What About Speaking in Tongues Today?

Question 04123.

Speaking in tongues today divides opinion in the church perhaps more sharply than any other single spiritual gift, and I want to give this question the space a Deep Dive allows, because both the Pentecostal insistence that tongues is the necessary initial evidence of Spirit baptism and the cessationist claim that tongues ended with the apostles fall short of what Scripture actually teaches. My own view sits between those two poles, and I want to explain carefully why, working from the text rather than from either camp’s inherited assumptions.

The short answer is that speaking in tongues today is, in my judgement, a genuine spiritual gift that Scripture nowhere restricts to the first century, but it is also a gift Paul deliberately places within firm limits of intelligibility, order and mutual edification, limits that a great deal of contemporary practice quietly ignores.

What speaking in tongues actually is in the New Testament

Paul defines the gift plainly in 1 Corinthians 14:2. 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, pneuma in the Greek. Speaking in tongues, on this definition, is Spirit given utterance, directed toward God rather than toward the assembled congregation, which is precisely why Paul insists that speaking in tongues in public worship must be accompanied by interpretation if the church is to benefit from it at all.

At Pentecost in Acts 2:4, the tongues spoken were recognisable human languages, understood by the international crowd gathered in Jerusalem without the need for a separate interpreter. Corinth appears to describe something related but not identical: an ecstatic, Spirit given utterance requiring interpretation rather than a naturally intelligible foreign language. Scripture allows for both expressions under the single heading of speaking in tongues, more fully explored in a companion article on the gift of tongues, and I do not think we need to force every instance of speaking in tongues into one single template.

Speaking in tongues at Pentecost compared with Corinth

It is worth pausing on the difference between these two settings, because a great deal of confusion about speaking in tongues comes from assuming Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 describe an identical phenomenon in every respect. At Pentecost, speaking in tongues functioned as a sign to unbelieving Jews gathered from across the Mediterranean world, each hearing the wonders of God declared in their own native language, a fulfilment of Joel’s prophecy that the Spirit would be poured out on all flesh. The sign value of that particular instance of speaking in tongues was tied closely to redemptive history, marking the inauguration of the church age itself.

Corinth, writing perhaps two decades later to an established congregation, describes speaking in tongues as an ongoing feature of congregational life, a private prayer language capable of public use only with interpretation. Paul does not treat the Corinthian practice as a lesser or counterfeit version of what happened at Pentecost. He treats it as a genuine, continuing expression of the same underlying gift, adapted to a different context and governed by a different, more restrictive set of instructions suited to congregational worship rather than a unique historical sign.

How should we test a claim of speaking in tongues

Given how much confusion surrounds this gift, I think believers benefit from a straightforward, biblically grounded set of questions whenever they encounter a claim of speaking in tongues, whether in their own experience or in someone else’s. Is the utterance directed toward God rather than performed for an audience, as 1 Corinthians 14:2 describes? Is it accompanied by interpretation when used publicly, as chapter 14 requires? Does it operate within the order Paul prescribes, one at a time, never more than a few in a single gathering, always for the building up of the whole body rather than the display of the individual speaker?

Where speaking in tongues meets these tests, I have no reason to doubt its genuineness, and I would encourage churches not to treat every occurrence with suspicion simply because it makes some believers uncomfortable. Where speaking in tongues departs from these tests, becoming uninterpreted, disorderly, or treated as proof of superior spirituality, the problem lies with the practice rather than with the possibility that the gift itself continues. Testing carefully, rather than banning outright or accepting uncritically, is the position 1 Corinthians 14 actually commends.

A dispensational perspective on speaking in tongues

From within my own dispensational framework, I do not see any theological reason built into God’s programme for Israel and the church that would require speaking in tongues to have ceased with the apostolic age. The sign gifts served particular purposes at particular points in redemptive history, especially in authenticating the apostolic message during the transitional period covered by the book of Acts, but nothing in Scripture attaches an expiry date to speaking in tongues itself once that transitional period had passed. This distinguishes my position from strict cessationism, which often argues from a theological system built around it rather than from an explicit biblical statement that the gift has ended.

