Recent Cessationist Arguments: Has the Storm Center Moved?

Of course, one of the main things fueling this antipathy to the idea of a private prayer language is a mistaken belief that biblical glossolalia is a supernatural ability to speak a language that one has not learned, along with a recognition that modern glossolalia is not that at all. Such an understanding of biblical glossolalia, of course, is derived from the narrative in Acts 2, and (reasonably enough) is assumed by cessationists to apply throughout all the references to glossolalia in the New Testament. (To make this one-size-fits-all understanding work, Yarnell [2006: 2] interprets kainais [“new”] in Mark 16:17’s reference to “new tongues” to mean “new to the speaker” rather than “new” per se.) As is well known, the earliest generation of Pentecostal glossolalists made the same assumption, leading to disastrous results on the mission field. It is one thing to assume that the tongues practiced on the day of Pentecost was the same as that practiced elsewhere in the New Testament, but it is quite another to try to make those other references to tongues advert to their supposed intelligibility. Yarnell does this in his exegesis of Acts 10 and 19: he writes of the glossolalic episode in Acts 10: “The Jewish Christians heard these foreign Gentiles magnify God as they communicated intelligibly in languages” (2006: 4), but he does not explain how he knows that it was intelligible communication, and he writes of Act 19: “the gift [of tongues] intelligibly conveyed the gospel”, but again he does not tell how he knows that. Perhaps Yarnell assumes that if the text states that the glossolalists “magnified God” in their tongues-speech, that that implies that it was intelligible, but that assumption is not backed up by the way in which near contemporary references to unintelligible speech can be linked to the function of praise. We read in the apocryphal Testament of Job, for example, that Job’s daughters are said to praise God in angelic tongues, and we are told in very general terms of the content of their praises: for example, one of Job’s daughters is there said to have “praised God for the creation of the heights”, doing so in “the dialect of the archons” (Test. Job 49.2 [trans. Spittler 1983: 866]). That this account is apocryphal (and clearly fictional) does not mitigate the point, which is that Yarnell is wrong in his implied inference that if so-and-so was heard to have praised God, then so-and-so spoke intelligibly. That inference is not borne out by literary-critical comparisons with other descriptions of glossolalic praise.

Tags: arguments, center, cessationist, featured, moved, storm

Category: Spirit, Winter 2008