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1 Corinthians 14: The Abuse of the Gift of Tongues

Although they were designed to help the church, tongues became quite a divisive issue among the Corinthians. According to the account in 1 Corinthians 14, there were several abuses occurring. Among them are: (1) several people spoke in tongues at the same time; (2) a majority of the church would speak in tongues at any given gathering; (3) tongues were spoken without interpretation being given or sought; and (4) women were assuming roles of authority and speaking tongues in the church. All these created confusion in the Church instead of edification. In answer to this, Paul assured the Corinthians that God is not the God of confusion and that something was amiss at Corinth (cf., 1 Cor. 14:33).

Since God is not the author of confusion, this means that God was not initiating all of the tongues-speaking occurring in the Corinthian church. It is reasonable to postulate that the Holy Spirit would neither cause someone to speak in tongues at the same time another person was speaking, nor cause someone to speak without inspiring someone else with the gift of interpretation to interpret the tongue, nor cause women to speak in tongues if, as 1 Cor. 14:34 shows, He intended them to remain silent.

This being the case, it means that the unrestrained tongue-speaking must have been coming from another source. The two possibilities remaining are the demonic world and the mind of the Corinthian church member. We have already noted that Paul warned the Corinthians that Satan transforms himself into an angel of light, masquerading in the Church as an apostle of Christ. We also noted that since he and his minions have the power to mimic the miracles of God, it is highly plausible that the demons were prompting at least some of the tongues in the Corinthian Church, influencing those whose allegiance to God was poor or non-existent (cf., 1 John 2:18-19). This would account for the confusion that was created, for if, as Paul affirms, God is not responsible for the confusion, then another entity must be responsible for it. Along these same lines, we must also realize that, if the Corinthians were being faithless and disobedient, God could allow demons to enter the church as a form of chastisement. Regarding prophets in rebellion, such passages as Ezekiel 14:6-11 and 1 Kings 22:22-23 show that God takes an active role in permitting them to speak words of deception.

The other possibility for the confusion, of course, is the Corinthians themselves who, according to Paul's warnings, perhaps wouldn't need prompting from a demon to exercise their overly-inflated spiritual egos. Blurting out something akin to tongues-speech in order to gain recognition may have come as naturally to them as walking or talking. According to 1 Cor. 12:30 and 14:5, the Holy Spirit did not give all the Corinthians the ability to speak in tongues. Hence, some of the Corinthians that did not have the gift could have become jealous of their brothers who did, and thus be led to pretend that they also had the gift. This is not a far-fetched possibility, since the Corinthians were infamous for their jealousy over one another (1 Cor. 3:3-5).

A possible mitigating factor here is that Paul does not explicitly mention the alternative origins (eg., demons or man) of tongue-speaking that are not inspired by God. He merely says that God is not the originator of confusion. We can conclude from this that God will not initiate an illicit tongues experience. Whether the proper protocol of tongue-speaking is being followed is of paramount importance in discerning if the particular manifestation is indeed from God. If the rules are not being followed, it is a corollary truth that the tongues-speech is not of divine origin, for God would not contradict His own mandates. The only other possibility is that if God gave someone the power to speak in tongues without an interpreter being present Paul commands that person "to speak to himself and to God" (1 Cor. 14:28), but such an occasion would be rare as well as irrelevant to the issue at hand.

A more subtle explanation Paul offers for the presence of illicit tongues-speech is suggested in 1 Cor. 14:21, in the somewhat strange and seemingly out-of-place reference to the Old Testament. Paul warns the Corinthians as follows:

" In the Law it is written, "By men of strange tongues and by the lips of strangers I will speak to this people, and even so they will not listen to Me," says the Lord. So then tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe, but to unbelievers..."

