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Creedal Faith
Depth

The Modern Church

The history of tongues

From "missionary tongues" to private prayer language - what early Pentecostals expected, what happened on the mission field, what linguists have found, and what the Fathers said.

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The first Pentecostals did not believe they were speaking a private prayer language. They believed they were speaking real foreign languages, given by the Spirit as at Pentecost, so that missionaries could preach to the nations without learning their languages. Charles Parham taught it from 1901. Azusa Street's newspaper reported languages identified by hearers. Within months, missionaries sailed for India, China and Africa expecting to preach in the tongues they had received.

It did not work. A.G. and Lillian Garr, who arrived in Calcutta in early 1907, found that they could not make themselves understood in Bengali or any other local language. Other missionaries had the same experience. The movement adjusted: tongues came to be understood as prayer in an unknown or heavenly language, addressed to God rather than to men (1 Corinthians 14:2), or as the "tongues of angels" (1 Corinthians 13:1). Today most Pentecostals and charismatics describe tongues as a private prayer language.

Linguists who have studied recorded glossolalia - most thoroughly William Samarin in Tongues of Men and Angels (1972) - have found that it uses sounds from the speaker's own language, lacks the structure of any human language, and cannot be translated. Similar speech occurs outside Christianity. No case of a person speaking an unlearned human language has been documented in a way that meets ordinary standards of evidence, though many testimonies claim it.

The Fathers understood the tongues of Acts as real languages and generally treated them as a sign for the apostolic age. Augustine wrote that tongues were "signs adapted to the time", showing that the gospel would run through every language - "that thing was done for a betokening, and it passed away". Chrysostom said the passage in 1 Corinthians was obscure because such gifts "used to occur but now no longer take place". Irenaeus, on the other hand, around 180, reported brethren who "speak all kinds of languages" through the Spirit.

None of the four traditions denies that God may give extraordinary gifts. All of them note that the Church fulfilled Pentecost's promise of the gospel in every language by missionaries and translators - Cyril and Methodius, the Bible translators - rather than by miraculous speech.

Verdict: there is no credible evidence that the gift of speaking unlearned human languages has been restored. Modern tongues are something different from what the first Pentecostals claimed, and different from what the Fathers understood by the gift.

What is believed

There are two views, and the movement has moved from the first to the second.

The early Pentecostal view (1901-c. 1910): the tongues given in Spirit baptism are real human languages - Chinese, Hindustani, African languages - given for preaching the gospel to the nations in the last days, as at Pentecost.

The later and present view: tongues are a God-given language of prayer and praise, usually not a human language, which the believer does not understand. "He that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men, but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries" (1 Corinthians 14:2). In public worship a tongue should be interpreted; in private it edifies the speaker (14:4). Some hold that these may be "tongues of angels" (13:1). Most Pentecostals and charismatics would add that God can and occasionally does give a real human language, as at Pentecost.

Where it came from

Missionary tongues before Topeka

The hope of miraculous languages for missionaries was in the air before 1901. In 1895 a young woman in the Holiness movement, Jennie Glassey, claimed to have received an African language for mission work, and her case was publicised in Holiness papers; Frank Sandford's Shiloh community in Maine, which Parham visited in 1900, expected the same. Gary McGee, a Pentecostal historian, has documented this expectation in detail.†

Parham and Azusa Street

Charles Parham taught from Topeka onward that the tongues of Spirit baptism were known languages. He told a Kansas newspaper in 1901 that missionaries need no longer spend years learning languages; he and his students claimed to have spoken in Chinese, German, Swedish, Hindi and others.†

At Azusa Street, The Apostolic Faith regularly reported that visitors had heard their own languages: "The gift of languages is given with the commission, 'Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.' The Lord has given languages to the unlearned... Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Zulu and languages of Africa, Hindu and Bengali and dialects of India..." (September 1906). †

What happened in the field

Within a year, several dozen missionaries had left for Asia and Africa, many without training, money or a sending agency, trusting their tongues.

Alfred Goodrich Garr and his wife Lillian, who had received tongues at Azusa Street and believed Lillian had been given Tibetan and Chinese and Alfred an Indian language, reached Calcutta at the end of 1906. They found they could not communicate in any local language. They stayed, preached through interpreters, and saw a revival among missionaries and Anglo-Indian congregations, then went on to Hong Kong. Garr came to believe that tongues were not given for preaching, and wrote so; he remained a Pentecostal and later became a healing evangelist.†

Other missionaries returned home disillusioned. Some left the faith. Some, like the Garrs, stayed and learned languages in the ordinary way. By around 1910 most Pentecostal leaders had quietly given up missionary tongues, and missions organisations - including the Assemblies of God's - began requiring language study.

