as calculated to impress their clientele with the exotic sounds;

(2) mantras whose endless repetitions have a calculated hypnotic effect;

(3) mumbles, groans, and shrieks that are only affectations within the common language;

(4) barks, squeals, and eerie sounds of those identifying ecstatically with idolized creatures of the wild;

(5) the slurred and sometimes indecipherable speech of those under the influence of intoxicants and drugs during ritualistic performances;

(6) the disordering of speech of delirium in which the common language is altered enough that attendants recognize that one’s words are not coming out right, or the coining of a usually compound word by a psychotic, the meaning of which is understandable only to him, and sometimes a few phrases are generated in the manner of gibberish;

(7) gibberish, the conscious mind’s purposeful disruption of the speaking process by forcing irrational combinations of sounds through the vocal tract, requiring considerable mental energy and therefore lasting but a short duration.

Of course, if all these forms of pseudo-speech are dubbed “glossolalia,” two results are predictable: (1) Biblical glossolalia by this denigrating association is made despicable. (2) The process of alleging of precedents in the ancient world and in various countries of the modern world is facilitated. But the critical historian who is laser-beam honest will not say, “This is that,” unless there is hard evidence to go on.

With all of recorded history to draw from, is it not remarkable that the paucity of the alleged parallels/precedents is so acute that virtually every investigator will be defensive about his lack of data by making his disclaimer that the phenomenon is “rare” or “infrequent”? Now admissions of scanty evidence mean that such evidence, or allegations of it as the case may be, must bear all the weight to support the thesis that glossolalia was in the world before Jesus introduced it, or that the same phenomenon exists side by side with Pentecostal glossolalia today.

The Queen Of Alleged Precedents

The best-known parallel and precedent cited by historicists, was the Delphic oracle. She is reputed to have regaled the religiously minded people of classical Greece with her mysterious speech believed to provide the pagan sacrificers with Apollos’ answers to their life questions. At the height of her presentation, the spirit of a python would take control of her, and in an ecstatic frenzy she would mutter sounds whose meaning did not register with the Greeks who came to her at Delphi. But at that point, to save the day, enters the female’s male assistant. He ostensibly translated her musings into divine adumbrations of the future for each questioner present. This ancient fortune-teller and her successors might well have been the inspirational model for the one in the first century whom Paul and Silas silenced in another Greek city (Acts 16:l6–19).

At Delphi only one person spoke irregularly. Contrast this with all the original worshipers on the Day of Pentecost speaking in other languages, and with the saturation of the church at Corinth with speech in other languages, whether the glossolalia occurred in the gathered group, or following Paul, in their private prayers. Several of the possibilities sketched earlier might account for the Delphic oracle’s vocal expression.

One further possibility exists: She who yielded her body to serpentine writhing in her act might have yielded simultaneously her speech-center to the pythonic spirit to speak covertly in “demonese” in praise of itself. In any case, nothing there was comparable to the display of the glory of God when about 120 Galileans in Jerusalem spoke in a great variety of languages, each one authenticated on the spot by national speakers of the language. And who could deny that at Delphi there was no collusion of any kind, planned or tacit, between the woman and the man who presented her “answers”? Corinth, where centuries after the Delphic oracle the gifts of speech in the church were distributed throughout the congregation, was not like this at all. Speaking in tongues there, as it was in Jerusalem, was “not … to men but to God” (1 Corinthians 14:2) in praise of His glory, or in prayers of intercession.

The False Equation Of Glossolalia With Insane Babbling

It yet remains to inquire with reference to glossolalia as to whether it is paralleled today, or ever in the history of the world, in the speech of those who are mentally ill. Human speech is at the top of the indicia of rationality. If speaking in other tongues is not what it seems to be in the Bible, but is a natural, albeit regressive, primitive and universal capability of man, then it would seem that the mental institutions in every land should have tens of thousands of fluent examples of this aberration. These supposed utterances should match in sound and length those of the millions of people worshiping God in tongues daily. That is, if Christian “tongues” are not supernatural gifts, but natural givens, there should be widespread evidence for this in humanity. If tongues are not dependent on the supernatural and only have access to expression in a disordered state of mind, technically in “dissociation,” then one should expect many expressions of this natural-abnormal phenomenon among the mentally ill; and correspondingly, one should expect a pronounced tendency toward mental breakdown in those who already have experienced glossolalia.

