Modern Chaos: The Charismatic and Pentecostal Movements (5:35)
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I laughed at "Linguistic analysis is not the only valid form of research " because that is need to translate the Bible.
I do not see the contradiction.
Linguistics is useful for translating the Bible. Translation is applied linguistics. Linguists learn from previous research. I do not think Samarin's research on tongues would be helpful for Bible translations, though he may have had some other skills that were useful for that area that he applied to African languages.
But it is still not the only valid form of research. Is the study of history unimportant? What about methods used in the social sciences, medicine, or the hard sciences?
All I'm asking for is one single case of xenoglossia documented. So far I haven't seen one.
Your statement is a misrepresentation of what I said. I didn't say it was impossible, that's your language. What I said was that it wasn't Paul's meaning. And that most gibberish-speakers today claim angelic tongues is a misrepresentation of Paul's meaning.
The flip-flop is your misunderstanding. I have not flip-flopped on anything at all. Let me be clear:
if there is even one single documented case of xenoglossia, I'd like to see it. It would include a video of the speaker, and some form of translation, indicating what language it is. Are you clear now about what I'm asking for?
I believe everything in the Bible.
Language of angels would have vocabulary and contain meaning, so it would not be such as is typically seen on youtube and religious TV. Do I have to write out the transliterations for you, in order to get you to see that it is nothing but random syllables? Compare it with someone speaking a real language, and the difference becomes obvious. That is, if you are really looking for a difference. But of course, if you're not looking for a difference because you want typical P/C gibberish to be language, then you won't see a difference. That's called 'bias.'
Your examples are a stretch. I think you're grasping at straws.
These things might happen during times of persecution. But it will be because it is done to them, not because they volunteered it or made it normative.
Are you trying to say that Paul meant it figuratively? If it is possible that Paul meant it figuratively, then why isn't tongues of angels also figurative? You cannot pick and choose some phrase literal and some phrase figurative, if you want any consistency in interpreting scripture. Paul wasn't talking about a metaphorical mountain.
I disagree. "Impossible" is your word, not mine. I'm simply taking the meaning of the context of what Paul is saying. But you are taking the phrase in v. 1 out of context and forming it to your agenda (as is typical of P/C interpretation).
The next chapter is not a change of subject.
And since they are hypothetical, he's not teaching that people were actually doing those things as a normal practice. But modern P/C tongues is considered angelic by many (if not most) P/Cs as normal practice. It's a misrepresentation of what Paul meant.
Something being possible doesn't mean it's happening. Paul did not say it was happening, and nowhere in the Bible does it support the idea that any man ever spoke an angelic language. When angels conversed in the hearing of men, it was always in the language of the human hearer.
I was responding to your misrepresentation of what I said. You claimed that I thought those things were impossible. Since I was using the term hyperbole, it appeared to me that you didn't know the definition of it, so I gave it to you. What can I conclude about this? Either you didn't know the definition of the term, or you did know it, and purposely misrepresented what I said.
Like I said, if you read Samarin's book, you might form a different conclusion. He explains in detail how he determines it's pseudo-language.
And here is yet another misunderstanding. I never said that you said the passage should be used to justify the claim that pseudo-language is tongues of angels. I'm simply telling it like it is. I'm saying that all the tongues I have heard, and all that's on youtube, and all I've seen on religious TV is pseudo-language, and that 1 Cor. 13:1 cannot be used to justify calling it tongues of angels. I'm saying that Paul's statement is being misused prolifically.
(Cont'd in next post)
(Cont'd from previous post)
I disagree. I say that your prejudice and your agenda is preventing you from acknowledging what Paul is actually saying. Like I said, our paths diverge here. You claim it's my bias that's the problem, I claim it's yours. For certain, we both have a bias and an agenda. But it appears to me that you are proving my words true here, that you have a vested interest in making your experience Biblical. And not only that, you apparently have a vested interest in keeping people in the dark about it. Otherwise, you would present your activity for examination.
By all means, prove me wrong. I invite it. But this is what I really expect: no such evidence will be presented. There will be only argument and endless debate. But even if you did present the evidence, and some expert linguist evaluated it and called it 'pseudo-language,' then you'd just claim it was tongues of angels. Am I correct in this?
But if no evidence is ever presented of actual xenoglossia, and yet tongues of angels is claimed, then what am I to conclude, except that it's just yet another Big Fish story?
