Tongues in Paganism

In 1 Corinthians 13:8-13 we have the central passage that deals with the cessation of certain spiritual gifts. What is interesting, theologically speaking, is that in the past thirty years there has been a tremendous amount of debate over this passage. At the beginning of the 20^th century there were no Pentecostals or Charismatics but by the end of the century fully fifty per cent of professing Christians throughout the world identified themselves with in some way with the Pentecostal position. That is an astounding movement. An example of popularity by the end of the 20th century it is supposed that almost all Christian religious television stations were controlled by Pentecostals or Charismatics, and the same thing is true about most Christian radio stations. In fact, Christian music is dominated by people who have a Pentecostal-Charismatic theology, and that theology, which is more than simply speaking in tongues (its most obvious external manifestation), has impacted the modern church in incredible ways. They have set the agenda for worship, for music; they dominate in the hymnals.

Tongues is not something that is new. The modern tongues movement is new in its expression of theology and certain theological concepts. We will use terms like religious utterance or ecstatic utterance to refer to the kind of non-biblical gibberish, and in some rare case there is legitimate evidence that people have spoken in some sort of legitimate language they never learned. We will call all of this glossolalia, the word that is used to talk about languages. In most languages the word that is used to refer to a language is the word “tongue.” That gets confusing when we keep talking about the spiritual gift of tongues because what has happened as a result of the modern Charismatic movement is that speaking in a tongue is no longer restricted to a known or legitimate human language but has come to also be applied to this kind of ecstatic utterance which is really gibberish, not a legitimate language at all. We will use the term “glossolalia” as the term for religious or ecstatic utterance, but we will use the term “languages” when we speak of the biblical gift of languages which was bestowed on a few during the apostolic era. It does not include ecstatic utterance or gibberish but involves speaking a language. It may not even be a language known to the person speaking it.

There has been since ancient times the practice of religious utterance, ecstatic utterance, as the key to spirituality. Going back to at least 1000 BC we have evidence that in pagan religion there has been the attempt for the worshipper to become so identified with the god or goddess that he is worshipping that it has taken control of his vocal cords and speaks to him, and this was the sign of super spirituality. But that is not what happens biblically. Yet, because of a certain similarity on the surface many people in the ancient world confused the biblical gift of languages with this religious ecstatic utterance that they grew up with.

Evidence of ecstatic utterance in history

The most ancient evidence that we have is from the report of Winamon, a young man who was the worshipper of the Egyptian God Amon. The report which is dated approximately 1100 BC says that as he was worshipping Amon in the temple he was overwhelmed in a state of frenzy which continued throughout the night and he spoke in some ecstatic language. We don’t know if it was a legitimate language or just religious frenzy, gibberish, but it is clear that the tongues was the direct result of this kind of possession and control by a god, although it just could have been brought on by emotion which is true in a lot of cases.

Plato also reports religious ecstatics in roughly the 5^th century BC. In the accounts we can observe that in each instance reported by Plato the speaker had no control over his mental faculties, he did not know what he was saying, there was the need for some sort of interpreter or diviner who would tell what was said, and the person was allegedly under the control of a god.

Virgil, writing about 17-19 BC, mentions a Sibyline priestess who would go into an ecstatic state where she was unified with the spirit of Apollo, and she would begin to speak in tongues, in ecstatic utterance. They claimed that it was known language. This is in pagan Greek worship of Apollo that she was probably possessed by a demon and spoke in a legitimate or a known language as well as in incoherent gibberish.

Then we have the Pythoness, the Oracle at Delphi. She had the symbol of a python and the Oracle at Delphi had to do with the worship of Apollo during part of the year and the worship of Dionysus, the god of wine, another part of the year. Some four centuries later Chrysostom made the following observation about the pythoness of Delphi: “This same pythoness is said, being a female, to sit at times upon the tripod of Apollo astride, and thus the evil spirit ascending from beneath and entering the lower part of her body fills the woman with madness. And she with dishevelled hair begins to foam at the mouth, and thus being in a frenzy, to utter the words of her madness.”

Also in the Greek world at this time was the rise of what was known as mystery religions. They were all mystical and emotional in their orientation, not too different from a lot of new age religions that we see in our own culture and not too dissimilar to some of the more extreme Charistmatic groups as well, and ecstatic utterance was associated with numerous other groups. So the point we should get from this is that throughout the ancient world from 1100 BC up to the New Testament period there were counterfeit tongues, an ecstatic utterance that was typical of many ancient Near-Eastern religions where they thought that the way to become spiritual and identified with their god was to go into an ecstatic trance where the god entered into the body of the individual, controlled it, and spoke through that individual. We see that there is a background of a pseudo-language or ecstatic utterance that runs through all kinds of religions and countries in the ancient world. Furthermore there are other occurrences of the glossolalic speech in other religions. There is a Hindu sect that practices this, certain Moslems, a tribe of Eskimos in Greenland that have services led by an individual where they beat the drums and sing and dance, a lot of nudity, who practice glossolalia, and there is a group in Tibet among Buddhists who practice glossolalia. Dr V Raymond Edmond who was the chancellor of Wheaton College wrote on this and contributed this comment: “One of our Wheaton graduates who was born and reared on the Tibetan border tells of hearing the Tibetan monks in their ritual dances speak in English with quotations from Shakespeare, with profanity like drunken sailors, or in German or French or in languages unknown. Quite recently a retired missionary of the China Inland Mission told of the same type of experience.” This is really anecdotal evidence.