Let us consider cirquare in this regard; it should be of some help to us in understanding the hypothetical term, “pathological glossolalia.” Speaking geometrically, we have in cirquare the compounding of “circle” and “square,” purporting to mean by etymology “square circle,” that is, a circle containing four right angles. It sounds scientific enough until you try to draw one, or try to find one in someone else’s drawings. As a medical and speech therapy concept “pathological speech” has a useful function, but “pathological glossolalia” is no less an oxymoron than cirquare. The term’s existence does not guarantee that anything in reality corresponds to it.

The broken common language speech of one who has lesions in his brain or the speech disorders due to psychological stress that range all the way in their effects from aphasia to incessant chattering are expressions of pathology — not glossolalia. How does one account, therefore, for the great dearth within state mental hospitals of speech alleged by antisupernaturalists to be glossolalia? There should be, according to theory, not just hearsay needle-in-the-haystack reports or suppositions, but countless continuing and recordable examples witnessed by nurses and orderlies annually, monthly, weekly, even daily.

In the last 3 decades numerous studies have appeared conceding that those who speak in tongues are not mental defectives, and hence charges of psychological abnormalities going all the way back to 1927 are false. It would be an overstatement to say that Pentecostals were relieved to hear this about themselves because they were not worried in the first place. The Lord Jesus who created the tongue with its intricate neural networking with the brain has always been known among Pentecostals as one who gives “good gifts.” If anything, biblical glossolalia improves one’s mental equilibrium, because such prayer and praise “edifies” just as all communion with God improves one’s perception of truth and reality.

Other False Identifications Of Glossolalia

Now that the pressure is off the pathological interpretation with reference to the equilibrium of the speakers, the newest tactic of derogation consists of diluting glossolalia with linguistic ditchwaters so as to lose its biblical purity. In addition to the seven — now eight — false identifications of glossolalia in paganism and pathology already mentioned above, there are others of the glossolalia variety that, because they get a trickle of flow going somewhere in the contemporary literature, are each presumed to be an integral contributory to a large polluted stream. Take akulalia, for instance. In the last five letters of the word one can see at once that it is a glossolalic variant. But is it? The term means hearing one language in the ear, but hearing it — not translating, but hearing it — in the mind as some other language. No scientific evidence for such exists, nor can it, because it is presumed to be entirely subjective. So we are looking at a concept, akulalia, that is as solid in the field of perception as is the cirquare in geometry.

Whence cometh akulalia? It derives from the attempts of certain struggling interpreters of Acts 2:1–l3, who could not take at face value the Lukan statement that the 120 spoke in languages and dialects other than their own under the enablement of the Spirit. By shifting the weight away from the speaking to hearing, they imply that each hearer was perhaps fantasizing something that was not really there, namely, another language. These interpreters would nip off the Pentecostal flower right in its locus classicus bud. Several decades old, that preposterous view is no longer taken seriously by those who insist on good hermeneutics, but the term itself lives on to pollute the pure stream that flows from the New Testament Rock (John 7:37–39). The wisdom of ascertaining the simplest interpretation is clear-cut: All that is necessary to account for the Lukan statement that the internationals “heard” their own languages was for the speaking to have occurred in those languages (Acts 2:4).

Other totally irrelevant terms are also sometimes adduced: echolalia, xenographia, glossographia, and glossomania. These terms if considered as subspecies of glossolalia, along with all the other aberrant concepts, gain respectability if they are presented as children, or at least blood relatives, of glossolalia. In each of these cases, however, glossolalia is overrun with false relations. It is watered down with ditchwater. It is obscured from its celestial glory in Christ, as heathenism, historicism, pathology, and humanism pile on.

How To See Through The Deceit Of Historicism

One final observation relative to the unprecedented uniqueness of biblical glossolalia needs to be drawn. It pertains to the history of historical relativism itself. How did it develop, and what lay behind its sinister relativistic methodology? Historicism arose in the 19th century in the post-Hegelian philosophical camp. It holds that socio-cultural phenomena are all determined — by precedents and parallels. This determinism had its roots in the dialectic of the German idealist philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, who saw history pulsating with thesis, opposed by antithesis. And then according to theory each antithesis fuses historically with its thesis in a synthesis, which becomes consequently the new thesis in endless cycles of opposition and synthesis. This surging movement away from the clear recognition of something and its opposite to a synthesis of the two meant ultimately that the polarity between opposites would be lessened by each synthesis, and eventually all would become one, inclusive of God and the world, and God and man.