At the same time, I do not think continuationism requires treating speaking in tongues as though it carries the same authenticating, sign shaped function it had in the earliest days of the church. Its ongoing purpose, as Paul frames it in 1 Corinthians 14, is personal edification when private and, when public and interpreted, the building up of the gathered congregation, a more modest but no less genuine purpose than the dramatic sign function it served at Pentecost itself.

Why cessationism does not hold up exegetically

The most common argument for the cessation of tongues rests on 1 Corinthians 13:10, where Paul says that when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. Cessationists typically argue the perfect refers to the completed New Testament canon, so that tongues, prophecy and the other sign gifts ceased once the Bible was finished, a claim examined further in a companion piece on what the perfect means in 1 Corinthians 13. I do not find this reading persuasive, because the immediate context speaks of seeing face to face and knowing fully, even as I have been fully known, language that points far more naturally to the return of Christ than to the closing of the canon.

If the perfect were the completed canon, we would be forced to conclude that believers today already know fully, even as they are fully known, which plainly is not our present experience. The most consistent reading keeps the perfect as Christ’s return, which means the gifts Paul describes in chapters 12 to 14 were never given an expiry date tied to the completion of Scripture. Scripture itself simply does not make the argument cessationism needs it to make.

Why the Pentecostal initial evidence doctrine also falls short

On the other side, the doctrine that tongues is the necessary initial evidence of having received Spirit baptism runs directly into Paul’s own rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 12:30. Do all speak with tongues, he asks, and the entire structure of the passage expects the answer no, a question examined more fully in a companion article on tongues as initial evidence. If tongues were the universal, necessary sign of Spirit baptism, Paul’s question would make no sense, because the answer would have to be yes for every genuine believer.

I hold, along with the wider evangelical Baptist and dispensational tradition, that every believer is baptised in the Spirit at conversion, in one Spirit we were all baptised into one body, as 1 Corinthians 12:13 states plainly, and that Spirit baptism is received by faith rather than evidenced by any single external sign. Tongues is one gift among several distributed to the body as the Spirit chooses, not a universal badge of full salvation or full empowering.

Order, intelligibility and the local church

Paul’s fullest instructions on tongues come in 1 Corinthians 14, and they are strikingly practical rather than mystical. If there is no interpreter, the tongues speaker should keep silent in church and speak to himself and to God. No more than two or three should speak in any gathering, and each in turn. Everything is to be done for building up. These are not the words of someone hostile to the gift. They are the words of a pastor determined that a genuine gift should not descend into disorder that leaves outsiders concluding the whole congregation has lost its senses, a concern Paul states outright in verse 23.

This is where I think a great deal of contemporary charismatic practice departs from the biblical pattern, not in believing tongues continues, but in abandoning the intelligibility and order Paul insists on. Uninterpreted, simultaneous, uncontrolled tongues speaking across a whole congregation has no clear warrant in 1 Corinthians 14. Neither does treating the gift as evidence of superior spirituality, a status Paul explicitly refuses to grant it above the more visibly useful gift of prophecy, discussed further in a companion piece on the gifts of the Holy Spirit for today.

Practices with no defensible biblical basis

Several phenomena that have become associated with tongues in some circles have no real footing in the text at all. Being slain in the Spirit, where people fall backward under a leader’s touch or proclamation, appears nowhere in the biblical descriptions of tongues or any other gift. Gold dust manifestations, uncontrolled holy laughter presented as a spiritual gift, and healing claims tied to prosperity teaching belong to a different, much less careful tradition than the one Paul describes in Corinth. I want to be plain that rejecting these does not require rejecting tongues itself. It simply requires holding the gift to the standard Paul himself set for it.

I would also gently caution against treating every spontaneous emotional experience in worship as automatically the gift of tongues. Paul’s description is specific enough, Spirit given utterance directed to God, that not everything called tongues in contemporary practice obviously matches it. Discernment here is a mark of maturity, not of unbelief.

