Catholic Sensibility

When we discuss the liturgy, many of us speak of missing a sense of “reverence.” What is this absence? What is “reverence”? Perhaps it is when a choir movingly sings an Easter cantata. Perhaps it is a dramatic silence. These things happened at Frank Macchia’s church. But, as he writes, then “came a loud cry in tongues from a woman somewhere in the auditorium. She followed with a series of cries in tongues, which were not spoken as much as they were wept.” Dr Macchia, an Assemblies of God theologian, tells us that these cries show a response to the presence of the Holy Spirit “which is ultimately too deep for words” – they are, he says, powerful mysteries that are sacramental, announcing beyond the capacities of ordinary language that “God is here.”

Would we consider this sort of worship, spontaneous and artless, properly “reverent”?

To better understand “reverence,” let’s look at what St Paul says about speaking in tongues in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 14. (I’m here indebted to an article in the current Journal for the Study of the New Testament by the Church of Scotland priest Stephen Chester.) In particular, Paul writes, “So if the whole church meets in one place and everyone speaks in tongues, and then uninstructed people or unbelievers should come in, will they not say that you are out of your minds?” (14:23). The New American Bible’s translation for “mainesthe,” “out of your minds,” would seem to suggest that speaking in tongues is not immediately “reverent” – to the outsider, it connotes insanity or frenzy. Paul would seem to be criticizing a form of “irreverence.” I don’t think that this conclusion would be all that counterintuitive to many of us.

But if we look deeper, we will discover two different and rather counterintuitive conclusions: many people did find being out of one’s mind rather “reverent,” and this “reverence” presented a problem for Paul. In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates state that “the greatest of blessings comes to us through madness, when it is sent as a gift of the gods.” “When they have been mad,” Socrates says - using the same vocabulary as St Paul, the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona “have conferred many splendid benefits upon Greece both in private and public affairs.” But only when they have been mad. Philo of Alexandria later applied this “mad” version of inspiration to the Hebrew prophets: “the mind is evicted at the arrival of the divine spirit, but when that departs the mind returns to its tenancy.” Besides this Platonic tradition of leaving behind ordinary rationality, the Greeks also took part in the cult of Dionysus, which involved a good deal of dancing and shouting that could resemble speaking in tongues. Pausanius says that Dionysus’ female worshippers were “maddened” by his inspiration. Dr Chester concludes that we can retranslate 1 Cor 14:23b as “will they not say that you are inspired?”

But if the tongues would appear impressive and “religious” to the outsider, why does Paul still prefer the wisdom of prophecy (1 Cor 14:24)? While speaking in tongues is the uttering of “mysteries in spirit” (1 Cor 14:2), and Paul gives thanks to God that he speaks in tongues more than the Corinthians (1 Cor 14:18), unintelligible tongues cannot fully communicate the Gospel. Their unintelligibility cannot help the listener distinguish between God and “mute idols” (1 Cor 12:2), and Paul commends praying “with the mind” (1 Cor 14:15) for the sake of the uninstructed. Likewise, the Corinthian believers’ reliance on tongues won’t create spiritual maturity within them. Paul here channels Isaiah 28. Both the Septuagint and the Targum’s renditions of Isaiah 28:10 suggest that God, through the Assyrians, will speak to Israel “with a stammering lip and with alien tongue,” for God had earlier spoken a more intelligible message about giving rest to the weary “yet they would not hear” (MT). Paul here reconfigures Isaiah, writing, “It is written in the law: ‘By people speaking strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people, and even so they will not listen to me, says the Lord’” (1 Cor 14:21). Paul says that God has now spoken to people with tongues, yet, once more (and “even so”), they will not hear. They will be trapped in the spiritual distress described in Isaiah 28:7-9 (“all the tables are covered with filthy vomit”). Tongues remain “a sign not for those who believe but for unbelievers,” because, while unbelievers might initially be drawn to them as a sign of inspiration, believers really grow in their faith through prophetic utterances. And even the unbeliever is able to say “God is really in your midst” only as a response to prophecy.

In Dr Macchia’s church, after the woman spoke in “a series of cries in tongues,” an interpretation came from the congregation. “It was by no means a translation of the tongues, since no words were adequate to capture fully those glossolalic cries. The interpreter functioned more like a critic who struggles to interpret a work of art.” But he showed how the woman’s cries were “taken up in the much larger mystery of the redemption drama of Christ’s death and resurrection and of the final redemption to come.” The tongues are not left uninterpreted and unintelligible.

Before I wear out my welcome, I think that I want to ask two questions:

Do we have a concept of “reverence” that grasps how the spontaneity and ecstasy of tongues can be a sign for unbelievers, or is our sense of “reverence” much too limited?

Are we unaware of the danger of depending upon “reverence,” forgetting Paul’s claim that he “would rather speak five words with my mind, so as to instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue” (1 Cor 14:19), even though tongues are truly “mysteries”?