We must do some unpacking of this verse in order to understand precisely what is being said. The first point of notice is that Paul is quoting from Isaiah 28:11-12. This is a direct translation from the Hebrew, omitting only a small portion of verse 12 and adding "says the Lord" at the end. Paul also exercises some literary freedom in making the passage speak in the first person ("I will speak to this people"), whereas Isaiah wrote in the third person ("He will speak to this people"). We might wonder why Paul added this obscure quote to his text, since without it he could have easily made his point to the Corinthians that tongues should not gain the ascendancy over prophecy. Indeed, the use of the Isaiah quote becomes all the more intriguing when it is noted that the unbelievers in view are the apostate Jews of the 8th century B.C. just prior to their ultimate punishment from God, who used the Assyrians to totally destroy them in 722 B.C. The Jews, who had rejected the clear words of God spoken through the prophets, had fallen into such unbelief that God told Isaiah He would now let the foreign tongues and stammering lips of Assyria do His speaking to Israel for Him. Isaiah records the condition of Israel in 28:7-8:

"And these also reel with wine and stagger from strong drink, they are confused by wine from strong drink; they reel while having visions, they totter when rendering judgment. For all the tables are full of filthy vomit, without a single clean place."

Isaiah continues with God's resolution in 28:9, 13:

" To whom would He teach knowledge? And to whom would He interpret the message? Those just weaned from milk? Those just taken from the breast?...So the word of the Lord to them will be 'Order on order, order on order, line on line, line on line, a little here, a little there,' that they may go and stumble backward, be broken, snared, and taken captive."

The phraseology "Order on order, order on order, line on line, line on line, a little here, a little there" are Hebrew monosyllables resembling the babbling of a baby. The sound would be something like: "tsa, latsa, tsa, latsa, ka, laka, ka, laka." Because they have rejected His clear words, God will now speak to them in gibberish, like that of a baby, only the words will not come from a gentle infant but from the fierce mouths of their Assyrian oppressors.

The same description of judgment over one hundred years later against the nation of Judah is recorded in Jeremiah 5:15. For Judah's apostasy the Lord brought the babbling tongues of the nation of Babylon against them. He says:

" 'Behold, I am bringing a nation against you from afar, O house of Israel,' declares the Lord. 'It is an enduring nation; it is an ancient nation, a nation whose language you do not know, nor can you understand what they say."

In verses 20-23 Jeremiah continues:

"'Declare this in the house of Jacob, and proclaim it in Judah, saying, 'Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not. 'Do you not fear Me?' declares the Lord. 'Do you not tremble in my presence.'...But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart. They have turned aside and departed."

At this point in Israel's history, there were many false prophets who were causing the people to turn away from the true faith. In Jeremiah 23:11-12, God complains to Jeremiah that

"...both prophet and priest are polluted; even in My house I have found their wickedness," declares the Lord. "Therefore their way will be like slippery paths to them, they will be driven away into the gloom and fall down in it; for I shall being calamity upon them, the year of their punishment," declares the Lord."

Continuing in verses 14-15, he writes:

"Also among the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing: the committing of adultery and walking in falsehood...All of them have become to Me like Sodom, and her inhabitants like Gomorrah. Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets, behold I am going to feed them wormwood and make them drink poisonous water, for from the prophets of Jerusalem pollution has gone forth into all the land."

Finally in verses 16 through 32 He warns that the prophets of Israel speak from their own mind:

"Thus says the Lord of hosts, "do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility; they speak a vision of their own imagination, not from the mouth of the Lord....I did not send these prophets but they ran. I did not speak to them, but they prophesied....I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy falsely in My name, saying, 'I had a dream, I had a dream!'...Behold, I am against those who have prophesied false dreams," declares the Lord...and led My people astray by their falsehoods..."

The prophet Ezekiel records the same phenomenon. In Ezekiel 13:2-9 the Lord speaks to him these words:

"Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel who prophesy, and say to those who prophesy from their own inspiration, 'Listen to the word of the Lord!' Thus says the Lord God, "Woe to the foolish prophets who are following their own spirit and have seen nothing....So My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations..."

Future Implications

Describing God's judgment as coming in the form of foreign tongues was first prophesied to Israel in the 15th century B.C., just prior to their entrance into the land of Canaan. Among the blessings and cursings that were detailed on Mt. Gerazim, one of the latter is stated in Deut 28:49-50 as:

"The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, as the eagle swoops down, a nation whose language you shall not understand, a nation of fierce countenance who shall have no respect for the old, nor show favor to the young."

The other mention of the nation of "fierce countenance" (Hebrew: az panim) is in Daniel 8:23. Like Deut 28:50, this passage concerns God's use of a foreign king to come against His people of God as a means of judgment against them. The distinction of Daniel's account is that, according to Daniel 8:17-19, 26, it is a prophecy of the "time of the end" which "pertains to many days" in the future. What "end" he has in view is not abundantly clear, but it is said to include a king who will come after the reign of Greece, the third kingdom in Daniel's visions.