I disagree. I say that your prejudice and your agenda is preventing you from acknowledging what Paul is actually saying. Like I said, our paths diverge here. You claim it's my bias that's the problem, I claim it's yours. For certain, we both have a bias and an agenda. But it appears to me that you are proving my words true here, that you have a vested interest in making your experience Biblical. And not only that, you apparently have a vested interest in keeping people in the dark about it. Otherwise, you would present your activity for examination.
By all means, prove me wrong. I invite it. But this is what I really expect: no such evidence will be presented. There will be only argument and endless debate. But even if you did present the evidence, and some expert linguist evaluated it and called it 'pseudo-language,' then you'd just claim it was tongues of angels. Am I correct in this?
But if no evidence is ever presented of actual xenoglossia, and yet tongues of angels is claimed, then what am I to conclude, except that it's just yet another Big Fish story?
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/orth...ntecostal-speaking-tongues-foreign-languages/
https://charlesasullivan.com/9179/pentecostal-missionary-tongues-crisis/
It would certainly be helpful if there was documented evidence of xenoglossia, and not just stories that people tell.
It is possible, and quite probable, that in a crowd of Christians who mostly think alike, that 2 people can get the same imaginary interpretation of nonsense. Therefore, it is not evidence of supernatural activity. I also once heard a prophecy of the same thing I was thinking, but the prophecy turned out to be false. Therefore, that is also not evidence of anything.
Yet, psychics do the same thing. I once heard someone "read my mail" very accurately, but in time that person revealed their true evil nature. Some people have a talent for reading other people. It's a natural ability based on knowledge and intuition, not a miraculous gift of the Holy Spirit.
This thread is about tongues, so I'd rather not get into a debate about prophecy. I've said before in this thread that even P/C leaders admit that the accuracy of prophecies in the P/C movement is poor, 80 to 90 percent failure. That means 1 out of 10 come true, which in my book is not good evidence for Holy Spirit gifting.
You can go to the Concordia Seminary and check out the documentation I referred you to. I also sent you a link to an article with many cases. Mark Rutlin was at Free Chapel in Gainesville, GA, the last I heard.
Dennis Balcombe had an article that contained his eye-witness testimony of hearing villagers speak in tongues, but either the author is down or Google is just as not of a good search engine for keywords as it was soon after it launched, possibly the latter. His daughter witnessed the same thing, based on her own eye witness ministry. A little research might actually put you in touch with one of them.
Does 'hyperbole' refer to things that are possible or impossible. I've explained several times that these are 'extreme possibilities.' There is no reason to think these things are impossible except the commentator says, "because I say so. Paul suggests tongues of angels. We should accept it.
Eye witness testimony is a Biblical form of evidence. I do not have a video collection for you. You could check out Concordia Seminary if you are interested in seeing if they have recordings.
Do you believe the Spirit distributes gifts including 'divers tongues' 'as He wills'?
How much research time have you spent examining angelic utterances in non-human language. I can imagine variables languages could be inflected for....for meaning that human minds could not process. For example, if someone held what sounded like one note, but there were slight fluctuations in frequency that human minds and ears could not detect that conveyed meaning. Non-human languages would not have to be designed so that human minds, ears, etc. would be able to detect these types of variations. They would not have to follow the theoretical linguistic universals for human language, the parameters for what they call 'universal grammar' for example, or vocabulary, or phonetics, etc.
Btw, if you get some angels to sit down in a lab for you, let me know. I'd like to visit.
Tell me which of these are transcriptions of speaking in tongues, without doing a Google or web search? if you replay, can you assure me you did not look these up?
1. Yamana kita, sia’-- ‘yamana ‘kita ,sia’naya,si
2. Huna mu minuna
3. Kuku kaki kakek ku kena paku
4. Harga warga
Which one(s) are 'tongues' and which are not?
It depends. Some utterances sound like they have structure of a human language some do not.
Some monastic types have given up all based on verses like this.
Luke 14:33
So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.
Giving one's body to be burned-- that generally goes along with persecution. Stephen had been martyred by this time, and probably some other Christians also.
I would not say that moving mountains could not be literal. But if someone guesses it might be some kind of idiom, where is the evidence for 'tongues of angels' being some kind of figure of speech. It shows up in the Testament of Job. Is there any evidence it was intended as a metaphor? No. The interpreter just has to guess and insist that is what it means. That is called eisegesis.