Since synthesis wins in each case, the world is all synthesis in one state of development or another. Historical relativism recognizes that according to theory nothing can remain opposite, but all gets caught up in the snowballing synthesis. All opposite poles ultimately disappear and everything becomes relative. In the History of Religions School the religions become religion, and religious practices of whatever centuries become interchangeable. God’s hands are tied so that He cannot do anything new that men have not already done.

In historicism any unusual communication — vocal or written — is called glossolalia: whether gibberish, prophecy, automatic writing, witches’ oral formulas, mantra repetitions, speech in one’s own language broken by brain lesions, or hypothetical hearings with no exegetical foundations. If it can be named, it can be included in the concept. That way the biblical truth is not attacked, but absorbed, synthesized, and redefined. Such strategy is clever, and deceiving: A is glossolalia. B is glossolalia. C is glossolalia. F is glossolalia. G, of course, is glossolalia. Q is glossolalia. Z is glossolalia. All are glossolalia. All this is “deceptive philosophy” (Colossians 2:8).

Once anyone concedes that pagan and pathological speech from A to Z can be subsumed under the term “glossolalia,” he surrenders the sublime distinctiveness of biblical glossolalia. Once synthesized, the whole then must be simplified, and that redefinition has already emerged in the scientific tongue as “broken speech.” The denotation of that term is this: “speech that needs to be fixed” or “speech that is broken off from reality,” and its connotation suggests that the speaker is to be pitied, because to the extent his speech is “broken,” so is he.

Glossolalia And Jesus’ Reputation

It is impossible for historicism’s redefinition of biblical glossolalia, after having synthesized it with profane models, to remain merely a judgment about the phenomenon of biblical tongues. There are implications as well for Jesus that are ineluctable: (1) that He could not have originated the holy and transcendent speech of biblical glossolalia; He had to dust off and reintroduce alleged pagan prototypes, for which, it might be recalled, no hard evidence is to be found; (2) that the biblical crediting of Jesus with the outpouring of the Spirit manifested on the tongues of those who were fully submitted to Him is unnecessary, even if the Bible does so credit him. If any other instances of glossolalia exist anywhere — apart from Jesus — then who is to say that New Testament tongues could not have occurred for other causes without Him?

Both these implications slap Jesus in the mouth just as surely as did the petty official in the high priest’s kangaroo court prior to His execution (John l8:22). But none is grounded in reality. Just as human beings cannot create living tissues with their hands, neither can they produce life-filled speech that will “build up/edify” the speaker without utilizing his conscious mind while speaking.

Jesus indicated that His words are spirit and life, and that is why biblical glossolalia is sui generis and why Jesus stands in glory as the peerless life-giving Spirit who tames the tongue to speak the languages of heaven and earth. Creator that He is — the original Designer of the human speech organs — He alone can and does produce the oral glory that matches prophecy in inspiration, but transcends it in mystery (1 Corinthians 14:2).

Pauline Respect For The Uniqueness Of Glossolalia

Finally, consider these two missing factors in the teaching of Paul that should have been present in 1 Corinthians 14 if the apostle had been working with historicism’s determination to desanctify tongues by synthesis:

1. None of the Corinthians was suspected by the apostle of having been a tongues-speaker before conversion. That is significant. The implication is plain that their glossolalia experience originated in the church.

2. There is no command to the church to evaluate utterances in tongues comparable to the directive to judge prophecies. Given all the other restrictions on the public utterance of tongues, the argument from silence here is noteworthy. No one but the Lord is adequate to make such an evaluation. Since the speaker is speaking “to God” in all cases, only God’s assessment counts.

Conclusion

Glossolalia reflects the nature of its sublime originator, Jesus. It is heavenly in its source, unprecedented in history and human nature, and revelatory of the glory of the exalted Lord of language.

—William Graham MacDonald, Th.D., Front Royal, Virginia, taught a combined 22 years at Southeastern College, Central Bible College, and Gordon College, before engaging in a full-time writing ministry.

Endnotes

1. Cyril G. Williams, “Ecstaticism in Hebrew Prophecy and Christian Glossolalia,” Studies In Religion/Science Religieuses, vol. 3, no. 4 (1973,74), 331.

2. Leon J. Wood, “Ecstasy and Israel’s Early Prophets,” Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society, vol. 9, no. 3 (Summer 1966), 125f; and in the same issue: Robert L. Alden, “Ecstasy and the Prophets,” 149f.