Paula White, the Head of Trump's White House Faith Office and Longtime "Spiritual Adviser" to Trump, Speaks in Tongues, Mixed with Some English Words, Praying that Angels from Africa Will Be Dispatched to Overturn the Presidential Election of 2020.
Over 80 percent of the American Evangelical Christian voters have voted for Trump. Without them, Trump would not have been elected. White has said that Christians who do not support Trump will be punished by God. If the Holy Spirit has miraculously filled her with the gift of speaking in tongues, that could be a sign of God's endorsement of Trump. Previously, I have written about those Evangelical Christians who insist that Trump is God's Chosen One. Trump has brought some of them into the White House to pray for him and to lay their hands on his head--a gesture that symbolizes the passing on of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 8:14-19, 9:17, 19:6).
But what does it mean to "speak in tongues"? And is there any evidence that it's a miraculous power given by the Holy Spirit?
SCRIPTURAL AUTHORITY FOR SPEAKING IN TONGUES
There are five places in the New Testament with references to speaking in tongues. First, in Mark 16:17, after Jesus has been resurrected, he speaks to his apostles: he tells them to preach the gospel and promises that there will be miraculous signs that accompany those who believe, and one of those signs is "speaking in new tongues." He uses the Greek noun glossa for "tongue or language" and the Greek verb laleo for "speak." So, the English term "glossolalia" has been coined to refer to "speaking in tongues." Since this passage in Mark (16:9-20) is missing in the earliest manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, some biblical scholars infer that it was not written by Mark but added by some other author.
In Acts 1-2, Jesus tells his apostles to remain in Jerusalem, so that after his ascension into Heaven, they will be baptized with the Holy Spirit and receive the powers of the Holy Spirit. Then, on the day of Pentecost, a wind from Heaven filled the house where the apostles were sitting. "They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them" (2:3-4). In Jerusalem, there were "God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven." 15 different countries are listed, ranging from the Parthian Empire in the northeast, to Arabia in the southeast, to Cyrene in North Africa, and to Rome in the west. As these people gathered to hear the apostles preaching, they were amazed that each of them heard the apostles speaking in "our own language, wherein we were born" (2:8). Some mocked them by saying "they have had too much wine." But, of course, even drunk men cannot speak in a language they don't know. So here was a miraculous power of the Holy Spirit--people speaking in languages that were unknown to them.
In Acts 10:46, Peter is preaching to the household of Cornelius in Caesarea, and people are amazed to hear them speaking in tongues because they are the first Gentiles to receive this gift of the Holy Spirit.
In Acts 19:6, Paul meets with some disciples in Ephesus. "When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied." This is what Paula White was doing when she placed her hands on Trump's head.
In First Corinthians 12-14, Paul comments on speaking in tongues as one of the many gifts of the Holy Spirit. Although he would like all the Corinthians to speak in tongues, he prefers that there should always be someone with the gift of interpretation who can translate the unknown tongue into comprehensible speech. Anyone who speaks in an unknown tongue speaks to God, but if there is no interpretation, he does not speak to other people, who will not be edified if they can't understand the message.
Generally, it seems that speaking in tongues is speaking a human language unknown to the speaker. But sometimes it seems that the language can be a divine or angelic language that is unintelligible to human beings. Paul says: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal" (1 Cor. 13:1). So those languages can be either "of men" or "of angels."
Paul also includes among the gifts of the Spirit "the ability to distinguish between spirits" (1 Cor. 12:10). This seems to refer to distinguishing Holy-Spirit-inspired speaking in tongues from Devil-inspired speaking in tongues. Because Christians are taught "do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1).
These are the New Testament passages cited by Pentecostal or Charismatic Christians as scriptural authority for their speaking in tongues. But most Christians claim that while most or all of the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit, including speaking in tongues, were really exercised by the early first-century Christians, that "age of miracles" has passed, and so Christians should no longer expect such miracles. The most obvious weakness in this claim by "cessationist" Christians is that the New Testament never says explicitly that these gifts of the Holy Spirit would cease after the first generation of Christians.
PROOF FOR A MIRACLE?
