Not trying to get into an argument, but, I have discussed 1 Cor. 14:2 quite a bit in other threads as well as some of the things you bring up. Didn’t want to repeat myself here, but….
With respect to 1 Cor. 14:2 – The whole passage is talking about real, rational language.
Let me use an analogy - If I attend a worship service in “East Haystack”, some remote town in the US out in the middle of nowhere, two things are going to be evident: one; there’s only going to be so many people at that service (i.e. there will be a finite given amount of people there) and two; the chances that anyone speaks anything but English is pretty slim to nil.
If I start praying aloud in say Lithuanian, there’s no one at that service that’s going to understand a single word I’m saying. Even though I’m speaking a real language, no one there will understand my “tongue”. That does not mean or imply that no one else understands Lithuanian; just no one at that particular service.
In this sense, therefore, I am speaking only to God, since he understands all languages. To everyone at the service, even though I’m praying in the Spirit (as defined in my original post), to the people listening to me, I’m still speaking “mysteries” – i.e. even though I’m praying as I ought, no one understands me; no one has a clue what I’m saying as no one speaks my language.
When one looks at the original Greek, the verb which is usually translated as “understandeth/understands” is actually the verb “to hear” in the sense of to hear someone with understanding. The verb is not “to understand”. That part of the verse is more properly “no one hears [him] with understanding”, i.e. no one listening to him understands what he’s saying.
There is nothing in this passage that suggests modern tongues-speech nor is there anything that even remotely suggests that the speaker does not understand what he himself is saying. It is the listeners who do not understand, not the speaker – no matter how hard some people want the speaker to also not understand…….it just isn’t there.
I suppose it could be people conditioned in some cases, but it’s also just a reading of the text (and getting rid of the archaic ‘tongue’ for the more modern ‘language’).
“Putting words into Paul’s moth that he never said” I would argue is precisely what many tongues-speakers are doing. A reading into the text of things that are just not there.
“The notion that tongues has to always be an understandable language is a silly notion”
I think you’re partially right; it’s typically not understood by the listeners as they do not speak/understand the speaker’s language. Tongues may not be understandable to everyone hearing it, but at the very least, it has to be language, which modern tongues-speech is not. A good working definition of the modern phenomenon is non-cognitive non-language utterance.
“Also, I have provided absolutely true testimonies of people speaking in modern tongues languages they have never learned, and most of the time the language has been unknown to anyone, but once, even praying normally in tongues, the language changed to a language understood by a foreign visitor.”
These types of stories seem to abound in tongues-speaking circles, but unfortunately, they are all anecdotal at best. There are no documented cases of xenoglossy – anywhere. Thousands of examples of tongues-speech have been studied. Not one was ever found to be a real rational language, living or dead.
I should think that the tongues-speaker would, at the very least, want to know specifically what language s/he was supposedly speaking and would want to ask the person who heard him/her exactly what was said. Was it just a word, a phrase, a short monologue, what? Did the person’s tongues-speech switch over to the target language such that everyone listening could notice the switch, or was it just the one person who heard it in their language? Did that person hear the speaker physically speaking their language, or was it something that just sort of came into their head? Were these people living in the country where the language is spoken, or did it occur somewhere far removed (which would beg the question with some stories I’ve heard of how did a person from a remote part of the world come to be attending a Pentecostal/Charismatic service in the US?). I’m not doubting it could happen, but unfortunately, the specific details are recalled rather vaguely at best. Personally, this is an area I would love to see more study done on.
