'If I speak with the tongues of men and angels...'

I'm a former Pentecostal, and I have a confession to make. Even though I still believe in the gift of tongues, I still have no idea what the supposed scriptural basis is for a "prayer language."

This is a practice among Pentecostals and charismatics of praying in unknown tongues during private prayer time. The believers I've known who practice the karisma swear by it. They describe these prayers as effortless, tireless, and a direct line between their soul and God, unobstructed by the clumsiness of human speech.

The difficulty I'm having is that if Scripture is our guide to spiritual matters, it doesn't provide much guidance when it comes to having a personal prayer language. When the glossolalia first was manifest in Acts 2, it was with the express effect that Jews from all over the world heard the gospel proclaimed in their own native languages -- even though the speakers were virtually all from Judea and Galilee.

The believers weren't praying in unknown languages. They were praying in languages that they personally couldn't speak, but the onlookers could. It would be like going to Lisbon and speaking in Portuguese without ever studying a lick of it beforehand.

In other words, this was a reversal of the Babel curse; the purpose of tongues was to unconfuse human language and to make communication easier.

This is also what Paul suggests is the use of tongues when he writes to the church in Corinth. If people come into church and hear you worshiping in a language they don't know, it means nothing to them. But if they hear you worshiping in their own language -- which you don't know -- they stand convicted that God is in the church (1 Corinthians 14:22).

That certainly was the impact of the crowd who heard Peter's sermon early in Acts.

In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul does say, "If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am only a tinkling cymbal or resounding brass." But one verse in isolation is a poor prooftext for  doctrine, and since every language has idiomatic expressions, I'm inclined to consider "the tongues of men and angels" to be one of those and nothing more until I hear a convincing argument otherwise.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep praying in the human languages that I know. They may not be a direct line from my soul to God, but they're all I've got, and they've worked all right for me so far.


Copyright © 2013 by David Learn, Used with permission.