I have experienced many kinds of church services in the last few years, and the level of emphasis placed upon the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues varies greatly from church to church. Finding the right church is about finding the church which best suits your own style of praise and worship. Having selected Proclaimers as my principal church I thought I had better mention something that many people might not be too familiar with - the phenomenon that is ‘speaking in tongues’ (SIT). 

 

Now I am in no position to edify anyone on this particular subject, I have at present only an outside perception of SIT, and have almost everything still to learn. But I thought it might be interesting for you to hear from someone who is on the periphery of this subject, as there are many who perceive SIT as an odd thing. What I want to explore is this. If it is such a glorious and essential phenomenon why do only some Christians do it? 

 

Before I attempt to answer that, I should say that ‘attempt’ really is the operative word. I am only attempting to do so based upon my observations and perceptions of SIT (and a few personal instances of it occurring within me), therefore for a fuller and better explanation of this subject you will have to go to my betters. The principal reason why such an article as this might be interesting is that there are, no doubt, some people who find SIT to be a state of hysteria.

 

Now SIT, as I understand it, is the form of ecstatic speech which is initiated by the Holy Spirit within us. It is the point at which the Spirit inside of us speaks to the Father on our behalf, the nature of which is indecipherable - what one might call a conversation from the Spirit of God to our Heavenly Father; that is, a communication of our wants and needs that we cannot convey to Him without the help of the Spirit. 

 

Now if all this is true (and having tried it myself I have no doubt that it is true) - it is going to follow that all the cognitive difficulties that we have at a sub-conscious level can be healed or removed throughout this process and that God can do work through SIT that does not occur through any other method of praise or worship. 

 

The account of Pentecost (Acts 2:1) is the first occurrence of SIT after the Spirit had been imparted; therefore we are compelled to see it as a miraculous thing (although doubtless there are people who think it is operating in them when it isn’t). It is also true that some people have been given special gifts as regards SIT and also the gift of interpretation in public meetings. 

 

If everything I have mentioned thus far is true; that is, principally - if SIT involves the Spirit speaking to God on our behalf for the purposes of doing work in us which we cannot even identify as work needed doing, then it seems to me that every Christian would benefit from doing this, at least in private. Yet it seems that the general feeling among many Christians is that this is not the case. Many see it as all right for some whose method of worship and praise leads them that way, but it is not a necessary thing for everyone. 

 

The continuity between things which are of the Spirit and things which are of the flesh is only an obvious thing in the mind in which it is occurring. No man can know from observing another man taking communion what spiritual effect the bread and wine is having on him, but he knows the physiological means by which the man will excrete them. A similar case can be found even at the human level. Lust and love differ not so much in physical circumstances (most acts are largely the same for both) but it is inside where love will be operating. Therefore the difficulty one might have with SIT is having the certain knowledge that it really is the Spirit operating and not some other cognitive phenomenon. 

 

What we are really speaking about here is the inner-certainty that we can recognise the real nature of the Spirit within. Now it is not surprising that there are difficulties attached to this proposition, for even in human love we find similar difficulties when trying to locate the real nature of the feeling. We find that if, during a moment when we felt intense delight in our beloved, we try to stop and hold on to the real nature of the feeling, we can never locate anything beyond a physical sensation. But the moment we turn round to catch the first thing we lose the physical sensation - that is, the dialectic between them is impossible to locate only by singular cases of introspection. 

 

Furthermore, one should notice that there are many different emotions which are accompanied by the same physical occurrences. One can get a sharp headache from joyous excitement and from foreboding fear but that does not mean they are the same thing. Here we must suggest that any spiritual activity inside us (aside from what we are) must be operating in terms beyond our own physiology (although for sure the two are interconnected). And furthermore, we can all admit three things; firstly, that we respond physically to things operating within us at an emotional level; secondly, that the layers of emotion are far deeper than our layers of physicality; and thirdly, that sometimes one physical sensation can occur from very different, and seemingly opposite, emotions. 

 

It seems to me that with this being the case, the Spirit operates in us in ways which add richness to our own earthly emotions; that is, the Spirit embellishes and supplements earthly sensations and awareness into Heavenly sensations and awareness occurring within one’s own mind and body. This by itself explains why those who are on the outside of this experience (non-Christians) cannot possibly realise why it is that all Christians claim to have personal knowledge of God from within. 

 

Now of course, it is easy to be sceptical and ascribe such certainty to the imagination (as many atheists have done) - so we must admit, in one sense, to a stalemate - a stalemate based upon empirical certainty from the Christian and non-empirical doubt from the atheist. All this is to be expected and you would not expect a sensible atheist to claim knowledge of such a thing when no such knowledge had occurred. In admitting this, we are saying that the Christian has some sort of ‘special knowledge’ which the atheist does not have; therefore if the atheist were to attempt to speak in tongues he would very likely find that inscrutable gibberish was the only thing occurring, and if a Christian attempted it he would very likely find an awareness of the Spirit operating inside him on his behalf. 

