Del Tarr: The Foolishness of God
Tarr, then, argues that it is precisely because tongues speech is so bizarre and foolish (Acts 2:13), so easily dismissed by the “cultured despisers of religion,” that the tongues phenomenon perfectly expresses God’s characteristic feature of revelation to humanity. Against the human seduction toward human knowledge to control our choices, as in the temptations of the first and Second Adam, God’s revelation in tongues speech requires a radical shift from the gleaming fortress of our own intellectual arrogance to a filthy stable, to see a powerless baby born to a so-called “virgin” from a backwater town—a birth that quite plausibly could be explained by the nearby Roman army garrison rampant with sexual predators (p. 260).
To truly see Jesus, Tarr argues, required getting past toxic small-town gossip and disdain, yet this is the biblical and foolish way God revealed Himself to the world—and even more foolishly, to end up being executed as a cursed criminal, “despised and rejected of men”—the paradox of a dead Lamb on the throne of the universe (Rev 7:17).
The Old Covenant was expressed as a written document. Tarr argues that while the written format has the advantage of being more or less permanent, unchanging and reliable, it nonetheless is inferior to the New Covenant, which is God’s word written directly into one’s heart. God’s New Covenant emphasizes the superiority of “orality,” direct, personal revelation, over a text even written in stone (143-46). Despite this biblical shift from our scribal focus on a written text (the Old Covenant), Tarr argues that orality, God’s direct communication to our heart or through charismata of utterance is the essence of the Christian experience (chapter 4: Communications Theory and Glossolalia). Instead, Christians, especially in the West, have reduced much of their encounter with God to interaction with texts—a regression to the practice of the scribes and the academics. “It is precisely this textualism of evangelical theology which undermines the Pentecostal experience of continuing revelation” (153). To clarify Tarr’s position: this “continuing revelation” does not imply an expanding canon of scripture any more than experiencing the required revelation of Jesus at conversion (Mt 16:17) implies an additional Jesus. Continuing revelation (e.g., tongues, prophecy, words of knowledge, healing) applies and actualizes the message of scripture (which demands the process of continuing revelation), but does not change it, in much the same way that new US laws apply and actualize the principles of the Constitution—a process that the Constitution itself anticipates.
Tarr’s extensive experience in non-literate areas of Africa taught him the power of the spoken word and how this power is viewed in ways quite similar to those of scripture. A spoken word has power in its effects, whether a blessing or a curse. The “elder or chief has ‘mouth’… ‘Mouth’ means authority/power that refers to the power of his oral speech—not written language” because these men were non-literate (153). The very term, “mouth,” conveys authority, strength or power, especially as it “names” a child or empowers the seed with life for sowing. A dull knife has “no mouth.” Accordingly, “since the word has all power, everything one says is binding. There is no ‘harmless’ or casual word” (154). Hence, Tarr notes that these Africans understand Jesus at a different level than Westerners when he says, “By your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” In this “word” culture, then, tongues-speaking could quickly be construed biblically: this is God himself bestowing authority, intimacy, a powerful new “name,” identity via “words” in the “mouth”. Since the biblical era was characterized more by orality (and its personal, intimate quality) than by text-based memory and manipulation of ideas, it is not so difficult in Tarr’s West African culture to understand the significance of the Pentecost experience as the fulfillment of the New Covenant being expressed as “words” in the “mouth” (Acts 2:39; Isa 59:21).
Category: Spirit, Spring 2014
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