The third thing I had set myself to do after Lydia’s visit was to talk to all the tongues-speakers I knew and find out whether they believed that the practice somehow added a dimension to their life that ordinary English prayer did not. I still remembered that mysterious flow of heat from Lydia’s hands—and the fact that when I got home the prayer she had said for Tib had been answered. Were these things just coincidence, and maybe a little imagination on my part, or did other people have similar experiences?
Of course, when I asked Pentecostals what tongues did for them, the first answer was always, “Assure me that I have been baptized in the Holy Ghost.” It was this assurance that Parham and his students were seeking when they began their long Bible study, and of course it would be a priceless asset in a believer’s life: to know without question that God’s own Spirit was manifested from within one. Pentecostals believe that tongues do provide this assurance; indeed it is a matter of dogma with them that the baptism in the Holy Spirit is always accompanied with tongues.
“The Baptism of believers in the Holy Ghost,” says the constitution of the Assemblies of God, “is witnessed by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues as the Spirit of God gives them utterance.” The Declaration of Faith of the Church of God says essentially the same thing: “We believe in speaking with other tongues as the Spirit gives utterance, and that it is the initial evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Ghost.”
Outside of the Pentecostal denominations, however, I found that people were not so sure—even those who had spoken in tongues at the moment of baptism themselves.
A Lutheran minister, Larry Christenson, pastor of Trinity Church, San Pedro, California, expresses what is probably the view of most non-Pentecostal tongues-speakers. Reviewing the accounts of the baptism in the Book of Acts, he asked in Trinity magazine,
Does this mean that everyone who receives the Holy Spirit will speak in tongues—and that if you have not spoken in tongues you have not really received the Holy Spirit? I do not believe that you can make such a case from Scripture. However, I do believe that the book of Acts suggests to us a helpful pattern: (1) Receiving the Holy Spirit is a definite, clear-cut, instantaneous experience. . . . (2) A simple and God-appointed way for you objectively to manifest the gift of the Holy Spirit is to lift up your voice in faith, and speak out in a new tongue at the prompting of the Holy Spirit.
And at the opposite extreme from the Pentecostals are people who are convinced they have had the baptism in the Holy Spirit but deny that tongues are a normal part of the experience at all. One of these is Dr. E. Stanley Jones. Tib and I talked to this veteran missionary to India about his feelings on the subject and later received a letter from him in which he told us about an experience he’d had while attending Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. Dr. Jones wrote:
I was in a prayer meeting in the room of one of my fellow students, with three or four others with no special emotion or expectancy when suddenly and sovereignly we were all filled with the Holy Spirit—literally swept off our feet. I did not sleep the rest of the night, I could only walk the floor and praise Him. For three days no classes were held, all were turned into prayer meetings. People coming from the countryside were converted before they would get into the auditorium. They would drop on their knees on the campus and be converted. There was no preaching, only praying and testifying to release and victory. Every student on the campus was converted.
I wondered what it meant. Then I soon found out. I was prepared by this visitation for my life’s work. I found myself saying “Yes” to my call as a missionary.
The evidences of the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit Himself was the evidence. No other evidence was needed or wanted. To ask for evidence would be like asking for the evidence of the sun at midday. No one spoke in tongues, for it was not taught.
So here was the gamut of opinion on the importance of tongues in determining the Spirit’s presence: from “essential” to “helpful” to “unnecessary.”
But tongues were reputed to have other uses than simply to serve as a sign of the baptism. When St. Paul was talking about tongues as a gift, he related them to the ability to praise God.
We had an interesting opportunity to compare this function of tongues in contemporary experience when we talked with a young Yale graduate. Robert V. Morris had been a member of the Yale Christian Fellowship and had found his religious life fairly complete with the exception of this area of praise. He remembers interrupting himself one evening at a meeting of the YCF when it was his turn to lead the prayers. He was using a familiar form that included the words, “We praise You, we adore You . . .” when he stopped short.
“No I don’t,” he said with the frankness that the group had long since achieved with one another. “I don’t know what it means to adore God.”