Two possibilities have been advanced for the identity of this future kingdom. The bulk of modern scholarship, following the view of the third century historian Porphyry (who claimed that the Jews of the second century B.C. placed historical events in the mouth of Daniel as prophecy), assigns the fourth kingdom to the Roman Empire that conquered the Greeks. The king in view is said to be the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes IV who reigned from 175-163 B.C. and who desecrated the Jewish religion as recorded in the books of Maccabees. If this is true, the "end" in view would be the demise of Old Testament Judaism.

The problem with assigning the fourth king to Antiochus Epiphanes IV is that, not only does it deny to Daniel the gift of true prophecy, but Antiochus fulfills virtually none of Daniel's descriptions about the fourth kingdom. Beginning with Daniel 7:7, the fourth beast is "dreadful and terrifying and extremely strong," "different than all the beasts that went before it" and "it had ten horns." The fourth beast is further explained in Daniel 7:23 as the "fourth kingdom...which will devour the whole earth and tread it down and crush it." In Daniel 8:23-25 the same king is said to be "skilled at intrigue" that his "power will be mighty" that he "will destroy to an extraordinary degree...mighty men and the holy people" and will "cause deceit to exceed by his influence" and even "oppose the Prince of princes." Antiochus Epiphanes IV hardly fulfills any of these things predictions. Although he severely persecuted the Jews, he was publicly humiliated by the Roman Senate and finally retreated in defeat to Syria, his place of origin (Giuseppi Ricciotti's The History of Israel, p. 43; See also Edwin R. Belvin's The House of Seleucus, pp. 138-145, as cited Desmond Birch's Trial, Tribulation and Triumph, p. 486).

In place of modern scholarship, the Fathers of the Church, with Jerome as the chief exegete, agree in consensus that the fourth kingdom, or the "little horn," is a future kingdom. It will be divided into ten kingdoms, from which the future Antichrist will come, the man of sin described in 2 Thess. 2:3-10. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) champions this same view, and cites the Fathers Irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Chrysostom, Hilary, Theophilactus, Oecomenius, Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrose and Jerome as its adherents. Jerome writes:

" Therefore, let us state what all the ecclesiastical writers have passed down the following: At the consummation of the world, when the Kingdom of the Romans has been destroyed, when ten kings shall have divided the territory of the Romans between themselves, an eleventh shall rise to a small kingdom, who when he shall have overcome three of the ten kings, ie, the king of the Egyptians, of the Africans, and of the Ethiopians and consequently as we learn more manifestly - whom he shall have killed, the other seven kings shall submit their necks to the victor" (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, Vol. LXXV A, S. Heironymi Presbyteri Opera, Pars I, Commentoriorum in Danielum, p. 844).

Of the future Antichrist, Jerome writes:

"Nor do we think him to be the Devil or a demon (as some others do), but one of mankind in whom Satan shall dwell totally...his mouth uttering great boasts, for he is the man of sin the son of perdition, such that he will seat himself in the temple as if he were God" (Ibid).

If true, then this places the king of "fierce countenance" in the distant future long after Antiochus Epiphanes.

In addition, the distinguishing feature of the man of sin, according to 2 Thess. 2:9, is that he draws his power from Satan and performs "signs and lying wonders." Active in this deception is God Himself who will "...shall send them strong delusion that they should believe the lie" (verse 11). As noted previously in Ezekiel 14:6-11 and 1 Kings 22:22-23, God takes an active role against prophets who rebel against Him, causing them to speak false prophecies. The work of the "man of sin" coincides with the works of the "dragon, the beast and the false prophet" mentioned in Rev. 13:14; 16:14; 19:20 who perform signs and miracles to deceive the whole world. It is against the Church herself that the attack of these demonic forces is primarily targeted.

Hence, the "king of fierce countenance" who comes with "another tongue," first prophesied as a means of God's judgment in Deut 28:50, and partially fulfilled in the destruction of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians and Babylonians, respectively, is finally fulfilled in the prophesy of Daniel 8:23-25. This final king will be worse than all before him. As Daniel describes him, he will be skilled at understanding the secrets of life, and with his great power and deceitful signs he will destroy the holy people of God. When this will all occur we do not know, but we do know that it must occur before Christ will return again. As the Catholic Catechism says:

"Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh" (Para 675).