It is not all demonic. Anybody can do it, just like anybody can play the piano. Some people have a natural affinity for it; others would only be able to do it of they got drunk. What we see so far is that outside of Christian circles there is a practice of glossolalia that is evident in all kinds of religious contexts. Then when we come to the Bible what we see is that the gift of languages, at least part of its function, was to serve as a sign of judgment on Israel, and part of its function, like other miracles, was to attest the doctrine, the theology and the orthodoxy of the apostles or those who exhibited these miraculous gifts. The question is, if you have someone who is speaking in glossolalia as a heretic or he clearly espouses bad theology or heretical theology, then would God validate bad theology with a miraculous gift? No, of course not. But what we see happening in so-called Christianity during the church age is groups that claim to speak with the biblical gift of languages really have a bad theology.

In the early church we have reference to the gift of prophecy and a few allusions to the gift of languages. One of the early church fathers, Justin Martyr (110-165), makes the statement in one of his writings: “The prophetical gifts remain with us.” Of course, the Charismatics jump on that and say, See, see, see. But he is writing in an epistle to Trypho, a Jew, and in context he is talking about the Old Testament, and what he is really saying is that as Christians we still honour and utilize the Old Testament, the prophets of the Old Testament, and he says these prophetical gifts, i.e. the writings of the prophets in the Old Testament, stay with us. We still use them and honour them. He is not talking about speaking in tongues and he is not making a statement that prophecy continues. Irenaeus was another second century church father (120-202) and there is no direct evidence in anything he wrote that the miraculous gifts were still in operation, he always speaks of them in the past tense. Then there was a heretic who came along by the name of Montanus. He founded a sect called the Montanists. He had two female priestesses with him and he claimed to be the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Before he was saved (if he was saved) he had been a priest of Sibyle. In the worship of Sibyle there was the same kind of ecstatic utterance and tongues-speaking and everything else. So he just brought all of that ecstatic operation with him when he came into Christianity. This is what we have been saying about the Corinthians, that they were saved with a certain amount of theological baggage, and rather than dumping this theological garbage for the sake of doctrine what they were doing was taking their frame of reference from paganism and superimposing that on their understanding of Christianity. This was the same thing that Montanus did a century later. Then a rather well-known Montanist by the name of Tertullian, who wrote a lot but made no explicit statement on the continuation of speaking in tongues or that he spoke in tongues. He is silent on tongues. Origen, another church father (185-254), wrote: “Moreover, the Holy Spirit gave signs at the beginning of Christ’s ministry and after His ascension he gave still more. But since that time these signs have diminished. So by the beginning of the third century there are clear statements being made that these gifts are no longer in operation.

During the Middle Ages there were a number of groups here and there in the Roman Catholic milieu, various mystical groups that claimed to speak in ecstatic utterances, and after the reformation there were several fringe and heretical groups that claimed to speak in languages but it was just ecstatic speech. There was a group of “prophets” who were young children who were going into trances and their bodies would become very stiff and they would prophesy and speak with ecstatic utterance. Another group within the Roman Catholic church, the Jansenists who were a mystical sect also claiming this gift. The Quakers and the Shakers, some of who claimed the possibility of speaking in tongues. They didn’t really continue and there is little evidence of it and there is debate among scholars as to whether they actually had ecstatic utterance or not. The Mormons, clearly a heretical theology that has no basis in truth, also had a lot of ecstatic utterance. So would God be validating the theology of all these fringe groups through a genuine miracle? We don’t think so.

Then we come down to the middle of the 1800s, and starting in the 1850s a shift began to take place in American theology of the Christian life. Going back to Charles and John Wesley in the 1700s, they had a doctrine of perfectionism, that a Christian could come along and reach a stage of commitment where he was so close to God he would live without sin. Then from the periods from 1800 to the 1950s the Methodist movement saw a real decline in its attendance and membership. So people began to ask the wrong questions, which they always do when people start leaving a church. What they didn’t have that we have today is the value of hindsight in history. The reason that their church membership was declining was because everybody was going west. They weren’t losing members because people weren’t coming to church anymore, they were losing members because everybody was getting on a covered wagon and heading out west somewhere and all the denominations all experienced a tremendous decline during that period. So a woman by the name of Phoebe Palmer who lived in New York, her husband was a physician, came up with this “brilliant” insight that they were missing out on something and that they had to go back to Wesley. What Wesley taught was a second operation of dedication, commitment, whatever it may be, that takes the believer into this higher plane. They had quit teaching that and she said they had to get back to it, and what developed was this two-step theology. The first step was that you get part of it at the cross and the second step was you get the next work of grace at this point of dedication. This idea of two-step theology manifested itself in a movement called “holiness theology” and there was the rise of holiness denominations, such as the Church of the Nazarene, Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Keswick movement had elements of holiness theology in it where it was alleged you reach a second point of grace. By the end of the 1800s people were beginning to identify this second work of grace with the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Then by the late 1890s they came up with the idea that you would know that you had the baptism of the Holy Spirit and had entered into this “higher life” if you spoke in tongues. Then a man named Charles Parnham had a small Bible institute called Bethel Bible Institute in Topeka, Kansas, and at a watch-night service where they were praying that the Holy Spirit would descend on them and they would speak in tongues. Just after midnight Agness Osmond began to throw her head back and speak in what they thought was Chinese, and that became the birth of the modern Pentecostal movement—January 1^st, 1901. That was characterized by the belief that baptism of the Holy Spirit was after salvation, that baptism of the Holy Spirit was signified always by speaking in tongues, that every believer needed to be baptized by the Holy Spirit and to speak in tongues (which was a sign of higher spirituality), and the fourth thing that characterized them was that they left their denomination. They started their own denomination, the Pentecostal denomination. So this stage is called Pentecostalism. They wanted to experience what the apostles experienced on the day of Pentecost.