He knew what it was, certainly, to thank Him for specific things. And he’d often experienced exaltation when he listened to beautiful organ music during a service or saw a lovely piece of stained glass. But praise of God in and of Himself—not apropos of anything He had done, nor mediated through human skill—that, he admitted to his friends, was something he had not yet achieved.
It was not long after this that the events occurred at Yale that were so widely reported in newspapers and magazines all over the country. Many in the YCF and others on the Yale campus received the baptism in the Holy Spirit with the charisma, including tongues. Although the press seized on tongues as making the best story, Bob Morris and the others put very little emphasis on them in their own thinking, feeling that gifts of prophecy, healing, above all the fruit of love, which the Spirit had poured out on the group were far more important. But in Bob’s personal religious life, tongues filled a very special gap.
“For me,” Bob told us, “the gift of tongues turned out to be the gift of praise. As I used the unknown language which God had given me I felt rising in me the love, the awe, the adoration pure and uncontingent, that I had not been able to achieve in thought-out prayer. Praise and adoration are basically nonconceptual things, and glossalalia is nonconceptual prayer. It releases us from our dependence on specifics and step-by-step thought processes into a direct awareness of God—just as we’re aware of the impact of a human personality without enumerating the details which go to make it up.”
Nor did this new dimension in prayer hold true only when Bob was praying in tongues. He noticed at once a new ability to praise and magnify God in English. Often he would begin his devotions with tongues, feel the swelling of this new capacity in him, and then switch to English, finding his total prayer life transformed.
“I have noticed a new ability to give praise to the God revealed in Christ,” he wrote for Trinity magazine in the flurry of national interest that followed the events at Yale. “Not just intellectual thanksgiving—but praise which seems to flow out of unknown depths in a nonemotional but fully self-filling way.”
And then he added something else. “I have also sensed very definitely a literal physical power and resiliency to meet the tasks of daily life.”
This added physical strength and resiliency was another purpose of tongues noted by St. Paul. He who speaks in tongues, Paul wrote, edifies himself, or builds himself up (see 1 Corinthians 14:4).
We have a friend who used to commute by ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan, in New York City. The trip took nearly half an hour and could have been a frustration in a busy day. But this man, David Wilkerson, used the time on the boat for prayer in tongues. He would start off by thinking of all the things he had to be thankful for. In a reversal of Bob Morris’s sequence, he would review them one by one in his mind, in English, praising God for each one.
Bit by bit, inside him, he would feel a mounting sense of joy. He was conscious of being loved, taken care of. He began to glimpse pattern and design in all that was happening to him. And suddenly in trying to express his gratitude he would reach a language barrier. English could no longer express what he felt. It was simply inadequate for the Being that he perceived. It was at this point that he would burst through into communication that was not limited by vocabulary. His spirit as well as his mind would start to praise God.
Inevitably, by the time David reached the Manhattan pier, a transformation had taken place. He was built up in body and in spirit. He felt emboldened, ready to tackle impossible tasks, invigorated and refreshed, ready to meet whatever the day had to offer. And this was often important, for David Wilkerson is a youth worker among street gangs in the New York slums—a job that brings him into contact with teenage dope addicts, child prostitutes, young killers and some of the most discouraging and intractable problems in the world today.
Here were some similar answers to my question about the value of tongues:
Another use of tongues suggested in the Bible is to let us pray even when with our own minds we have no idea what to ask for in a given situation (see Romans 8:26–27).
Lydia Maxam evidently relied heavily on this kind of prayer in tongues when she interceded for another person, realizing how little of his or her situation she could ever really know. Did other people, I wonder, use tongues this way?
Here is part of a letter I received from a psychiatrist:
Each morning before the day’s appointments begin, my wife and I have a prayer time together. We pray for our own needs and then for each patient I will see that day. . . . We mention first our own insights into his problem, using the notes I’ve made during his sessions, and what we know of medicine and psychiatry. But then, realizing how much of mental illness still defies understanding, we include a prayer for him in tongues. I am frequently astonished at the healing power which is present in sessions following these prayers.
One of the most startling instances I know of when the intellect simply refused to pray in an emergency was related to me by William C. Nelson. The Reverend Mr. Nelson is now editor of Frontiers for the American Baptist Convention, but at the time this incident took place, he was pastor of the First Baptist Church in Whitman, Massachusetts.