Thus we see that the passage Paul chooses from the Old Testament to make his point to the Corinthians is no ordinary passage. Implicit in his selection of Isaiah 28:11 and its related passages is an indictment against the Corinthians for their unbelief, an unbelief characterized by their abuse of tongue-speaking, among other things. It is not surprising to see this indictment in the Corinthian letter, for up until chapter 14 where the tongues issue is directly addressed, every prior chapter of the Corinthian letter carries with it some form of indictment against them for their unruly and immoral behavior. The abuse of tongues was a symptom of a much larger problem.

Paul begins his warning to them in 1 Cor. 14:20, saying, "Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; in evil be babes, but in your thinking be mature." A childlike immaturity, which is precisely the spiritual condition of the Corinthians, would be very attracted to the pomp and pageantry associated with tongue-speaking. As Paul had made clear in the opening chapters of the letter, the Corinthians were vying for ascendancy in the church, one saying "I'm of Apollos," the other saying "I'm of Paul," and another "I'm of Cephas," and yet another "I'm of Christ" (cf., 1 Cor. 1:11-12; 3:3-5, 21; 4:6), and as a result they ran the risk of destroying the church by their prideful divisions (cf., 1 Cor. 3:10-17). The proliferation of tongues in the Corinthian church was one of the greater divisive issues. The more they spoke in tongues above that which was ordained of God, the more they harmed the church and subsequently opened themselves up to God's judgment. Inordinate tongues-speaking was one of the means of building the church with "wood, hay and straw" due to the divisions it caused (1 Cor. 3:12) and in 1 Cor. 3:17 Paul was adamant that "If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are."

In 1 Cor. 10:1-13, Paul warned the Corinthians by comparing them to the Jews of the Old Testament. The Jews were "baptized" in the sea and ate a spiritual food and drink similar to what the Corinthians had experienced in their Christian baptism and Lord's Supper. In fact, Paul says, the Jews actually had Christ "following them" in the form of a "spiritual rock," similar to the Corinthians who had Christ in the Eucharist. Yet, Paul warns, even with all those spiritual blessings the Jews sinned grievously in the wilderness, and God subsequently destroyed them for their unbelief. In 1 Cor. 10:6 and 11 Paul warns that those incidents were written down in the Old Testament precisely to serve as warnings to the Corinthians that God will not tolerate sin and unbelief among His people.

Hence, although when used properly tongue-speaking was a blessing of God and a means to communicate the gospel, it could easily turn into a curse and the very means by which the Corinthians might fall from the faith. In fact, in 1 Cor 14:22, Paul specifies that "tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe, but to unbelievers, but prophecy is not for unbelievers, but to those who believe." The "unbeliever," as Paul goes on to describe in verses 23-25, would be someone who happens to attend a Corinthian eucharistic celebration.

Paul never says, however, that the Corinthians' tongues-speaking is a sign to the "ungifted" or "unbeliever" that actually enters the Corinthian Church (1 Cor. 14:23-25). The hypothetical entrance of the "ungifted" and "unbeliever" is used only for the purpose of illustrating to the Corinthians how silly they look when the whole church is speaking in tongues. Practically speaking, tongues could not be a sign to the ungifted or unbelieving man of the street, since, according to Paul's reasoning, upon hearing tongues they would walk away in disgust thinking the Corinthians to be insane.

Moreover, it would be a contradiction for Paul to establish tongues as a sign to unbelievers in 1 Cor 14: 21, but then discourage giving tongues as a sign to the unbeliever who walks into the Corinthian church. According to Paul's reasoning, the only "sign" to which the unbeliever or ungifted will respond is prophecy, since when he hears the clear word of prophecy he will "fall on his face and worship God." Hence, the only logical reason for Paul to quote the passage in Isaiah 28 concerning the Assyrian tongues which were given as a sign to the Jews of their unbelief is that the inordinate proliferation of tongues by the those in the Corinthian church serves as a sign their unbelief.