Parham never gave the doctrine up. As late as the 1920s he still insisted that true tongues were real languages.

Mukti and the Indian revivals

In India, the revival at Pandita Ramabai's Mukti Mission at Kedgaon, near Pune, began in 1905 with deep repentance among the young women and girls, before any contact with Azusa. Tongues were reported there in late 1906 and 1907. Ramabai, a scholar of Sanskrit and one of the great Christian women of modern India, welcomed the revival but warned against making tongues the evidence of the Spirit and against seeking them. Her American colleague Minnie Abrams wrote The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire (1906), which helped carry the revival's influence to Chile and elsewhere. (See The modern movements in India.)

The shift to prayer language

As the claim of missionary languages receded, Pentecostal teachers emphasised the passages in 1 Corinthians that speak of tongues as prayer addressed to God, not understood by the speaker or hearers. This was the view the charismatic renewal of the 1960s inherited: tongues as a private "prayer language", given to most or all who are baptised in the Spirit, used daily in personal devotion, with occasional public tongues and interpretations.

Pause and thinkPause: at Pentecost, what exactly did the crowd hear?

What linguists have found

The most thorough linguistic study is Tongues of Men and Angels (1972) by William J. Samarin, a linguist at the University of Toronto who had worked as a missionary linguist in Africa and was sympathetic to the people he studied. He recorded and analysed glossolalia from Pentecostal and charismatic meetings in several countries. He found that:

  • the sounds used are almost entirely those of the speaker's native language, with some favoured syllables repeated;
  • there is no consistent vocabulary or grammar - the same stretch of sound does not carry the same meaning twice;
  • the speech has the rhythm and intonation of language, which is why it sounds like one;
  • it is not translatable, and different "interpretations" of the same recorded tongue do not agree.

His conclusion was that glossolalia is "a meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance, believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead".†

Samarin did not conclude that tongues are worthless or fraudulent. He noted that speakers are sincere, that the experience is often meaningful to them, and that glossolalia can be learned without any sense of pretence.

Other studies point the same way. The psychologist John Kildahl (The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues, 1972) found that it could be learned and was associated with a close relationship to a leader. The anthropologist Felicitas Goodman (Speaking in Tongues, 1972) argued that it occurs in an altered state of consciousness with similar features across cultures - a conclusion other researchers disputed. A 2006 brain-imaging study at the University of Pennsylvania found reduced activity in the frontal lobes during glossolalia compared with singing.†

Glossolalia also appears outside Christianity: in some spirit-possession cults, in spiritualist séances, among early Latter-day Saints in the 1830s, and in some shamanic practice. That does not prove Christian tongues are the same thing. It does mean that the mere fact of speaking in tongues is not, by itself, evidence of the Holy Spirit.

Has the gift of human languages been restored?

This question deserves a direct answer.

There are many testimonies of people speaking a language they had never learned and being understood by a native speaker - in Pentecostal literature, in charismatic books, and in Catholic hagiography (Saint Vincent Ferrer, Saint Francis Xavier). Some are given by honest and sober people.

But none has been documented in a way that would satisfy an ordinary standard of evidence: a recording, independently identified as a specific human language by linguists who did not know the speaker, with the speaker's ignorance of that language established. Samarin looked for such a case and found none. When missionary tongues were tested in the most practical way - by people who had staked their lives on them, on the streets of Calcutta - they failed.

The honest answer is therefore: there is no credible evidence that the gift of speaking unlearned human languages, as at Pentecost, has been restored. This does not rule out that God has at some time given it. It means the claim that He is now giving it widely is not supported.

What the historic Church taught

The Fathers understood the tongues of Acts as real languages. Pentecost was the reversal of Babel: the nations divided by language reunited in the one gospel.

On continuation and cessation, they differed.