No, you are taking what verse 1 there says and insisting it does not mean what it directly says, to fit your agenda. I'm open to the possibility that an utterance in tongues might be tongues of angels. Or insistence that Paul must mean it figuratively or as hyperbole..with no evidence to back it up... is not rational. If it were figurative, what would the phrase signify?
Huh? Tongues without interpretation is not addressed in verse 13.
I really don't know what the majority belief is. A straw poll I saw on a forum should have of a small sample size thought it is either 'tongues of men or of angels' or 'tongues of men or of angels or something else'. A little more than half thought that. A smaller group thought 'a heavenly language.' That's probably a viewpoint that came to be more popular with Charismatics, maybe WOFers, whose doctrines tend to be less-well-thought-out on a lot of issues. Historically, Pentecostalism focused on human languages, and the many experiences of those who heard them from time to time at Azusa Street and on the mission field and elsewhere reinforced this.
Paul says, "Though' (or if) "I speak with the tongues of men and of angels..." If you are open minded to what the text says, you should be open minded to the idea that God might empower someone to speak with the tongues of angels. Functionally, it doesn't matter the way tongues operate in chapter 14 anyway. The audience is edified through the interpretation, not the ethnicity or species of the language speaker.
That is a really silly point since there are no cases in the Bible of angels conversing without a human hearer that are not written down in a way for human readers to understand. We don't get any scenes of angels doing anything at all in the Bible except cases where humans are seeing or perceiving what they are doing. Does that mean they do nothing or do not exist if prophets are not watching? Both are silly lines of reasoning.
Please share your samples of angelic tongues against which you compared the samples of speaking in tongues to determine this. Just one sample, please. More if you have them.
I don't have recorded samples of speaking in tongues. I borrowed a CD of my father's once. I don't think I have a digital recording. I do have some qualms since tongues are meant to be shared with others if followed by an interpretation and I don't have that. I am also not in a church situation where there is an active tongues-speaker and interpreter if I wanted to try to gather recordings. I don't recall your asking me for specific recordings of my own life-experience previously in the conversation.
If I were going to go the academic route on this... and this is out of my area... I might try to get social scientists and medical researchers together, including linguists, for more than just examination of speaking in tongues, but also prayer, healing, etc. I would not be very interested in expending any energy on examining tongues they way you want. Realistically, I do not know if a Linguistics journal would be interested. Research has to research in the gaps where research has not been done and add something knew, theoretically, for the most part. Lower ranked journals may have a very low bar for that. Researching the same old stuff in a new time period might work for some things, probably not linguistics unless you are doing work on dialects. I'm guessing here. My studies in linguistics are at the undergraduate level, so I am speaking from my perspective in another academic field.
But what I would want to do if I were going to have linguists evaluate speaking in tongues is I would let them do blind assessments of tongues versus normal utterances. Realistically, I would likely limit documentation to cases of xenoglossy. Documenting existing cases from a historical or case study perspective would be of interest for me. This would probably be outside the domain of linguistics journals, either a religious journal or if there is still a 'paranormal' journal still around it might fit, though that has a negative connotation to Christians, so probably not. A friend of mine, a doctor in theology, sent me a Facebook friend link to someone he knows who has spoken in tongues in English. He has witness 'tongues in English.' I don't know if the man was the one who spoke KJV English or late modern English. I had the guy's Facebook link, but he doesn't speak English, and I decided not to bother him. If I were doing research on this, I might do interviews, and it might not be peer reviewed journal stuff.
How would a speaker in tongues know if a tongue is 'tongues of angels' short of divine revelation. Since Paul suggests tongues of men and of angels in chapter 1, and one set of languages is something linguists might be able to identify, and the other set--we have no clue whether they follow the rules of human language--then it's unfalsifiable using Linguistic means.
Samarin's research was not about determining if glossalalia was true language, at least in the article I read (for free or because I had access through work, without paying $100+ for a used copy or $300 for a new one.)
I know that "Yamana" in Sanskrit is "the god of death" whom we know as the devil.
The full text happens to be a praise to that false god in a Hindu sect.
One of my friends spoke that in a Pentecostal Service as a joke long ago.
We never expected that to be imitated.
If you are interested you can look it up in the practical Sanskrit-English dictionary.
Good Night All, I should have done the rest of the story line.....
I found only one recording:
https://scholar.csl.edu/sem/Recorded_Seminars/Year/223/
I do not believe it is language.
I get the idea you aren't even trying to understand what I said.
