unscriptured

Posted in unscriptured, by Toby T, Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 12:01 am.

As I’ve already mentioned, I saw the movie Jesus Camp the other day. One of the striking things in the film is the kids at camp “speaking in tongues.” Like probably most people, I’ve heard of this phenomenon before; I even learned that it was called glossolalia by watching the movie Where the Heart Is (the 1990 film with Dabney Coleman, Uma Thurman, and Christopher Plummer, among others). The churches that regularly encourage this practice cite its occurrence in the Bible to show that it’s divine.

When I talked about this with God, she pointed out that the modern Christians have the practice pretty much backwards. In The New Testament, the Apostles speak in tongues shortly after Jesus ascends into heaven leaving them for good. They are all sitting in a room and the Holy Spirit descends on them in the form of “tongues like as of fire.” Then they go out and start talking to the assembled multitude, and the multitude, devout men out of every nation under Heaven, each hear the words in their own native language. So the miracle of glossolalia was that the apostles spoke in their own language but were heard by each listener in the listener’s own language. In today’s churches and tents the devout speak in languages which no one understands and which linguists say don’t even have discernible syntactic structures.

I think that means gibberish.

So I thought, this was an obvious case of religious zealots either faking inspiration or being duped by the devil to produce a facade of a miracle. I kind of wondered why the ministers and preachers don’t put a stop to it, but then I ran across a line in the Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians where Paul says, “forbid not to speak with tongues.”

I thought maybe Paul was referring to genuinely speaking in tongues rather than the modern corruption, so I asked God about it. She didn’t tell me what Paul intended and she didn’t tell me whether the modern gibberish was a miracle or not. What she did tell me was that it didn’t matter if they performed a miracle or not, what mattered was why they did it. If they did it to be closer to God, than that was great. If they did it to show others that they were close to God, than that was simply vanity and did not help their chances of getting into Heaven.

So the bottom line is that God cares more about intent than actions, even though the actions express the intent. She did add that while this works for her, that it’s not a good idea for our courts. Apparently they don’t have access to the same evidence that she does when it comes to discerning intent.