Gift of Tongues

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The gift of tongues is the practice, found across several strands of Christianity, of speaking in a flow of sounds taken to be language but not understood by the speaker — held by those who practice it to be granted by the Holy Spirit. Scholarship calls the phenomenon itself glossolalia, from the Greek for “tongue” and “to speak,” and treats it as a form of ecstatic vocalization that recurs, under various names, well beyond any one religion.

The Christian charter for it is two New Testament passages that do not quite describe the same thing. In Acts, the apostles at Pentecost are filled with the Spirit and begin “to speak in other tongues,” and the crowd of pilgrims each hears the message in his own native language — a miracle of being understood. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul addresses something else: a gift exercised in the assembly that no one present can follow unless a second gift, interpretation, is also given. Paul ranks it carefully, valuing prophecy above it because prophecy edifies the whole gathering, and warns that tongues without an interpreter leave the church no wiser. The two pictures — speech heard as known foreign languages, and speech intelligible to no one without translation — have been read together and held apart for the whole history of the question.

After the early centuries the practice receded to the margins of Christian life, surfacing among particular sects and revivals rather than the mainstream churches. Its modern career begins at the turn of the twentieth century, when participants in American holiness revivals — gatherings associated with Charles Parham’s circle and then, from 1906, the Azusa Street mission in Los Angeles — took the renewal of tongues as evidence that the Pentecostal experience had returned. From those revivals grew the Pentecostal denominations, and later the charismatic movement that carried the practice into Catholic, Anglican, and other established churches. For these believers, speaking in tongues is a sign of “baptism in the Spirit,” and in some teaching its initial proof.

Researchers who have recorded and analyzed glossolalic speech generally find that it is not a natural language: it lacks the structure of grammar and a stable vocabulary, and tends to recombine the sound-patterns the speaker already knows. The anthropological and psychological literature describes it instead as a learned, often communally cued behavior, frequently produced in a state of heightened arousal, and reports that practitioners typically experience it as release rather than loss of control. None of this settles what the speaker takes it to be. To name the structure of an utterance is not to name its source, and the believer’s claim is about the source.

Comparable ecstatic speech is documented in other settings — among some spirit mediums, in certain prophetic and shamanic traditions — and observers have long noted the resemblance. The likeness is real and worth marking; it does not make the cases one practice, since each is embedded in its own account of who, or what, is speaking.

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