  • Irenaeus (c. 180): "we do also hear many brethren in the Church, who possess prophetic gifts, and who through the Spirit speak all kinds of languages" (Against Heresies 5.6.1).
  • Tertullian (c. 207), by then sympathetic to Montanism, challenged Marcion to produce prophets and interpreted tongues in his church (Against Marcion 5.8).
  • The Church rejected the Montanists' ecstatic prophecy in the late second century, not because ecstatic speech was impossible but because its prophets claimed new revelation and disorder in place of the Church's order.
  • John Chrysostom (c. 390), preaching on 1 Corinthians 12: "This whole place is very obscure: but the obscurity is produced by our ignorance of the facts referred to and by their cessation, being such as then used to occur but now no longer take place" (Homily 29 on 1 Corinthians).
  • Augustine (c. 407): "In the earliest times, the Holy Ghost fell upon them that believed: and they spake with tongues, which they had not learned... These were signs adapted to the time. For there behoved to be that betokening of the Holy Spirit in all tongues, to shew that the Gospel of God was to run through all tongues over the whole earth. That thing was done for a betokening, and it passed away" (Homilies on 1 John 6.10). For Augustine the sign was fulfilled in the Church herself, which now speaks in all the languages of the world.
  • Thomas Aquinas (c. 1270) treats the gift of tongues as the gift of languages for preaching, given to the apostles (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 176).

No Father taught that tongues are the sign that a Christian has received the Spirit, or that they are a prayer language every Christian should seek.

The verdict

The early Pentecostal claim that the gift of human languages had been restored for world mission was tested on the mission field and failed. The movement then redefined tongues as a private prayer language - a different claim, defended from different texts. The linguistic evidence is consistent with glossolalia being a learned, sincere, non-linguistic form of vocal prayer.

The four traditions do not need to say that every modern instance of tongues is false or demonic. Many sincere Christians find it a help in prayer, and the Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran charismatic renewals have accepted it as such under pastoral oversight. But the traditions should say clearly that tongues are not the sign of the Spirit, that the Pentecost gift of languages has not been shown to have been restored, and that the Church has always valued the understood word above the unknown tongue: "I had rather speak five words with my understanding... than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue" (1 Corinthians 14:19).

How the four traditionsthe Catholic Churchthe Orthodox Churchthe Lutheran Churchthe Anglican Communion responded

Lutheran

Lutheran theology places the Spirit's work in the understood word. Luther's whole quarrel with the enthusiasts was about the Spirit who speaks apart from the outward, intelligible word; Paul's "I had rather speak five words with my understanding" was one of the Reformers' texts for worship in the language of the people. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession (XXIV) defends the use of the vernacular so that the people may understand and believe.

The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod's Commission on Theology and Church Relations studied the charismatic movement in the 1970s and concluded that speaking in tongues is not a necessary sign of the Spirit, that claims of a post-baptismal Spirit baptism are contrary to Lutheran teaching, and that private experiences cannot be a norm for the Church.† Other Lutheran bodies have been more open to tongues as a private devotional gift.

Catholic

Catholic theology, following Aquinas, understands the gift of tongues in Acts as a gift of languages for preaching, and Catholic hagiography records saints said to have been understood across languages - claims the Church has treated as edifying traditions rather than defined facts.

Since the charismatic renewal entered the Church in 1967, the Catholic Church has accepted tongues as a possible gift of prayer, under the principle that "charisms are to be accepted with gratitude" and that "discernment of charisms is always necessary" (CCC 799-801). The Malines Documents of the Renewal (1974) describe tongues as a pre-conceptual prayer of praise and insist they are neither the sign of the Spirit nor necessary to holiness.† The Church has never made tongues a mark of having received the Spirit; that is given in baptism and confirmation.

Orthodox

The Orthodox Church reads Pentecost as the reversal of Babel, and finds the gift of tongues fulfilled above all in the Church's mission into the languages of the world. Saints Cyril and Methodius, "Equal-to-the-Apostles", created an alphabet to give the Slavs the Scriptures and the Liturgy in their own language; Saint Innocent of Alaska translated the Gospels into Aleut; Orthodox missionaries have celebrated the Liturgy in Japanese, Chinese and Swahili. That is what the Orthodox would call the abiding gift of tongues: the gospel spoken in every language, understood by those who hear it.

St John Chrysostom, whose Liturgy the Orthodox celebrate every Sunday, regarded the Corinthian gifts as having ceased in his day. Orthodox writers on the charismatic movement, such as Fr Seraphim Rose (Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, 1975), have regarded modern glossolalia with deep suspicion as a form of spiritual delusion.

Anglican

The Anglican formularies contain an article that was written for another purpose but reads pointedly here. Article XXIV: "It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have publick Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments, in a tongue not understanded of the people." It was aimed at the Latin Mass, but its principle - that public worship must be understood - is Paul's in 1 Corinthians 14, and applies to uninterpreted tongues in public worship too.