Moreover, Charismatic Christians today point to the fact that when they speak in tongues, they speak in languages that they have never learned, which they say is proof of a miraculous power of the Holy Spirit. For example, Charles Fox Parham initiated the modern Pentecostal movement in October 1900, when he opened Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, and there he and his students felt the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which was expressed through speaking in foreign languages that they had never learned. Parham reported that one woman began speaking in Chinese and was unable to speak in English for three days. Parham himself had a similar experience: "Right then there came a slight twist in my throat, a glory fell over me, and I began to worship God in the Swedish tongue, which later changed to other languages and continued so until the morning." He insisted that this was "indisputable proof" of the miraculous working of the Holy Spirit (Hyatt 2002, 135-39). That's why Paul said speaking in tongues was "for the unbeliever" because even unbelievers could not doubt that this was proof of a miracle (1 Cor. 14:22).
But is that true?
William Samarin was a prominent linguist who taught at the University of Toronto. In the 1960s, he spent more than five years studying glossolalia. He wrote a book--Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism, in which he concluded that speaking in tongues was not a miracle or a supernatural phenomenon--in fact, it was not a language at all but rather "strings of syllables, made up of sounds taken from among all those that the speaker knows, put together more or less haphazardly but which nevertheless emerge as word-like and sentence-like units because of realistic, language-like rhythm and melody" (1972, 227).
Samarin did three kinds of research. He collected a large sample of glossolalia by having many people consent to having their glossolalic prayers tape-recorded. He attended meetings of Pentecostalist groups around the world--including Italy, Holland, Jamaica, Canada, and the United States. The clearest recordings were then phonetically transcribed and analyzed.
He also interviewed in person many of the people that he met. And he had 84 individuals fill out a questionnaire mailed to them with 71 questions. For example, one of the questions was whether they thought their glossas were real human languages but unknown to them, and most of them said yes, although they were often uncertain as to what languages they might be compared to.
Here is one sample of a phonetic transcription of a man's speaking in tongues who thought he was speaking a language unknown to him:
kolama siando, laboka tohoriamasi, lamo siando, laboka tahandoria, lamo siando kolamsi, labo siando, lakatandori, lamo siambaba katando, lama fia, lama fiandoriako, labokan doriasando, lamo siandoriako, labo sia, lamo siando, labakan doria, lama fia, lama fiandolokolamababasi, labo siando, lama fiatandroria, lamokayamasi, labo siando (1972, 253).
That is not English, not French, not German, not Chinese, not any human language. It is not a language at all. As Samarin said, it is "a meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead" (1972, 2).
English was the native language for the man who uttered this. And what he said is composed of English syllables put together haphazardly. Samarin found that this was true for every case: the speaker draws sounds from whatever language (or languages) he knows.
Samarin also studied transcripts of what people said when they were interpreting the unintelligible tongues by translating them into English. Samarin found that many times the style of the English interpretations imitated the style of the King James Translation of the Bible. For example: "Heed ye the word of the Lord. Yea, hear ye my voice as I speak to you this day. Hear ye not in words, nor in voice, but hear ye in the hidden recess of your heart. . . . Yea, hear my voice today and yield to me as I speak to you in the tender voice of the Lord, your God" (1972, 169-70).
Samarin did not find a single case of someone speaking in tongues in a human language of which they had no previous knowledge.
Charismatic Christians who speak in tongues are using the uniquely human capacity of the mind for creating symbolic meaning, which is a produce of human evolution. The symbolic meaning of speaking in tongues is not the meaning of ordinary human discourse. It's the meaning of religious language that says, "This experience is special. This is sacred. This shows that God is in me right now." That religious language is not sacred in itself. But it does express the feeling of the sacred in the speaker. That feeling of the supernatural is itself natural because it arises naturally as the power of the human mind for experiencing ecstasy.
So the next time Trump babbles something incomprehensible, we should consider whether he is speaking in tongues. But if so, we can be sure that it's no miracle.
REFERENCES
Hyatt, Eddie. 2002. 2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity: A 21st Century Look at Church History from a Pentecostal/Charismatic Perspective. Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House.
Samarin, William J. 1972. Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism. New York: Macmillan.