 

What we are trying to do here is two things. We are trying to show that there does exist in the Christian faith an inner-certainty of spiritual activity and that such activity (and other activities like it) provide the requisite evidence that supernaturalism is true. Now in one sense we are saying that the Christian knows something more than the atheist. I do not, of course, mean that he must have more general knowledge, but that there is one specific type of knowledge that the non-Christian does not have. The situation is a little similar to knowledge of mathematics. A young boy might know only simple arithmetic up to, say, the number twenty. A mathematician knows a great deal more, but that superior knowledge does not negate his ability to do simple arithmetic nor does it mean that he will not have to use lesser numbers to achieve complex algorithms. The same is true when we draw, say, a graph of statistics. The paper does not contain all the effort required to collate the statistics, it merely shows you the resultant summary of the findings. But we do not see one as inferior to the other; we see one as an expansion of the other. 

 

And this I think is what understanding the Spirit is like and also what speaking in tongues is like. One must understand the bigger picture to understand the smaller details (as is the case with understanding the Bible). A paragraph from a great piece of literature might be good in its immediate context, but it will be even better when understood in the context which is complete with the whole thing. But an even more significant point is this. The literary analysis is only made sound by knowledge of other books. A man who has only read one story in his life (and has never read a book review) has no way of knowing, in the context of literary criticism, whether the story is a good one or not. This is a little like the situation in which the non-Christian finds himself. But instead of a book, he has the complete totality and actuality of his limited inner-psychology - his experiential awareness has no idea of anything spiritual until it occurs. 

 

Another analogy will show why he might be stuck with the limitations of his own awareness. Film critics have an idea about which films are good and which films are bad because they have great experience of reviewing many films. Now let us say that a man who has never seen a film in his life tries to find out what makes a good film and what makes a bad film. Now if he thinks he can find this out by watching, say, just two films, it is quite obvious that his self-imposed limitation will invariably hinder his outlook. Let us say that he wants to know what constitutes a good thriller and in attempting to find this out he chooses Basic Instinct and Hitchcock’s Psycho. He might have an intuitive idea which is the better of the two films (for sure, Hitchcock’s Psycho is better), but he will not find out all he needs to find out unless he has a good idea of what constitutes a good film and what constitutes a bad film. 

 

Without any such knowledge he might think, for example, that the fact that Psycho was filmed in black-and-white makes it inferior, or he might think that the longer the duration of a film the better it must be. But all good film critics know that these two things are not indicative of a good film - in fact, in the latter’s case, a duration too great in length can spoil the quality of a film. The non-Christian is in a similar position to our fledgling film critic. He must, as regards his psychology, understand which methods of analysis are going to reveal to him the truth about Christianity and which are not. He will also need to find out which of the earthly pleasures can be used to help him and which can be used to hinder him. 

 

If the man happens to enjoy Basic Instinct more than he enjoys Psycho, one might be tempted to say that in his mind the former is a better film, as it happened to be the film which produced in him the most pleasure and happiness. The difficulty here is this. If we are going judge the quality of something by pleasure or happiness alone, we are not going to have a very clear opinion of the truth. Our film critic can say that Basic Instinct made him more happy than Psycho, but in doing this he is abandoning film criticism in the process, or at least making a severe departure from it. 

 

If we are to reconcile all this to realities of the supernatural within us, we must illustrate the distinction of having and not having while at the same time recognising that the psychological activity (just like headaches for both joy and fear) is the same physiological process. In other words, the same psychological activity is occurring when the Spirit is operating inside us as when a man is thinking about spiritual things. But the man who knows God knows how to form the connection between the abstract and the concrete because he has the Spirit in him to make the bridge. 

 

When I think of, say, what the value ‘5’ is, there are two different psychological events which can occur. If I see five pennies on a table, the value ‘5’ is in front of me as a concrete reality. But if I see the number ‘5’ written on a piece of paper the value remains abstract until I think of five objects. The differences between spiritual emotion and spiritual sensation are much the same. To think of the Spirit without the Spirit in actuality is much the same as seeing the number ‘5’ as a singular figure. To see five pennies without the symbol ‘5’ is to see it in a different way. And if we see the sequence ‘5 5 5 5 5’ we are able to perceive both types of sensation. We can see simultaneously the figure of five and also the value. 

 

A little of this type of conglomeration is occurring in the mind when spiritual activity is occurring. A better way to understand what is occurring when there is an absence of spiritual activity is to simply focus on ‘5’ without attaching any value to it. The real nature of ‘5’ changes into nothing but a curved line and two small straight lines. To say that this type of awareness is an example of spiritual absorption is, I think, pretty accurate. It is the difference between having dye and wool and being dyed in the wool. If we look at the following word - YELLOW - we see an interesting paradox. Try to think of what ‘blue’ is and the word ‘yellow’ become very slightly abstruse. But try to think of the word ‘yellow’ and you find that the colour blue is a ‘dyed in the wool’ factor of the word - that is, the word itself is saturated with its colour, it has come to represent two simultaneous things in the psyche, something that the analysis of ‘blue’ itself could not. 

 

The same is true of the Holy Spirit within us. It saturates us so that things which we ordinarily perceive turn out to be perceived in a sense saturated by the Spirit. The reality of which is the following. The Spirit does not just accompany our psychological activity, nor does it take over entirely - it becomes part of the inner-self, just as a square is part of a cube.