The Church of England has had charismatic parishes since the 1960s, and has generally treated private tongues as a legitimate devotional practice while insisting on order in public worship. Alexander Boddy, the first Anglican Pentecostal, was careful to say that tongues were not the only sign of the Spirit.

Key personalities

Pandita Ramabai1858–1922Full profile · 6 min Scholar and reformer whose Mukti Mission saw a revival from 1905, and who warned against making tongues the sign of the Spirit
Affiliation
Brahmin Sanskrit scholar and social reformer; Christian from 1883 (baptised in the Church of England); founder of the Mukti Mission, Kedgaon
Appears in
The modern movements in India, The history of tongues
Profile
Link to this profile

Life

A pilgrim childhood

Ramabai Dongre was born on 23 April 1858 in the forest of Gangamul in the Western Ghats, in what is now Karnataka, into a Chitpavan Brahmin family. Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, a Sanskrit scholar, had taught his young wife Sanskrit against the custom that forbade it to women, and he taught Ramabai in turn. The family lived as wandering pilgrims, reciting the Puranas at temples and holy places across India. In the great famine of 1876-77 her father, mother and sister died of starvation.

Calcutta and marriage

With her brother Srinivas, Ramabai walked thousands of miles and reached Calcutta in 1878, where her learning astonished the pandits. They gave her the titles "Pandita" and "Saraswati", unprecedented for a woman. She lectured on the education of women and on the rights given to women in the ancient texts. Her brother died in 1880, and she married Bipin Behari Medhavi, a Bengali lawyer of a lower caste - a marriage that defied convention. Their daughter Manorama was born in 1881. Her husband died of cholera in 1882.

Pune and England

Widowed at twenty-three, she moved to Pune, where she founded the Arya Mahila Samaj, a society for the education of women, and gave evidence in 1882 to the Hunter Commission on education, urging the training of women teachers and doctors. In 1883 she went to England, supported by the Anglican sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage, to study medicine. There, after long study, she was baptised in the Church of England in September 1883, with her daughter. She studied at Cheltenham Ladies' College and taught Sanskrit. Her correspondence with the sisters and with the Bishop of Bombay shows a mind that would not accept doctrines it did not understand: she questioned the Athanasian Creed and, for a time, the full deity of Christ, and resisted pressure to submit to Anglican authority in all things.

America and the Sharada Sadan

In 1886 she went to the United States, where she published The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887), an indictment of child marriage and the treatment of widows. American supporters formed Ramabai Associations to fund a home for widows. Returning to India, she opened the Sharada Sadan ("Home of Learning") in Bombay in March 1889, moving it to Pune soon after. It was officially non-sectarian, but when some residents became Christians, Hindu reformers who had supported her, including leaders of the Pune nationalist press, accused her of proselytism, and many withdrew their daughters.

A deeper conversion

Around 1891 she experienced what she described as a personal conversion: she had been a Christian by conviction, she wrote, but now found Christ as her Saviour. Her faith became more evangelical, and she drew closer to the holiness and revival movements.

Mukti

During the famines of 1896-97 and 1899-1900 she travelled into the famine districts and brought hundreds of starving girls and widows to a farm she had bought at Kedgaon, near Pune. There she built the Mukti ("Salvation") Mission, which by the early 1900s sheltered around two thousand women and children, with schools, workshops, farms and a printing press, all run on the faith principle. Inspired by news of revival in Australia and Wales, she organised praying bands from 1903. In June 1905 a revival broke out at Mukti, with confession of sin, weeping, visions and, from late 1906, speaking in tongues. Her colleague Minnie Abrams described it in The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire (1906), which was read widely by early Pentecostals.

The Marathi Bible

From 1904 she devoted much of her time to translating the Bible into simple Marathi from the Hebrew and Greek, which she had learned for the purpose. She completed it shortly before her death. Her daughter Manorama, who was to succeed her, died in July 1921.

Key dates

  • 23 April 1858 - Born in the Western Ghats
  • 1876-77 - Parents and sister die in the famine
  • 1878 - Reaches Calcutta; titled "Pandita"
  • 1880 - Marries Bipin Behari Medhavi
  • 1882 - Widowed; founds the Arya Mahila Samaj in Pune
  • 1883 - In England; baptised in the Church of England
  • 1887 - The High-Caste Hindu Woman
  • March 1889 - Opens the Sharada Sadan
  • c. 1891 - Personal evangelical conversion
  • 1896-1900 - Famine rescues; Mukti founded at Kedgaon
  • June 1905 - Revival at Mukti
  • 1907 - A Testimony
  • 1919 - Awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind medal
  • July 1921 - Her daughter Manorama dies
  • 5 April 1922 - Dies at Kedgaon

Teachings and claims

Women's dignity

Ramabai taught that women, including widows and girls of every caste, are made in God's image and must be educated and protected. She attacked child marriage, the treatment of widows and the exclusion of women from learning.

