The Slow Work of Speaking in Tongues: The Spirit, (Im)Mediacy, and Our Responsibility

The following is a guest post by Dr. Chris Green. See Chris’s bio at the bottom of the post.

Because it bears us into the work of interpretation, ‘the gift of Pentecost entails slow, hard work’. In point of fact, as Hauerwas reminds us,

… the gift of Pentecost is but the beginning of hard and painful lessons in failure. Yet even failure turns out to be a gift if through failure the church is reminded that others are included in God’s promise. At its best, the church learns to receive the stories of different linguistic communities and in the process discovers that our own speech requires constant revision.[1]

The truth is that we must struggle, both in our attempts to understand and in our attempts to make ourselves understood. If our words come too easily—as they did for Job’s friends, for example, and for so many of Jesus’ friends and enemies—it is a sure sign that we are keeping God at bay, suppressing the Spirit’s efforts to transform us through our speaking and listening. Scripture warns us: ‘God is in heaven and you upon earth; therefore let your words be few’ (Eccl. 5.2). But not only few: our words must also be care-full, born of fear and trembling. True, at times we must speak, and sometimes we should do so boldly. But authentic boldness is possible only where there is deep, abiding humility born of what Eugene Peterson names ‘the-fear-of-the-Lord’ and sensitivity to the deepest needs of our weakest neighbors.[2] We cannot speak boldly (in any godly sense) if we do not know how to listen fearlessly.

The problem is, some of us sometimes talk as if the Spirit saves us from the trouble of interpretation and mediation, taking over our mouths or our ears so that we are freed from the difficulties of judgment, meaning-making, and communication—as if by the Spirit we are taken up beyond human, worldly limits. This is perhaps especially true of the way we describe speaking in tongues and prophecy, as Jamie Smith explains: 

… in contemporary pentecostal practice and understanding, one often encounters a sense that tongues (and prophecy) are immediate deliveries from the divine, without mediation or translation. In other words, in the popular imagination, glossolalia is often thought to be a quintessentially unmediated, divinely given, ecstatic discourse that bypasses the conditions of interpretation—a kind of pure conduit from God, without the static or supposed distortion of semiotic mediation.[3]

Certain (diseased) forms of our spirituality tempt us to confuse the dynamics of the human spirit with the work of the divine Spirit. Take, for example, how often we imply that God is most powerfully present and active in those events that are least easily explained and so seem the most ‘supernatural’.[4] But God is no less present in what seem to us ‘natural’ events than in those that seem ‘supernatural’. And God gives us no unmediated, otherworldly, more-than-human mode of speech. As Smith reminds us, understanding (and not mere self-expression) is the telos of Christian speaking. And speaking for understanding requires at every turn the work of interpretation—even for the Spirit-filled, charismatic believers.[5] Therefore, glossolalia (like prophecy)[6] is nothing more or less than a particular Spirit-graced outworking of our faithful struggle to speak and to hear the Word of God intelligibly.[7] Following Smith’s lead, we can say that the Spirit will not save us from the work of interpretation, but presses us further and further into it, burdening us with it by gifting us for it. 

When all is said and done, then, we have to come to terms with the fact that God’s gifts are not meant to carry us out of this world or beyond our humanness, but are purposed to ground us more firmly in the world that has been entrusted to our care.[8] Yielded to the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, living a Spirit-filled life, we become more and more responsible and response-able, pressed deeper into our creatureliness, drawn nearer the heart of the world. Ellul is exactly right: the Spirit makes us ‘fully responsible’.[9] 

God’s transfiguring work in and through us happens just as we are in the throes of working to understand and be understood. Because we were created for God, our rational, meaning-making ‘nature’, as it is being restored and transfigured by grace, finds its perfection in our doing what we were made to do: mediating God’s divine-human holiness sanctifyingly to the rest of creation, and, in the process, receiving our own transfiguration in the image of the one from whom, in whom, and for whom we live.

Dr. Chris Green is the Associate Professor of Theology at Pentecostal Theological Seminary and Author of *Foretasting the Kingdom* and *Sanctifying Interpretation* || Follow him on Twitter

[1] Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, pp. 132-33.

[2] Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 42.

[3] James K.A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), p. 138.

[4] For example, an early Pentecostal (Pastor Lettau, ‘The Pentecostal Movement in Light of Scripture’, Confidence 1.2 [Jan 1909], pp. 8-9) says of the disciples’ speaking in tongues on the Day of Pentecost: ‘the human spirit was in this case set aside, and the work was of God’.

[5] Smith, Thinking in Tongues, p. 138.

[6] Many Pentecostals and charismatics think of prophecy, like a message in ‘tongues’, as direct communication from God (as opposed to something born from human knowledge, understanding, or wisdom). For example, Julie C. Ma and Wonsuk Ma (Mission in the Spirit: Towards a Pentecostal/Charismatic Theology [Oxford: Regnum Publishers, 2010], p. 161) describe the gift of prophecy as finding its place when ‘in a real life setting, [where] there are many situations that require decisions which have nothing to do with ethical or Christian principals. In these instances, “direct revelation” is sought …’ For an in-depth exploration of what constitutes ‘prophecy’ in the Pentecostal/charismatic communities, see Margaret Poloma, Main Street Mystics: The Toronto Blessing and Reviving Pentecostalism (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003), pp. 115-36.

[7] We must not limit ‘intelligibility’ to mean easily digestible or agreeable. We must, instead, judge intelligibility in terms of how it affects the character of speakers and hearers over the long haul. Simply put, if our vocation is to mediate the holiness of God to our neighbor, then the only way we can judge whether our prophecy is faithful or not is to determine if we and our neighbors are being drawn together deeper into the sanctification God intends for us.

[8] It is telling, I believe, that Pentecost Sunday leads into what is called ‘ordinary time’. After all, our day-to-day communication, whether with God or with one another, is sure to seem dreadfully unexceptional most of the time. The Spirit rarely comes near in dancing fire or violent wind. Usually, the Spirit comes near in the ‘sheer silence’ that makes space for the ‘still, small voice’. Regardless, we must never forget that even in the quietness of our everyday lives—perhaps especially in what seem to us like throwaway moments—God the Holy Spirit is at work, making all things new.

[9] Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), p. 13.