Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin joins host Cy Kellett to respond to a thoughtful caller’s question: Can someone really speak in the tongues of angels? And what does the Catholic Church actually teach about the gift of tongues? Jimmy explains the biblical context of speaking in tongues, clarifies the difference between real human languages and “angelic speech,” and affirms that Catholics are free to hold differing views.
Transcript:
Cy: What’s the Catholic position on the gift of tongues? Does it have to include unintelligible sounds, just real languages, or are Catholics free to have different opinions on this?
Jimmy: Catholics are free to have different opinions on this. There is no single Catholic teaching on this. And you will find Catholics who do have different opinions on this, if you’re interested.
For what it’s worth, my opinion is that the phenomena spoken of in the Bible that are regarded, that are called speaking in tongues, both in the Book of Acts and in Paul’s writings, especially First Corinthians, are languages that are not naturally known by the person who speaks them, and they are normal human languages.
There are other proposals that have been made, like these are maybe the tongues of angels, and Paul does in First Corinthians 13 refer to the tongues of angels. But I think that that’s not to be taken literally. He’s using that as kind of hyperbolic case. Like, even if I were to speak in the tongues of angels, he’s not. And so that’s not typical of what’s happening.
Furthermore, I don’t think angels have literal languages because they don’t have bodies. So they certainly don’t have the physical organ of a tongue. And they correspondingly would not have the concept of language the way we have it, which is where you take your thought, which is at the base level, expressed in what sometimes referred to as mentalese, and then you turn that.
For most people, it happens so naturally, you’re not even aware of the mentalese behind the linguistic expression. Like, if I have the thought, “Oh, it’s cold in here,” that comes to me as phenomenologically, or what it’s like to have that experience, it comes to me prepackaged in words. But really there is a mental articulation of it that is prior to words.
I have seen examples of that, typically in situations where I don’t have time to express something in words. Like I remember driving down a curvy hill, you know, with these switchbacks and stuff, some years ago, and the vehicle I was driving suddenly started to slide because of rocks on the road. I could see, you know, the next turn coming up and what I needed to do, and I didn’t have time to articulate it in words, but in mentalese, I knew exactly what I needed to do.
So there are situations where you can become aware of your own ment. But normally it’s so bound up in our language that when we think to ourselves, if we have an internal monologue, which most people do, then we don’t really distinguish them. But with angels, since they don’t have physical bodies, they’re gonna think in mentalese and they’re gonna be telepathic creatures that communicate in mentalese. So they’re not gonna need languages the way we have them.
So I think both because Paul is being hyperbolic and because angels don’t really have languages, certainly not ones that humans could pronounce, I don’t think that tongues of angels is a good explanation of what’s going on in the Bible.
Other people have tried to propose that this is a miracle of hearing because they’ll say in Acts, when the apostles start speaking in tongues, you have this multi-ethnic crowd. And they say, “Aren’t we hearing them all in our own languages?” And they think, “Oh, it’s a miracle of hearing.” You know, it’s like you, whatever language they’re speaking, you hear it in your own language.
But that doesn’t really fit the text. That’s bad exegesis, to use a term we defined a little bit earlier. The crowd is speaking in the mode of a Greek chorus, where Luke presents the crowd as having one unified voice, as if they’re one character and they’re all saying the same words together.
“Are we not Cretans and Libyans and visitors from Rome, both Jewish and Greek?” You know, this is not what they were literally saying. It was a crowd of people; they weren’t all saying the same thing. And Luke is just summarizing their experience. Their experience is they did hear these Galileans speaking in their own languages.
And that’s what this is. This is Galileans speaking in languages they did not naturally know. And that also fits the same. That’s the best fit for the data in the Bible. So I’m convinced that what is happening in biblical tongues is you’re speaking a language that you don’t naturally know and you don’t even know what you’re saying.
That’s why Paul says in First Corinthians that you may need to pray for the gift of interpretation to be able to understand what you’re saying.
Now there are a couple of terms that get used for this sometimes. The two terms are glossolalia and xenoglossy. In Greek, glossa means tongue. And so it can either be the tongue in your mouth or it can be the language you’re speaking. Glossolalia means speaking in tongues, where by its etymology, whereas xeno means foreign, and so xenoglossy is speaking a foreign language.
The way these two terms have evolved, sometimes any kind of speaking in tongues is called glossolalia, and it would include the kind of tongues I’ve been talking about. But other times, people distinguish these two and they’ll say, okay, glossolalia is what happens when someone is not speaking a real human language that they just don’t know, whereas xenoglossy is speaking a real human language that they don’t naturally know.
And so you may encounter those two terms, and sometimes they’re used in ways that distinguish them.
What about the kind of speaking in tongues that goes on today? Well, there are reports of people speaking in foreign languages, and some of these are well grounded. You know, where you have a native speaker of whatever language is being spoken, and they can identify the language and translate what was being said. So there are reliable reports of glossolalia occurring.
Most of the time, though, I don’t think that a lot of it is real human languages. It’s something else. And so the question could be, what else is it? I don’t think it’s languages of angels, because I don’t think angels really have languages, certainly not ones we could pronounce.
So one possibility is that it is someone doing what they think is speaking another language as a kind of private prayer language. That’s a proposal that’s often made in some Pentecostal and Charismatic circles, that it’s not a real language that anybody uses, but it’s sort of a private prayer language for you, that the Holy Spirit is. You’re having a spiritual experience and this private prayer language comes out, and that’s what speaking in tongues is.
Well, I wouldn’t say that’s what tongues is in the Bible, of course.
Another possibility that a skeptic would propose is that you’re just babbling and it doesn’t really have any meaning at all. I tend not to take a hard position either way. A few years ago, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, as it’s now called, put out a document on charismatic gifts called *Juvenesque Ecclesia*.
In this document, it pointed out that none of the lists of spiritual gifts in the New Testament are exhaustive and that God can give new spiritual gifts to people at different periods in church history. So it’s not like there’s a single list, and this is all God gives and all he’s ever going to give.
So I don’t preclude the possibility that God could have someone speaking in a private prayer language today. I would say that’s different than the biblical understanding of tongues. So it would be a different kind of tongues, but I don’t rule it out.
On the other hand, I also don’t rule out the skeptical position that in some cases nothing supernatural is going on here and the person is just generating speech content that sounds like what they’ve seen other people do when they are speaking in tongues, but that they’re not. Actually, nothing supernatural is happening here.
So I leave that question open. What I can say with confidence is that the best fit for the biblical understanding of speaking in tongues is it’s a real human language that you don’t naturally know. But I don’t rule out other understandings of tongues that could be active today. But that’s just my opinion.
Cy: Magic Carp, thank you very much. That’ll take us to the break. We’ll be right back with more Jimmy Akin Ask Me Anything Internet questions right after this on Catholic Answers Live!