Speaking in (and listening to) Tongues

No one told me that the King James Version of the Bible was the “right” translation. I grew up in a church that exclusively used the KJV, but it did a lot of other things that were exclusive too—for instance, demanding that men always wear long pants in public. Choosing to champion the KJV seemed relatively normal by comparison.

The church I grew up in could loosely be called charismatic, but that would be like saying that southern summers could loosely be called sweltering. The label was accurate, but somehow didn’t quite capture the experience

We were tongue-talkers. We were holy-rollers. I could quote Acts 2:38 before I learned to read. Acts 2 is to Oneness Pentecostals what Romans 8 was to Calvinists: the Bible’s defining chapter, the storehouse for thousands of sermons, and the motivation for millions of clapped or raised hands. We even made jokes out of its language. Q: What kind of car did the apostles drive? A: A Honda. Acts 2 says they were all “with one accord in one place.”

But Acts 2 is fascinating for one reason that I don’t think I ever heard a minister mention. It basically authorizes vernacular translation. The originary moment for the church AS church involves lots of people learning to speak in languages that aren’t their own, praising God in that tongue, and then having both the miraculous form and edifying content combine to spark a mass conversion.

I never considered this when I was a Oneness Pentecostal, but one of the church’s chief ironies is that they valorize glossalalia to the point of making it essential for salvation yet remain wary of newer Biblical translations.

This manifested itself particularly in the charismatic gift of tongues and interpretation, a rare worship treat that would often happen in a revival service or on a particularly fiery Sunday night service.

The set up was this: a worship song would end and the crowd-clapping and general God-adoration wouldn’t stop. And then there would be this eerie silence as one voice started talking over everyone else in some language that clearly wasn’t in English. In fact, it wasn’t clearly anything. I never heard a public tongue-talking that was in any language I could remotely identify. (When I was in college, I thought several times of recording the language and then taking it to a linguistics professor to identify the tongue. But the recorder seemed to ensure nothing happened, as though I were the cameraman sent to capture the faces of people who believed that cameras steal souls…only to find myself without film when I arrived). Upon hearing the louder voice, everyone shut up. Suddenly the church was a cavern filled with the voice of a prophet. The tongue-talking would last for a minute or two, would cease, and then slowly the fader would be pushed up and then general crowd noise would re-enter.

We were thanking God, but we were also biding our time, waiting for the interpretation. Then a voice would ring out over the crowd, but this time, it was speaking English. Often the interpreter would be the SAME person who did the tongue-talking. I have since realized how suspicious this was, but at the time it seemed like letting the farmer who planted and reaped the crop get to enjoy the first bite of the harvested corn.

The important thing was the WAY the interpreters spoke. Maybe my memory has skewed the numbers, but I am positive that at least 40% of the English interpretations of tongue-talking moments were in King James English. “Thus saith the Lord…” they often began. It says so much that when I was in high school, this diction only lent the interpretation more authority. There were always urban legends floating around about parishioners who had abused their power: “Thus saith the Lord, ‘I shall roast thee over hell like a hot dog.” Stuff like that. Looking back, I am amazed that those sorts of wacky moments didn’t happen more often.

Ever since, I’ve been a sucker for any comedy bit that used KJV phrasing. The Holy Hand Grenade section from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. The soliloquy at the end of Woody Allen’s Love and Death. But it’s only because I know how much power the language has that these bits are hilarious, that almost as a defense mechanism against the powerful use of language represented in Acts 2, we had to make a groan-worthy car pun out of its 1^st verse.