How this shapes ordinary church life

In practice, I do not discourage private, personal use of tongues in devotional prayer, since Paul himself says in 1 Corinthians 14:18 that he speaks in tongues more than all of the Corinthians, evidently as part of his own private prayer life, even while restricting its public use in the assembly. What I do discourage is any suggestion that a believer without this gift is somehow spiritually deficient, since Paul’s rhetorical question in chapter 12 rules that idea out directly.

I would rather a congregation grow in the gifts that most obviously build up the whole body, teaching, encouragement, service and generosity, while leaving room for tongues to operate within the careful limits Scripture sets, rather than either banning the gift outright on cessationist grounds that the text does not support, or elevating it above every other gift on grounds Paul himself contradicts.

Pastoral wisdom for churches divided over this question

I have watched congregations fracture over speaking in tongues in ways that grieve me, often because both sides argued past one another rather than actually engaging 1 Corinthians 12 to 14 together. A church that forbids speaking in tongues outright, on cessationist grounds the text does not clearly establish, risks quenching a genuine work of the Spirit and driving sincere believers with this gift toward less careful charismatic contexts elsewhere. A church that elevates speaking in tongues above every other gift, treating it as the mark of superior spirituality, contradicts Paul’s own express teaching in chapter 12 and creates a hierarchy of Christians the New Testament never sanctions.

My own counsel to elders navigating this is to teach the whole of 1 Corinthians 12 to 14 patiently, rather than isolating single verses to support a position already settled in advance. Let the text itself set the boundaries: speaking in tongues continues, it operates under real limits, it is not evidence of superior faith, and it is never to be practised at the expense of order, intelligibility or love. Churches that hold this balance tend to avoid the worst extremes on both sides of this long running debate.

Speaking in tongues and the Toronto and Brownsville phenomena

The wave of unusual charismatic phenomena associated with the Toronto Blessing and the Brownsville Revival in the 1990s brought renewed public attention to speaking in tongues, but also brought with it uncontrolled laughter, prolonged shaking, and prolonged collapses that Scripture never attaches to any spiritual gift. I want to distinguish carefully here. Genuine speaking in tongues, tested against 1 Corinthians 14, is orderly, purposeful and edifying. The theatrical excesses associated with these particular revival movements do not meet that test, and treating them as confirmation of speaking in tongues generally has done real harm to the wider reputation of a genuine biblical gift.

I would encourage believers to separate the question of whether speaking in tongues continues today from the question of whether any particular revival movement handled the gift, or handled worship more broadly, in a biblically faithful manner. A movement can get the second question badly wrong while the first question, whether the underlying gift itself continues, remains untouched by that movement’s specific failures.

So, now what?

If you have this gift, use it as Paul instructs: privately with freedom, publicly only with interpretation and restraint, and never as a badge held over other believers who do not share it. If you do not have this gift, take Paul’s own question to heart. Do all speak with tongues? No, and that has never been the mark of a Spirit filled life.

Whatever your experience, keep 1 Corinthians 13 close at hand, since Paul places the entire discussion of tongues, prophecy and knowledge inside a chapter about love. Whatever gifts we have or lack, love for God and for one another is the context in which every gift is meant to operate, and without it even the most remarkable spiritual experience profits nothing.

I would add one further, quieter observation from decades of pastoral experience. Congregations that handle speaking in tongues with patience, testing each claim against Scripture rather than either fear or enthusiasm, tend to enjoy a settled unity that congregations torn apart by this single question rarely recover for years afterward. Handling this gift well is itself a mark of a congregation’s wider spiritual maturity, not a peripheral concern to be settled once and then forgotten, and I have found it repays the patient effort every single time.

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.

1 Corinthians 14:2

For Further Study

Readers wanting to go further into this question of speaking in tongues will find careful treatment in Charles Ryrie’s writing on the gifts of the Spirit, in J. Dwight Pentecost’s work on the person and ministry of the Holy Spirit, in John Walvoord’s studies on the Holy Spirit, in Lewis Sperry Chafer’s systematic theology, in Millard Erickson’s broader treatment of pneumatology, and in Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s writing on the charismatic movement from a dispensational perspective. Each of these writers holds the continuationist position I have argued for here while insisting, as I have tried to, that the gift be held within the boundaries Paul himself set for it.