Is speaking in tongues the proof you have the Holy Spirit — or are Pentecostals building an entire theology on one passage in Acts?

• R

  Riley2w ago

  I spoke in tongues for the first time at 19 at a revival in rural Tennessee. I wasn't trying, wasn't worked up, wasn't even sure I believed it was real. It just... happened. I wept for an hour afterward. You can call that psychology or crowd dynamics. I was alone in a back corner of the room. Something happened that night I cannot explain away and I'm 54 years old now and I've never stopped believing it.

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• MM

  Maya M.1w ago

  My grandmother prayed in tongues every single morning of her life. Quiet, private, not performative. She is the reason I'm a Christian. I don't care what your systematic theology says about it. I watched that woman's prayer life and I want whatever she had.

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• L

  Leo2w ago

  bro i grew up in a pentecostal church and the pressure to 'receive your tongues' was genuinely traumatic. elders would gather around teenagers and tell them to repeat syllables until something happened. people would fake it because the shame of being the only one who hadn't received it yet was unbearable. that is not the fruit of the Spirit. that's coercion with a Bible verse attached.

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• Q_

  Quinn _x1w ago

  Here's where I actually land after 20 years of thinking about this: the Pentecostal tradition retrieved something real that the Western church had buried under rationalism and respectability. But the specific doctrine that tongues is THE required evidence turned a good recovery into a new legalism. We traded one kind of works-righteousness for another — instead of earning God through morality you earn the Spirit through the right spiritual experience. That's still grace-less at its core.

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• R

  Riley2w ago

  I'm a linguist. Not coming at this from any particular faith tradition. The 'tongues' described in Acts 2 — where everyone heard in their own language — is completely different from what's described in 1 Corinthians 12-14, which requires an interpreter and sounds like it's unintelligible to others. These might not even be the same phenomenon. That distinction matters enormously for how you build your theology, and almost nobody in these debates acknowledges it.

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• C

  Casey2w ago

  I dont know what I believe about tongues anymore but I'll tell you this: the MEANEST most unloving most self-righteous people I ever met in my life all spoke in tongues regularly. And the most Spirit-filled man I've ever personally known was a Baptist deacon who would've thought the whole thing was weird. I'm just saying the correlation between the sign and the actual fruit isn't what some folks claim.

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• A9

  Alex 922w ago

  The whole 'tongues as initial evidence' doctrine is built on three or four narrative passages in Acts, which are DESCRIPTIVE not PRESCRIPTIVE. You cannot build a universal doctrinal requirement on what Luke is simply recording happened. That's hermeneutics 101. Even Gordon Fee, a Pentecostal NT scholar himself, admitted the doctrine is exegetically weak. This isn't me being anti-Spirit. It's me reading the Bible carefully.

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• T

  Taylor2w ago

  Tongues is real. I've seen it. I've experienced it. But making it a REQUIREMENT for salvation or Spirit-indwelling? No. That's where I part ways with my Pentecostal brothers and sisters. You are separating believers over a secondary sign. I've met Spirit-filled Presbyterians who have never uttered a syllable of glossolalia and their lives reek of Jesus. Fruit is the evidence. Not syllables.

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• J

  Jordan2w ago

  Paul literally says 'I speak in tongues more than all of you' (1 Cor 14:18) and then says he'd rather speak five words with his mind than ten thousand in a tongue in church (v.19). He values the gift and also pumps the brakes hard on making it the centerpiece of worship. The Pentecostal tradition has, in many places, done the exact opposite of what Paul instructed. That should bother people.

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• R

  Riley1w ago

  This hits different for me because I faked tongues for three years as a teenager to fit in. Nobody told me to fake it explicitly but the social pressure was so intense I just started mimicking what I heard around me. I eventually got saved — actually, genuinely, for real this time — in a church that never mentioned tongues once. Make of that what you will.

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• I

  Iris2w ago

  1 Corinthians 12:30 — 'Do all speak in tongues?' The implied answer is NO. Paul himself says not everyone has every gift. So how on earth does a movement build a doctrine that EVERYONE must speak in tongues to prove they have the Spirit when the apostle who wrote the most about tongues explicitly says they don't? Someone explain this to me like I'm five.

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• M

  Morgan2w ago

  if speaking in tongues is proof of the spirit then what is it proof of when people in non-Christian religions do it? Because they do. This phenomenon shows up in voodoo rituals, in ancient Greek oracles, in shamanic practice. Are we sure we're talking about something unique to Christianity here or just a human capacity that gets interpreted through whatever religious framework someone is in?

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• I

  Iris1w ago

  Fine. Tongues might be a real gift. Fine, maybe it's still active. But can someone — ANYONE — explain to me a single Pentecostal service where the tongue was followed by an interpretation as Paul commands in 1 Cor 14:27-28? Because I have been in hundreds of these services and the 'interpretation' step conveniently gets skipped more often than not. If you're going to insist the gift is real and required, at least follow the biblical instructions for how to use it.

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• S

  Sam2w ago

  The cessationist position has always struck me as oddly convenient. 'Yes all the gifts existed, yes they were powerful, but they stopped exactly when we stopped needing them and also right around the time the canon closed.' You built that timeline from silence and tradition and then called it theology. I'll take the global Pentecostal church of 600 million people experiencing something over a doctrine argued from absence.

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• D

  Diego1w ago

  Respectfully, if you disagree that tongues is a valid gift for today, explain what you do with the global church explosion in the Global South — Nigeria, Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines — where charismatic Christianity is the fastest-growing form of Christian faith and accounts for hundreds of millions of converts. Are you really going to sit in your reformed seminary and tell those believers their experience of God isn't real? On what authority?

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• LL

  Leo L.2w ago

  Hard disagree with everyone calling this traumatic or manipulative as if that's what tongue-speaking IS. My church practices tongues every Sunday. Nobody is pressured. Nobody is shamed. It's reverent and orderly, exactly like 1 Cor 14 describes. You had bad church experiences. I'm sorry. But you don't get to define the gift by the worst version of it.

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• M

  Morgan1w ago

  The question in the title is actually two different questions conflated into one. 'Is tongues real' and 'is tongues THE evidence of Spirit baptism' are separate debates. You can fully affirm the gift as active and legitimate today and still reject the Oneness Pentecostal / classical AG doctrine that it's the initial physical evidence. Most charismatics outside strict Pentecostalism do exactly that.

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• F

  Feli2w ago

  What's funny is that both sides of this debate are basically ignoring the cessationist elephant in the room. A LOT of Reformed and Baptist folks think tongues stopped entirely after the apostolic age, which means the whole argument about whether it's 'initial evidence' is moot to them. Three different camps and they all think the other two are reading the Bible wrong. Gotta love the church.

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• HT

  Hana T.1w ago

  growth in numbers doesn't equal theological correctness. Islam is growing. Mormonism grew fast. Prosperity gospel churches are exploding in Africa. numerical growth is not a hermeneutical argument.

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• MS

  Marco S.2w ago

  That's actually a fair challenge and the answer most serious Pentecostal theologians would give is that not every spiritual experience is from the Holy Spirit — Satan counterfeits gifts. But yes, it does complicate the 'tongues is proof' argument considerably when the thing you're calling proof appears cross-culturally in non-Christian contexts.

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• Z

  Zara2w ago

  Counterpoint: the meanest people I've ever met claimed to be Bible-believing Baptists who'd never spoken in tongues. Anecdotal evidence cuts every direction. Let's argue theology not our bad experiences.

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