To Paul, and of course God, prophecy was to be the superior gift to tongues, for no other reason than that it contained the clear and unmistakable message of God. Yet the Corinthians were attempting to make tongues the superior gift. As noted earlier, the Corinthians went beyond what God actually inspired and thus began to create their own version of tongues, resulting in several people speaking at one time or out of turn (many of them women who were told to keep silent), often with no interpreter, causing mass confusion within the church.

Proliferating tongues-speaking beyond what God allowed would be very easy to accomplish. One did not have to think of what he was going to say. All one needed to do was speak in an unintelligible utterance and hope that the church would believe that God was actually speaking through him. Tongue-speaking was much easier to camouflage than prophecy, since if no interpreter was present the church would not know whether the tongue speaker was divinely inspired or speaking from his own mind. But in attempting to speak in a prophecy, a charlatan would have a much harder time passing the scrutiny of the church, since the words of a prophecy would be clearly understood by all present such that those same hearers would subsequently hold the speaker accountable to whatever he prophesied. If his prophecy was never fulfilled, the "prophet" would easily be exposed as a fraud.

For anyone attempting to make himself appear more spiritual than others in the church, as was the penchant of many of the Corinthians, tongues would be the perfect means to gain such status, since the risk of having someone find out he was a fraud was minimized by the fact that no one in the church understood what the tongue-speaker was saying in order to hold him accountable.

So what is the bottom line in all this? Paul is warning the Corinthians that a proliferation of tongues in the church means that the occurrence is illicit. The more the Corinthians engage in this behavior the more they show themselves to be unbelievers like the Jews of Isaiah's time who no longer wanted to hear the clear words of prophecy and thus God forced them to hear His word through the babbling tongues of their Assyrian oppressors, but obviously it was a word of judgment, not blessing. As Paul says in 1 Cor. 14:22, tongues are a "sign to unbelievers." Paul's introduction of the word "sign" appears as a commentary on the incident recorded of the Jews in Isaiah's time, the people of God in that day, but who became apostate unbelievers. The "sign" the Jews were given for their unbelief and God's ensuing judgment was tongues - a tongue, which at God's direction, replaced the clear word of prophecy.

Similarly, when Jesus began preaching to the Jews, He taught them in parables, not because He was trying to make things clearer, but to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah 6:9-10 which stated that, because of their obstinate unbelief, God would speak to them in "veiled" language so that they would not understand Him. In this way, God took an active role in reinforcing their decision to disbelieve Him (cf., Matt 13:13-15). Likewise, the Corinthian's spiritual immaturity prompted them to elevate tongues as the superior gift, and, in turn, God would allow the mass proliferation of this unintelligible speech to be their panacea, all the while serving as a sign of their sin and rebellion.

It is important to note here that in the case of rebellion, God is not neutral. He will judge apostates, and will do so much more swiftly than He will judge atheists and agnostics. As noted previously, Paul warned the Corinthians about God's judgment against their spiritual abuses in 1 Cor. 3:17, making it clear that God would destroy those who destroy His temple. The other New Testament writers give similar ominous warnings. In 1 Peter 4:17, Peter warns that "judgment begins with the household of God," and John's Revelation speaks of seven churches in the first century who were warned and judged for their sins of apostasy (Rev. 2-3).

As Paul records earlier in his letter, the Corinthians had already experienced a taste of judgment when God took the lives various members for abusing the Eucharist (1 Cor. 11:29-30). We see that, prior to the judgment, God allows the apostates to continue in their pernicious ways so that their sin accumulates and is ripe for judgment (Gen 15:16; 2 Macc 6:12-17). Prior to this, God gives space for repentance, as Paul did for the Corinthians. But at the end of his second letter to the Corinthians we find that many had still not repented of their sins and Paul warns them that they are on the brink of judgment (2 Cor. 12:20-13:10).

In regard to tongues, if the Corinthians went against God's wishes and sought to elevate tongues as the premier gift of the church, God would allow them to go down that path, but at the same time, the subsequent proliferation of tongues would serve as a sign of their false belief and God's ensuing judgment. In 1 Cor. 14:23 Paul says that the unbeliever or ungifted man who walks in would hear everyone speaking in tongues and say "you are insane," which, when juxtaposed with verse 25, really means "God is not among you." Ironically, the unbeliever or ungifted man would serve as the "prophet" who foretold the horrible spiritual condition of the Corinthians.

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