A leader of the National Democratic Party in Ghana has officially declared that “Christians who speak in tongues are mad”. Probably not mad enough to burn a Koran, though.
Ghana has been in my news watch since President Obama visited the Slavery museum to learn about the history of slavery. He apparently overlooked that it was Islam and the Berbers who enslaved black Africans in 1076, and the slaves shipped to the Western hemisphere came from the West Africa areas like Ghana, not his family ancestors in Kenya.
Ghana freed itself from European control about 50 years ago, and recently has invited China businessmen in to help with restarting their mining activities and develop newly discovered oil deposits.
Having attended a few Pentecostal gatherings wherein “speaking in tongues” presided as a salient feature, I was left with two feelings about it. First, I think somebody somewhere somehow misunderstood scripture and what “tongues” actually meant. Speaking and understanding a tongue unknown is not in my view the same thing as speaking Gibberish, a tongue nobody knows including the speaker and the hearer, and then having a Gibberish interpreter jump up with miraculous understandings of said, or muttered, Gibberish. Second, I thought it did in fact make them all look a little loopy. This does NOT make them “mad,” insane, crazy or evil. What makes a religion mad, insane, crazy AND evil is teaching universal hatred for nonbelievers, blowing up public places whilst screaming “God is great!” crashing airplanes filled with innocent strangers into tall building filled with more innocent strangers, believing Heaven is a great whorehouse in the sky, stoning women and covering them in taffeta garbage bags and … oh I dunno. The list is easy and lengthy. Islam is a religion of intolerance and compulsion, Christians who speak in tongues comprise a religion of friendly persuasion and sometimes of peculiar — to us — ways.
My invisible unprovable God can whip your invisible unprovable God and if you don’t think so my God will meet your God at the bike racks after school and whip your God.
Having done the “tongues”-bit for four years back in the mid-70s, I opted out of the experience for the reason that adequate discernment of spirits is not available to humans who are of the zealous religious type to begin with. When I started to hear voices from it, that was enough for me. Frankly, it takes a month of refusing to speak or privately pray in tongues to “dry out” and have the urge end. It is not enough to ask a troubling spirit according to the Apostle John’s direction I John 4:2-3: “Do you confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh?”–spirits from the other world are best left there. God comes to you when He so chooses, you can’t force Him to talk with you, which is what speaking in tongues implies: that the Holy Spirit will talk if and when he has first given one church attendee a message to speak in tongues. The New Testament says the purpose of speaking in tongues is so that visitors who attend will have secrets of their heart revealed during the observance of it (I Corinthians 14:23-25) and the result will be their dramatiac falling down and worshipping God. In four years of attendance in a big church, I never saw this happen once. (And I’m still waiting to see Jews get jealous of Christians, as per Romans 10:19 and 11:11.) For a marginal Christian, a church having “heat” may be helpful to keep that individual interested in attending and “revved up” for God; however, if a convert is by nature zealous, tongues can drive such a one loony. It officially becomes “oppression” and requires deliverance prayer by someone who is not of the movement. I still believe 100% in prayer for healing, and of laying on of hands when praying; I believe that visions, though rare, may come to you. But tongues? No, baby, get yourself out from there.
I find this subject fascinating. The first time miraculous tongues are referred in the New Testament the purpose was simple, to witness to those Jews who had traveled to Jerusalem for Passover. These Jews didn’t speak the common language of the day (some scholars indicate this language to be Koine Greek while others say it was Aramaic.) This Jews simply spoke their own language and heard in this language the gospel.
I once attended several Pentecostal churches in San Antonio, TX and at the prayer time I blurted purposely Psalm 23 in Hebrew. I had to satisfy my curiosity if this was in fact true. None of the churches I attended came even close. On another ocassion I blurted a very common Aramaic prayer. Again, no dice. The last time I recited Psalm 1 in Vietnamese. No dice. (Later a Vietnamese attendee told me that my Tieng Viet was pretty good).
Being a linguist I was fascinated with the subject but… It was all a fake. There is no such thing as speaking in miraculous tongues. At least that’s my two cents worth.
My uncle (long deceased) wrote what is apparently still the authoritative Lao-English dictionary) . He was an interesting man, although he wasn’t around all that often.