Many years ago, the son of a pastor I knew visited a tongues-speaking church out of curiosity. Members of the congregation would stand, supposedly speak in tongues, and immediately afterwards another member would rise and provide an interpretation (in keeping with 1 Cor. 14:27).
Deciding to join in, the pastor’s son stood up, recited the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, and then sat back down. A church member immediately rose and gave an “interpretation” that had absolutely nothing to do with the Latin version of the Lord’s Prayer.
Oops.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.
CP’s recent article Can ChatGPT interpret speaking in tongues? reminded me of that episode, and brought back memories I had long ago of visiting tongues-speaking churches. Just like back then, the whole Yea or Nay tongues debate is a sensitive one, stirring up lots of emotions, especially with those who believe tongues are normative in the church today.
No matter which side of the fence you currently reside on, with just a little effort, I think we can get some insight into this topic via a relatively quick, systematic, and biblical approach. In the end, it’ll help explain why ChatGPT doesn’t speak in tongues.
Two quick distinctions
The Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas believed that a key task for philosophers was to make distinctions. When it comes to the question of tongues, there are at least two key distinctions in Scripture that need to be noted.
The first concerns the difference between what is prescriptive in the Bible vs. what is descriptive. Scripture describes many things in its pages, but it doesn’t necessarily prescribe them all.
A case in point is the second chapter of Acts and others in 1 Corinthians, where the authors depict different historical occurrences that happened in the early Church, which were for that time alone. In his book, New Testament Teaching on Tongues, Dr. Merrill Unger speaks to this and the point of tongues on Pentecost when he says: “The supernatural display of languages at Pentecost was a harbinger of the dominant feature of world-wide evangelism to be realized in the new age and was a sign to the Jews that the Holy Spirit had been given to work out in believers Christ’s glorious salvation purchased on the cross and to equip them to proclaim the wonderful message of this salvation to every creature under Heaven.”
The apostle Paul himself declared, “The Jews require a sign” (1 Cor. 11:22), and boy did they get one on that day.
The second distinction involves the difference between the fact of miracles and the gift of miracles, like being able to speak in a language you’ve never learned. The fact of miracles can be found throughout all of Scripture, but the gift of miraculous sign gifts is constrained to three specific and brief periods of history — the Mosaic period, the prophetic period (with Elijah and Elisha), and the apostolic period with Jesus and the apostles. In each of those situations, God gifted a few persons with sign gifts that were used to overrule false teachings and false gods, confirm God’s truth, and serve as a witness against those who stood in opposition.
And afterwards? Those gifts disappeared with those gifted with them.
What and why tongues?
If those two distinctions make sense to you, let’s next look at the biblical definition of tongues.
The words the New Testament uses to describe the event at Pentecost when certain individuals spoke “with other tongues” (glōssa, Acts 2:4) and their audience heard them in their “own language” (dialektos, Acts 2:8) make it clear that tongues was a “dialect”; a known language. That being true, it’s hard to challenge that the equivalent would be someone today spontaneously speaking a language that they’ve never learned, such as Japanese.
Countering that, some will point to Paul saying in 1 Corinthians 13:1, “If I speak with tongues of men and of angels” and later in 1 Corinthians 14:2 “For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit” as tongues being a non-human language.
In the first case, I think a strong case can be made that the apostle was employing hyperbole or speaking hypothetically. In the second instance, David K. Lowery, writing in The Bible Knowledge Commentary, sums that up well when he says: “The context of this verse is the assembled congregation in Corinth in which utterance in a tongue was given without the benefit of interpretation (cf. vv. 13, 19). Apparently, no native speaker of the tongue was present in the assembly. The utterances therefore were mysteries, truths requiring a supernatural disclosure which God had not provided the Corinthians in this particular instance.”
Lastly, it’s vital to understand God’s specific purpose for tongues. Fortunately, we don’t have to guess because Paul tells us: “In the Law it is written, ‘By people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners will I speak to this people, and even then they will not listen to me, says the Lord.’ Thus tongues are a sign not for believers but for unbelievers, while prophecy is a sign not for unbelievers but for believers” (1 Cor. 14:21-22, emphasis mine).
Paul references how the Israelites had scorned Isaiah, who told them God’s truth in simple and clear Hebrew. But since they rejected it in a language they knew, God would come to them with Assyrian armed forces, whose soldiers would speak to them in a foreign language, which was a curse on them because of their unbelief. Using this as his context, Paul says the purpose of tongues is for a sign, but not for believers; instead, they are a sign of judgment and warning to unbelievers. This realization brings strong clarity to what we see happen in the New Testament with tongues.
Recall for a moment how and when tongues arrived. Israel had just murdered and rejected their Messiah in a way reminiscent of the Jewish rejection of God in the Old Testament. The Jews had heard Christ’s message in their own language and rejected it along with God’s ultimate Prophet, Jesus, but now they are hearing God’s message in a different language that serves as a warning to any who would still disregard it. With tongues, God gave them a strong warning sign that the age of the Church had arrived. So, unlike what some denominations teach and practice today, when a closer look is given to how and when tongues appear in Scripture, the purpose of tongues is revealed to be a negative sign to unbelievers, just as Paul indicates.
When you roll all of this together, we see why ChatGPT doesn’t speak in tongues, and why the CP article on the topic stated at the end: “This Pentecostal reporter tested the chatbot on Tuesday, and it noted that the translation of the glossolalia produced was “a creative interpretation, not a literal translation, since the original doesn’t map to any known language.”
That’s pretty telling.
Those wishing to make tongues standard practice in the Church today, an admission slip into the body of Christ, a subsequent experience that signifies a special “baptism of the Spirit” (a phrase that never appears in the Bible), or a mark of deeper spirituality should re-examine Scripture and then perform an honest inner assessment of the above before affirming that tongues are for today.
Robin Schumacher is an accomplished software executive and Christian apologist who has written many articles, authored and contributed to several Christian books, appeared on nationally syndicated radio programs, and presented at apologetic events. He holds a BS in Business, Master’s in Christian apologetics and a Ph.D. in New Testament. His latest book is, A Confident Faith: Winning people to Christ with the apologetics of the Apostle Paul.
