The Spirit: Tongues and Message

Once every year the Christian minister is confronted with the task of preaching a sermon on Pentecost. Barring happy exceptions, most ministers see themselves not so much confronted with a wonderful challenge as condemned to an inevitable annual chore. Given the reigning conception of Pentecost in the Christian church, the reason is not hard to find. One has to say something about those tongues of fire, that rushing mighty wind, and particularly all those languages spoken at the same time. These mysterious occurrences, so far removed from our own experience and observation, are indeed difficult to do anything with either theologically or homiletically if they are regarded as in themselves significant phenomena.

Pentecost is much like the Cross. One can regard the Crucifixion as an event of a few hours’ duration, in which case one soon comes to the end of the discursive rope. It can also be regarded as the epitome of the Christian message, the height and breadth and depth of which angels desire to know. That is what Paul had in mind when he wrote, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” It is in this manner that Pentecost should be viewed. It is not an “event” that was over when Peter began to preach, but rather the beginning of a great divine work that continues in our day and will continue to the of time. The beginning has no meaning without the continuation, and the continuation could not be without the beginning.

Pentecost was the beginning in redemptive history of that specific function or activity of the Holy Spirit of which he had already given so powerful a manifestation in the realm of the natural, namely the giving of life. The Spirit gives life. He is the life-giving Spirit of all creation, and his is the life of the new creation. Having brooded upon the face of the waters to bring forth, he gave life to grass and flowers and trees, to animals and to men. Every birth is a manifestation of this mysterious gift of the Spirit to the creature.

His, too, is the life that makes possible the rebirth of man. “Verily, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” In the New Testament the Holy Spirit is most intimately linked with both the initiation and the continuation in its many and varied forms of the new life of the believer in Christ. To transmit and to develop this life is the specific function of the Holy Spirit in the divine redemptive economy. The Cross made the giving of this life possible; Pentecost began the effectuation of it in the history of the Church.

The question we want to consider more particularly in this article is: How is the most prominent phenomenon associated with Pentecost, namely the speaking with tongues, related to this work of the Spirit? In taking up this question we do not forsake the grand theme of the life-transmitting work of the Spirit; rather, we enter upon the very heart of the theme.

The Spirit Speaks

When one reads the Pentecost account in Acts 2:1–13 carefully, he is struck by the imbalance between the space devoted to the tongues of fire and the mighty rushing wind, on the one hand, and that given to the speaking with tongues, on the other. Clearly the writer intended the central significance of Pentecost to be found in the speaking with tongues, not in the rushing wind or the tongues of fire. The latter are mentioned in verses two and three respectively, but are not again alluded to. The speaking with tongues, by contrast, is introduced in the fourth verse and then dominates the account to its very end, even carrying over into Peter’s sermon. We must not fail, therefore, to give very serious consideration to the speaking with tongues if we are to understand the coming of the Spirit.

It is passing strange indeed that through all the centuries of the Church’s reflection on the Pentecost event, so much attention has been devoted to the manner of the speaking with tongues and so little (almost nothing) to the fact of the speaking with tongues. It should be a matter of sanctified indifference to us whether the speaking with tongues constituted a miracle of speaking or a miracle of hearing, whether the tongues that were spoken were a new language, the language of Paradise, the language of heaven, or a form of ecstatic utterance. Why should we be concerned about such curious questions when the New Testament itself manifests not the slightest interest in them? What stands in the foreground of the account is the fact of the speaking. The Holy Spirit who came to indwell the Church at Pentecost came as a witnessing, a proclaiming, a speaking Spirit. He himself was not heard or seen. His effects were heard and seen, among which the speaking of the mighty works of God overshadowed all others.

We should further note that this speaking framework in which the Spirit came to us is not only inseparable but also indistinguishable from his coming. Think this speaking away and there is no Pentecost left. The prophetic form in which the Holy Spirit came to dwell in the Church was not accidental but was essential to his coming. It was essential because it is the nature, the character, the very being of the Spirit to witness, to speak, to proclaim. His coming in the Old Testament is foretold as a prophetic coming. When Jesus gave the Great Commission to his disciples, he told them to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Spirit. When the Spirit had come upon them, then they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. The whole book of Acts is the elaboration of this theme. At every significant turn in the book the Holy Spirit is the central Actor, and the grand climax is St. Paul’s arrival in Rome, the capital of the kingdoms of the world, to make known there the mystery of Christ. In Jesus’ discourses in John 14; 15, and 16 the Holy Spirit is presented as the one who will guide, teach, judge, reveal, witness, and show, with respect to the things that Christ will give to the Church. Pentecost, concentrating all this in a dramatic symbolic action, wants to make plain that the witness of the Church is wholly identified with, grounded in, and flowing out of the coming of the Spirit. Not later, not soon, not immediately after, but in the coming, through the coming of the Spirit, the Church became a witnessing Church.

The Spirit Gives Life

The witnessing nature of the Spirit, and therefore of the Church in which he dwells, is seen to be grounded even deeper when beyond the explicit data of Scripture, and as the fundamental reason for them, we have regard to the Spirit’s specific function of transmitting life. This activity of the Spirit is most intimately related to the preaching of the Gospel. There is only one way in which the life of the Spirit can come into being in the life of a man. That way is the believing acceptance of the proclaimed word of the Gospel. Where the preaching of the Gospel (or its equivalent: hearing or learning through some human agency) has not taken place, there the Christian life, that is, the life of the Spirit, cannot exist. Fundamental to the life of the Church is the spoken witness to the Gospel of Christ. The witness of the Church is the means by which the Spirit of God transmits his life to the children of men. There is no other way. “… How are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?” The ministry of the Word is the mystic agent of that spiritual reproductive process which brings into being the life of the new man in Christ. Therefore the Church is first of all, most of all, and above all, a witnessing body. Out of the prophetic activity to which her inner nature prompts her flow all her other activities of worship, fellowship, confession, teaching, mercy, discipline, reflection. The Word begets; all else follows from the birth.

Now this is the fact that the speaking with tongues at Pentecost dramatizes. For the purpose of this grand occasion the power with which the Spirit comes (the wind) and the purifying effect of his presence (the tongues of fire) recede into the background to make possible the full projection of the manner in which the life of the Spirit is transmitted. The Gospel is to be preached in all languages. It is to be preached to all nations. Christ for the world through the witness of the Church! This is the message of the “other tongues.” This is the meaning of Pentecost.

The principle given at Pentecost rapidly took on permanent and radical historical form in the change that came over the institutional manifestation of the People of God in the world. The Jewish congregation became the supra-national Church. Temple and synagogue yielded to the worship service of the New Testament church. The priest was replaced by the preacher, the altar by the pulpit, the strictures of the law by the freedom of the Gospel, circumcision by baptism, Passover by the Lord’s Supper; the Gentile became the equal of the Jew. In short, at Pentecost, by reason of the universally witnessing character of the Holy Spirit, the People of God was reconstituted from a national sacerdotal manifestation to a universal prophetic one to fit it for the new role into which the coming of the Spirit had thrust the Church.

One is tempted to say that Pentecost has a missionary message. But this is too superficial a statement. It might strengthen the reigning conception that the Church amid her multifarious activities “also does mission work” and that Pentecost has to do with this facet of her existence. Rather, Pentecost calls the Church to reexamine her entire spiritual heritage, her deepest and truest nature, and then to rechannel her energies in the direction to which the renewed discovery of her basically prophetic character points her.

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