tongues – neumatikos

Singing is prayer

Here’s my conviction: singing is prayer. That’s the spiritual discipline that it is most like. And in the church, music’s primary purpose is to connect right feeling with right prayers. So, when you’re selecting songs to sing, the question you want to ask is if you want to pray a prayer of the people, or a prayer for the people. Occasionally, it’s good to pray on behalf of the people, but most of the time, you want the people to pray. So: you want the people to sing, and to do that, you need songs that can be sung by the congregation: not too complicated, or too far out of most people’s range.

How like speaking in tongues is a good worship song that nobody can sing: Is it doctrinal, rich, thick, beautiful? Good! But if the people cannot sing it, where is the amen?

Baptisms and Re-baptising

Acts 19:1-5 –

And it happened, while Apollos was at Corinth, that Paul, having passed through the upper regions, came to Ephesus. And finding some disciples he said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

So they said to him, “We have not so much as heard whether there is a Holy Spirit.”

And he said to them, “Into what then were you baptized?”

So they said, “Into John’s baptism.”

Then Paul said, “John indeed baptized with a baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they should believe on Him who would come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus.”

When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke with tongues and prophesied.

This passage came up in my Bible reading this morning, and I wanted to tease it out a little bit. Paul comes upon some disciples, presumably Gentiles, and he notices that there’s something missing. So he asks them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit.” Presumably, this means that the thing that he noticed missing was some visible evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work. Upon further inquiry, he discovers that they were baptized “into John’s baptism.” I take that to mean that they were repenting of their sins and believing in an unnamed christ, with the anticipation that they would one day gain the further information of who that christ was. Paul supplies the missing piece, that the christ in question was Jesus Christ. All twelve of them accept this information readily, and are baptized again, into Jesus Christ. At this point, the Holy Spirit supplies the missing part that Paul noticed – they speak in tongues and prophesy.

I’m gong to completely ignore the question of whether regeneration, baptism into Jesus, receiving the Holy Spirit, and supernatural gifting are inextricably interlocked. We can say that they are closely associated, but that it’s possible to be a bit patchy on a few of those items, and move on from there.

What caught my attention this morning was the concept of rebaptism. Baptists, of course, are known for rebaptism, especially for those who were baptized as infants. But I’ve always been a little leery of it, because I felt that getting baptized again involved among other things a repudiation of your former baptism. It’s not like a bath, and it’s not like communion. In some ways it is like circumcision. If you have to do it again, this must mean there was something not quite right about the first time, so that it didn’t take.

So, my parents, when I was about 12, heard a new teaching about what baptism accomplishes, and were persuaded to get baptized again. My mom recommended it to me, but I felt that the dunking I got when I was 5 was quite sufficient. This was in spite of the fact that, right around that time, I had a major turn in my walk that looked a lot more like true repentance than what happened when I was 5. But, as Luther said, the whole Christian life should be one of repentance. If repenting some more was the basis for rebaptism, we ought to get rebaptized every day.

But here we see some folks getting baptized all over again, and they don’t seem to be repudiating their former baptism. You don’t reject John the Baptist when you accept Jesus. Jesus is the fulfillment of everything John preached. On the other hand, having met Jesus, you can’t stay with John. Or rather, you could, but that wouldn’t make you a Christian, would it?

Rebaptism from John to Jesus doesn’t seem to be a requirement. Paul was baptized into Jesus and I think never into John. James, and John the apostles were disciples of John before they came to Jesus, and there’s no indication that they were baptized again, any more than there’s an indication that Jesus baptized John the Baptist.

So it looks like rebaptism is okay, but it’s a totally optional practice. Probably it’s not even a guaranteed method of getting the gift of tongues.

I’m still not sure what to do with groups like the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, who apparently believe that it is acceptable to separate from other groups of Christians along the lines of Reformed doctrine, but perfectly reasonable to stay together across the issue of infant baptism. They have churches that practice infant baptism, and churches that only baptize on profession of faith. Usually those guys can be friends, but they can’t be the same denomination. The Baptist church tells the guy who was baptized as a baby that his baptism was basically a meaningless event, every bit as invalid as an infant marriage, that he must say his vows and go under the waters again. I think the Presbyterian church says basically that the infant baptism is every bit as valid as an infant marriage – as long as you stayed with it, it must have took – and that it’s the remarriage as an adult that is kind of silly.

Paul here tells the Corinthians that the messiah is Jesus, and they are so excited that they go and get baptized all over again. They come up spluttering and speaking in tongues. And one thing is certain: after that the Corinthians definitely new how to speak in tongues.

Tongues and Interpretation

I’m not sure what brought it to mind, but I’ve been thinking lately about the best example I ever saw of tongues and interpretation in a church setting.

In the church I went to in high school, we usually had a few pauses in the worship service that were sort of designed for an interruption from the congregation. I’m pretty sure they were put there on purpose, but they always seemed like a natural selah in the singing. That was the designated time for prophecy. Sometimes it would be the pastor, or another elder, sometimes a member of the youth. They would speak, the elders would lead the congregation in response if it was necessary, and the music would resume.

Occasionally, from the last or second to last row, this couple would rise, holding hands. It was very striking, because he was a black man, with great bright eyes and a beaming smile, and she looked as though she might have been a combination of Inuit and Welsh. First she would speak, in a tongue that sounded something like Chinese, her closed eyes rapidly fluttering, her hand clamped hard on her husband’s. When she was done, there would wait a second or two, and then her husband would open his eyes and begin to give the interpretation, always comfort and encouragement, with a voice on the verge of rejoicing.

I always thought how convenient it must be, to always bring your interpreter along with you. Paul doesn’t give the prophets any favors in his passage about decency and order. If a person prophesies and another person interrupts him, the one who was interrupted should give ground to the person who so rudely interrupted. The one who speaks in tongues, apparently, has the responsibility of ensuring that an interpreter is there. No interpreter? He should keep it to himself.

I think this places an even greater burden of charity on the congregation (and thereby on the elders as well) to plan ahead. Do you believe that these Spirit-led utterances are supposed to be a normal part of the service? You do well to set parameters and practice. Without parameters, you will get chaos, and your primary means of guiding the church in these things will be stamping out the disorder. Without practice, having stamped out the disorder, you get… nothing. Your service will be identical to our brothers in the cessationist camp, broken up by six-month swings into Pentecostal hysteria.