I disagree with you, as I do not believe modern tongues is languages of angels. This is where our paths diverge.
I hear no difference between that recording and what I hear on youtube. But real languages are certainly different.
This question is irrelevant to this debate, since I don't believe modern tongues is of the Holy Spirit. Prove me wrong with the documentation I'm asking for concerning xenoglossia.
I can tell the difference between a language and gibberish, as long as it's recorded and more than a few seconds.
Ine sindinabadwe dzulo
Ndikuwona kudzera mwa inu
"A hundred times" is a figure of speech in a certain context.
Out of context. You're the one eisegeting.
But in scripture, there is not one single instance in which angels spoke anything other than what human hearers understood. So my point is that calling modern glossolalia "tongues of angels" is a misrepresentation of what Paul wrote, and is certainly not Biblical.
The next chapter after 13 is 14. Paul isn't changing the subject.
Like I said, present documentation (not just stories) of xenoglossia. Otherwise, I have no recourse but to conclude that they only poke guesses as to what language they are speaking, as they did at first. From where I'm looking, it's an urban legend.
I agree that the type of language doesn't matter. Nevertheless, I still don't believe modern tongues is languages.
What I'm saying is Biblical. What you're saying is pure conjecture.
osasewera masewera anu
Lame excuses. Why don't you pray for interpretation? Why not see the forum as a church setting? Why not offer both interpretation and the evidence as a means to edify the churches? Are you fearful, or courageous? Are you lazy, or powerful? If you claim to operate in the power of the Holy Spirit, then why do you hide it as if it's something that cannot be exposed in the light, into public view? Is it a light you put under a bushel, or one you put on a stand to light the whole house? Where is your faith?
I'm not holding my breath.
Apply these things to yourself. If you think getting a spiritual gift is a matter of being courageous, be courageous and get one. Why would you say that to me, and not do it yourself?
The Bible teaches spiritual gifts, including interpretation are given, as the Spirit wills. I have been praying for interpretation of tongues, btw.. I am not in a church situation where tongues and interpretation happens in the meetings, so if my prayer is being answered, I may need to be in a situation where it manifests itself. I don't see in the Bible where being 'courageous', not being lazy, or being powerful is the key to getting prayers answered.
I'm glad you mentioned the interpretation coming along with the tongues. I've been puzzled by that. I don't have the gift of tongues or interpretation. I have a friend who told me a story about visiting someone in a remote area of Colombia from an old indigenous tribe, and she was able to speak to him in his language, even though she had no prior knowledge of this language, and they were all amazed. That sounds like tongues to me. Then she's also told me about when she's just praying by herself and speaks in a language of God that she doesn't understand, but she knows God does. I don't get that. Where's the interpretation? I don't see what the purpose of that would be, to speak in a language only God understands to God Himself. I don't judge her. She's a very faithful woman and has been encouraging to me in so many ways. I don't get it, though. Anyhow, i did want to say that i appreciate your posts. You seem very well spoken. God bless.
I said this to you, because you claim you have the gift, and yet you continue to evade examination of it. And your idea that I should be courageous enough to "get one" - and I presume you mean "gift of tongues" - is an irrational idea, since I don't believe in modern tongues. You seem to have the same attitude of those who say "try it, you'll like it." But that's an invitation to mock the Holy Spirit by doing something unbiblical. Actually, I am being quite courageous right now, trying to expose the counterfeit in the face of opposition.
My challenge is not for "getting prayers answered," but for doing what can be done.
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I seem to remember one post where you thought God could enable someone to speak a language if he so desired. If you do not believe the Spirit enables some members of the body of Christ to speak in 'divers tongues' or presumably to interpret tongues (as I Corinthians 12 teaches) then why would you encourage me to do so. You are not making much sense.
Whether to subject speaking in tongues to a laboratory is something I would have to mull and pray over a bit. I do not have a problem with tongues for private devotion or tongues for interpretation used in the congregation. I'm not that sure about tongues being used for amusement or to jump through social scientists hoops. If I were to have peace about going in that direction, i have some ideas, but this is out of my area of academic expertise since undergraduate education in Linguistics does not go into much detail into methodology and there is not a lot of overlap between this and my own areas of academic training as far as research methodology is concerned.
If you believe anyone can speak in tongues and interpret based on their own faith, then believe God and do it. If not, then don't tell other people to do so. I believe gifts are given as the Spirit wills. You are the one being inconsistent.