In the dead of night, one evening in the fall of 1959, the telephone beside Bill’s bed rang. Fumbling for the receiver, Bill was still groggy when a woman’s voice identified itself as belonging to a nurse at a nearby hospital. There had been an automobile accident, the voice continued.
“We have Carol Vinall here. Her mother gave your name as minister. You better get here right away if you’re coming. Doctor doesn’t think she’ll live another hour.”
“I’ll be there.”
Bill threw his clothes on and crowded the speed limit every mile of the way in to the hospital. The desk had been alerted that he was coming, and sent him up to the third floor. The clock across from the elevator said 3:15 A.M.
“This way,” said a nurse.
Thirteen-year-old Carol lay in a high-sided bed with no sign of life about her. Her mother stood beside the oxygen tent. “It was a head-on collision,” she said to Bill. “She hasn’t moved since I got here.” Apparently Carol had been thrown through a windshield. A doctor explained that there was injury to the brain shelf.
“If she lives,” said Mrs. Vinall, “they say she might not be . . . normal.”
Bill knew that he ought to pray. He was their minister. Mrs. Vinall had a right to expect support and comfort from him. But what should he pray?
He looked at Carol and felt that the doctor’s guess of an hour was overlong. The girl still had her clothes on; her black sweater was torn and stained. Her hair, pulled back from her torn and bruised face, was matted with blood. The emergency stitches holding the cuts together were swollen and angry.
And the worst of the injuries, he knew, he could not see at all. Deep inside her skull, the bone shelf that supported her brain was fractured. What damage was there to the brain itself? Did he have any right to pray for a physical recovery when there was every chance Carol would become a creature more like a vegetable than like a human? Yet, surely, he could not pray that she die.
Bill approached the girl and placed his hands on the one portion of her body that seemed unhurt, her right arm. Human, negative thoughts crowded in on him. “Lord,” he said, “help me to know how to pray.”
And right away a verse of Scripture popped into Bill’s mind. “We do not even know how we ought to pray, but through our inarticulate groans the Spirit himself is pleading for us, and God who searches our inmost being knows what the Spirit means” (Romans 8:26–27, NEB).
How perfectly the verses fit! Bill took a deep breath and began to pray not with his mind but with his lips and tongue only, bypassing all the doubts and hesitations of his humanity, using the sounds that God gave him. He turned the prayer over entirely to the Holy Spirit, knowing that He loved Carol more than any human could. Bill sensed a strange paradox in the situation: to the degree that he could become passive and yielding, that was the degree to which he could become effective for God.
Bill prayed with the Spirit this way, quietly and under his breath, for fifteen or twenty minutes. He was only vaguely aware of the room around him: of the standing lamp that threw its beam against the wall, of the bottles of saline solution, the oxygen tent, the jars of plasma standing near Carol’s bed, of the other patient in the room who was looking on in wide-eyed silence. He was conscious of Mrs. Vinall’s unstirring vigil. But he was aware above all of two things that were happening inside himself. He felt a current of warmth flow through him to the little girl whose arm he held lightly in prayer. And he was aware of the strange, brilliant certainty growing stronger each moment: the sure knowledge that Carol was going to be well again.
And then Carol moved.
That was all. Just one fleeting movement. A whisper of life that touched her small body and then was gone. But it gave Bill Nelson the courage to say the thing that was singing in his heart. The thing that he was sure of. The thing that he knew!
“Mrs. Vinall, Carol is going to be all right.”
Once he had spoken the words they sounded preposterous. How dare he! A nurse bent over the bed, imperturbably carrying out the schedule of respiration and plasma feedings.
The clock on the wall in the corridor said 3:45. Bill had been there just half an hour: it seemed like so much longer. Mrs. Vinall walked with him to the elevator, as though she wanted to stay close to the only voice of hope she had heard. At the elevator he told her again what he did not understand: Carol was going to get well.
And Bill was right.