Christ above denomination

She held that her loyalty was to Christ and Scripture rather than to any denomination, and she was critical of Western missionary divisions. Mukti was independent of any mission board.

Revival and caution

She welcomed the 1905 revival as God's work but cautioned against seeking tongues, against treating them as the necessary evidence of the Spirit, and against excitement. She taught that the Spirit's chief fruit is love and that the Spirit's presence is shown by humility and holiness.

Documented controversies

Conversions

Hindu reformers and nationalists accused her of breaking her promise of religious neutrality at the Sharada Sadan, and the controversy damaged her standing in Pune.

Independence

Some Anglican and missionary leaders criticised her for her doctrinal independence and her refusal to submit to church authority, and for her later association with revivalism.

The revival

Some missionaries were critical of the emotional phenomena at Mukti and of the tongues. No personal scandal is recorded.

Death

She died at Kedgaon on 5 April 1922, aged 63, a few days after completing the proofs of her Marathi Bible.†

Legacy

Ramabai is honoured as one of the great figures of modern India - a scholar, social reformer and pioneer of women's education - and the Government of India issued a stamp in her honour in 1989. In the Church she is commemorated in the calendars of the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Church of England. The Mukti Mission continues at Kedgaon. The 1905 revival made Mukti a significant site in the early history of Pentecostalism, and her caution about tongues has been cited by those who resist making them a test.

Measured against the creeds

Ramabai's mature faith confessed Christ as Lord and Saviour and the authority of Scripture, and her love for the destitute is one of the clearest examples in modern Christian history of faith working through love (Galatians 5:6). Her early questions about the Athanasian Creed and the deity of Christ were those of a searching convert, and she came to a clear confession of Christ.

Her caution about tongues is close to the historic churches' view that the Spirit's gifts are many and that love is the greatest (1 Corinthians 12-13). Her independence from church order is the point at which she differs most from the historic tradition: she was baptised into the Anglican Church and remained in communion with it, but Mukti was an independent work, and she valued the inner experience of revival more highly than the sacramental life of the Church. Her own life, though, shows how far the gospel can lead someone in the service of the neighbour.

Major writings

  • Stri Dharma Niti (Morals for Women, 1882)
  • The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887)
  • The Peoples of the United States (Marathi, 1889)
  • A Testimony of Our Inexhaustible Treasure (1907)
  • Marathi translation of the Bible (completed 1922)
Agnes Ozman1870–1937 The student whose tongues on 1 January 1901 are counted as the beginning of Pentecostalism
Affiliation
Holiness Bible student at Parham's Bethel Bible College, Topeka; later Assemblies of God
Appears in
Topeka and Azusa Street, The history of tongues
Card
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Teachings and claims

On the evening of 1 January 1901, after Parham laid hands on her, spoke in what was reported to be Chinese and was said to have written in Chinese-like characters. Believed, with Parham, that her tongue was a real language.

Documented controversies

No independent linguistic evidence confirms that she spoke Chinese. In 1909 she wrote in The Latter Rain Evangel that "tongues was not the only evidence of the Spirit's Baptism", and that she had been wrong to rest in tongues and other demonstrations rather than in God.

Death

Died in Los Angeles on 29 November 1937, aged 67.

Legacy

A symbolic figure in Pentecostal history. Her own account, What God Hath Wrought (c. 1920s), is a primary source for Topeka.

Charles Fox Parham1873–1929Full profile · 6 min Founder of the doctrine that speaking in tongues is the initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit
Affiliation
Methodist supply pastor (to 1895); independent Holiness preacher; founder of the Apostolic Faith movement and Bethel Bible College, Topeka
Appears in
Topeka and Azusa Street, The history of tongues
Profile
Link to this profile

Life

A sickly boy on the Kansas prairie

Charles Fox Parham was born on 4 June 1873 at Muscatine, Iowa, and moved with his family to Cheney, Kansas, in 1878. As a child he suffered from what he later called "fever" and a heart condition, and a tapeworm that stunted his growth. His mother died when he was twelve. He was converted at about thirteen in a Congregational church and began to lead meetings while still a teenager.