Then on April 3^rd 1960 Denis Bennett, who was the rector of St Mark’s Episcopal church in California, spoke in tongues. Up to that point if you spoke in tongues you got kicked out of your denomination. But he wouldn’t let them kick him out. He stayed, and that gave birth to what became known as the Charismatic movement. The basic difference between Pentecostals and Charismatics is that Pentecostals left and went into their own denominations like Assembly of God and United Pentecostal Church, and other groups, and Charismatics stayed in their denominations. So Charismatics stayed in their denominations and theology didn’t make any difference, what mattered was the experience. So unity is now going to be based on experience, not on doctrine.

What happened after that in 1975 was that two people, Peter Wagner who taught in the missions department at Fuller Seminary in California, and John Wimber who pastored a church that became known as the Vineyard church (later became known as the Vineyard movement and also the Signs and Wonders Movement), and they started a movement called The Third Wave. The first wave was the Pentecostal movement, then the second wave of the Holy Spirit in the 20^th century was the Charismatic movement, and it became the third wave. There was an attempt to be more biblical. If you listened to some of their teachers they would emphasize so much of the emotional they would try to actually exegete and exposit text. That really sucked in a couple of people. Three professors at Dallas Seminary in the late eighties got sucked into this movement and they were quite bright. Two of them were Hebrew professors. One had a doctorate from Dallas Seminary and a second doctorate from Harvard. These were very intelligent men who had been very much against the Pentecostal movement. But there was an attempt to be biblical and baptism for the most part was said to be at salvation. Others would say it happened after salvation but it was a case of whatever floats your boat. And speaking in tongues wasn’t for everybody, so there was an attempt to be more biblical but a much heavier emphasis on experiential theology.

In Acts 2, the first occurrence historically of the gift of languages takes place after the Lord has ascended, forty days after the resurrection. Rather than just sitting and waiting like the Lord had told them to do, Peter gets a little carried away at the end of Acts chapter one and decides that they need a replacement for Judas. So they are going to cast lots and decide who has the spiritual gift of apostle. We never hear from Matthias again because he really wasn’t an apostle. Remember, there is no verse or chapter division in the original text, so when we come to the first verse of chapter two: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” Who were the “they”? A lot of people think that it was the 120 and they are out by the temple. But they are in a house still and this happened that morning at breakfast and when the day of Pentecost had come, “they,” the eleven apostles. Basic rule of grammar: when you have a pronoun it refers to the nearest antecedent, that is, the closest plural noun preceding: “apostles.” So it is the eleven.

Acts 2:2 ^NASB “And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.” We have to ask certain questions: Who is involved? What are the circumstances? What is the order of events? What were the accompanying conditions? So we see here that there is a sound from heaven, a rushing mighty wind which filled the whole house [not the temple] where they were sitting. They were probably having breakfast when this happened.

Acts 2:3 ^NASB “And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them.” There is a physical manifestation of flame like tongues of fire over each individual, and then, [4] “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues [languages], as the Spirit was giving them utterance.” So it is a miracle of speech, “utterance.” So they apparently left the house and began to teach and to witness. They go out and begin to speak in all the various native languages of all those who had come in from all over the Roman empire, and these were hearing the gospel in their own language. This is the first occurrence of speaking in tongues, it happened simultaneously with receiving the Holy Spirit; but then this was the first time that there had been a reception of the Holy Spirit, so they are baptised with the Spirit, filled with the Spirit, and speak in tongues all at the same time, there is an accompanying overt manifestation of flames of fire and the sound of rushing wind, and they are speaking in legitimate languages.

What we are going to see is that there is no set pattern, they don’t always speak in tongues. The problem with the Charismatic-Pentecostal movement is that they want to go to Acts as if Acts is normative or prescriptive. But Acts is history and history tells us what happened, not what we are supposed to do. Unless it makes a point of saying, emulate this, it is simply telling what God did in history, not what God is always going to do in history. Acts is not the manual for the spiritual life, that comes in later revelation in the epistles.