Twelve weeks later, Carol was back in school. Today, five years after the accident, the only aftereffects are some hairline scars on Carol’s face and arms. It is as true today, Bill Nelson believes, as it was when Paul wrote to the Romans, that when we do not know how to pray, “the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness.”
The final claim made in the Bible for tongues was that—together with the companion gift of interpretation—it provided a means for God to communicate directly with a group of Christians assembled together in worship.
I will be frank to say that as far as modern-day applications of the gift went, it was this use of tongues in public worship that alone struck me as suspect. I had by this time attended a great many Pentecostal services and made notes on them.
“It disturbs me,” I had written after one such service, “that these people have to talk so loud and use such a monotone when they speak in tongues or give an interpretation. They seem almost to go into a trance, which may mean that they’re genuinely possessed by the Spirit, and may mean that they just hope to look that way.” On another evening I’d written simply, “Very theatrical.”
I noted that there was often no correlation between the length of the message in tongues and the length of the interpretation. I frequently had the feeling that an interpretation (often supplied by the minister) was produced just because Paul insisted on it, and not in response to a genuine inner urging. I was usually disappointed in the content of the interpretation: more often than not it was a stereotyped exhortation to “. . . stand fast in the latter day. . . .” or “. . . walk in the way . . . walk in the way of the Lord. . . .” I was bothered, too, that the language used was almost exclusively King James English. Why should God, if He were really using this means to communicate with people here and now, not use the language of here and now?
And then, one afternoon I had a personal experience with this kind of message from God, which from then on also had to be included in any thinking I did about it. Tib and I had gone down to Philadelphia to a meeting of the “Saturday Group”—a fluid and deliberately non-organized collection of tongues-speaking Christians, mostly from denominational churches, who took a room in the Benjamin Franklin Hotel one Saturday a month for a daylong Spirit-filled prayer meeting.
The week before we went down I had made a decision that had been bothering me ever since. It involved a young man whom I had met some years earlier in connection with a magazine story. In doing research for the article on juvenile delinquency, I had happened to play a role in getting him and some others a suspended sentence on a charge of stealing. I’d been in touch with his family off and on since this time, had helped him get a job and twice been called into conference when he’d been accused of stealing on the job. Now he was in jail again on incontrovertible evidence and I had come to the difficult conclusion that trying to get him off, interceding in his behalf, stepping between him and the consequences, had never been in his real interests.
It was a long, complex affair, involving a church group and other people, but basically the decision had been my own, and I wavered between deep conviction about it and deep doubt. Members of the boy’s family had written, accusing me of being a fair-weather friend and other hard-to-deny adjectives.
At any rate, it was that weekend that we went to Philadelphia. For the first hour or so after we joined the group in their eleventh-floor suite, the meeting was similar to others we had attended. There was a good deal of prayer in tongues, but it was private prayer: either individuals worshiping quietly by themselves or little groups of three and four “ministering” to one another.
All at once, though, a woman Methodist minister stepped to the center of the room and gave an utterance in tongues that was clearly intended for the entire group to hear. There was immediate silence. Then a man’s voice interpreted. I could not see him from where I was sitting, but there was no suggestion of trance in his tone. The language used was simple, modern English, quietly spoken: “Do not worry. I am pleased with the stand you have taken. This is difficult for you but will bring much blessing to another.”
These words hit me with a power that is indescribable. I knew they were meant for me, specifically for me, right now. Indeed, they gave me the courage to stand by my decision in the weeks that followed even in the face of a great deal of pressure. Events have since proved that this was indeed the right tack to take with this particular problem. But what was germane to the question I had asked about tongues was the emotion of absolute certainty that was my interior reaction to that message and its interpretation. I no more questioned, at the time, that those were God’s words to me, than I question the fact that there is a typewriter in front of me now.
Later, of course, I toyed with all kinds of other meanings the words could have had. But I couldn’t argue away the fact of my feelings at the time. Here was something I had not read in Paul’s letters and could not have guessed: that God might accompany the messages with a corroborating conviction in the hearer.
I didn’t try very hard to argue it away, naturally: a message of your own from God is a wonderful thing. But it was getting a little close for comfort. When I’d set out to discover whether tongues had practical value, I meant, of course, value for other people.