In 1890 he entered Southwest Kansas College, a Methodist school in Winfield, intending to become a minister. He nearly died of rheumatic fever there, and attributed his recovery to prayer; he left the college convinced that God was calling him to preach, not to study medicine.

Methodist supply pastor to independent healer

He served as a supply pastor for the Methodist Episcopal Church at Eudora, Kansas, from 1893, but left in 1895, objecting to denominational control and creeds. He married Sarah Thistlethwaite, a Quaker, in 1896. After the serious illness of their first son and his own renewed sickness, he renounced all medicine and doctors.

He moved to Topeka in 1898 and opened Bethel Healing Home, where the sick came for prayer, and published a magazine, The Apostolic Faith. In 1900 he toured Holiness centres in the east - including Dowie's Zion, A.B. Simpson's Nyack, and Frank Sandford's "Shiloh" community in Durham, Maine - where he heard reports of missionaries receiving foreign languages by the Spirit.

Bethel Bible School and 1 January 1901

In October 1900 he opened Bethel Bible School in a rented mansion in Topeka known as "Stone's Folly", with about forty students. Parham said that before leaving for a few days in December he set them to study what the Bible gives as evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that they concluded independently that it was speaking in tongues. On the night of 1 January 1901, a student, Agnes Ozman, asked Parham to lay hands on her and, by her own account, began to speak in what was taken to be Chinese. Over the next days Parham and others also spoke in tongues. Newspapers reported the event with curiosity and ridicule. The school closed within months.

Revival in Kansas and Texas

After lean years, Parham's healing meetings at Galena, Kansas, in the winter of 1903-04 brought large crowds and claims of many healings. He organised his followers as the Apostolic Faith Movement, with headquarters at Baxter Springs, Kansas, and in 1905 moved his work to Houston, Texas, where he opened another short-term Bible school. There a Black Holiness preacher, William J. Seymour, sat in on his classes - by most accounts in the hallway or doorway, because of Texas segregation laws and customs. Seymour carried the teaching to Los Angeles in 1906.

Zion and Azusa Street

In September 1906 Parham went to Zion City, Illinois, where Dowie's community had collapsed, and won hundreds of residents to Pentecostalism. In October he visited the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, where Seymour had invited him as the movement's leader. He was appalled by what he saw - emotional worship, people falling and jerking, and above all Black and white worshippers mixing freely - and denounced it from the pulpit. He was asked to leave and held rival meetings nearby, which failed.

Arrest and decline

In July 1907 Parham was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, with a young man, J.J. Jourdan, on a charge of "the commission of an unnatural offense". The charge was dropped without trial and Parham always denied it, saying he had been framed by enemies, but reports spread quickly - promoted by his rival Wilbur Glenn Voliva of Zion - and his national leadership of the movement ended. He spent the rest of his life as a travelling evangelist from Baxter Springs, with a small loyal following.

Key dates

  • 1873 - Born at Muscatine, Iowa, 4 June
  • 1890 - Enters Southwest Kansas College
  • 1893-95 - Methodist supply pastor at Eudora, Kansas
  • 1896 - Marries Sarah Thistlethwaite
  • 1898 - Opens Bethel Healing Home in Topeka
  • 1900 - Visits Zion, Nyack and Shiloh; opens Bethel Bible School in October
  • 1 January 1901 - Agnes Ozman speaks in tongues
  • 1903-04 - Galena revival
  • 1905 - Bible school in Houston; William Seymour attends
  • 1906 - Revival in Zion; visits and denounces Azusa Street
  • July 1907 - Arrested in San Antonio; charges dropped
  • 1927 - Visits the Holy Land
  • 29 January 1929 - Dies at Baxter Springs, Kansas

Teachings and claims

Tongues as the initial evidence

Parham's lasting contribution was the doctrine that speaking in tongues is the necessary initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which is a third experience after conversion and sanctification. This "initial evidence" doctrine became the defining teaching of classical Pentecostalism.

Xenolalia

He held that tongues are real foreign languages, given so that missionaries could preach without learning languages. He reported that his students spoke Chinese, Swedish, Bohemian and other languages. Missionaries who went abroad expecting to preach in their tongues found they could not be understood (see A.G. Garr).

The bride and the sealing

He taught that only those baptised in the Spirit would form the "bride of Christ", caught up at His coming, while other Christians would pass through the tribulation.

Other teachings

He taught divine healing without doctors, the imminent premillennial return of Christ, the annihilation (not eternal punishment) of the wicked, and British-Israelism - the belief that the Anglo-Saxons are descended from the lost tribes of Israel. He held that races should remain separate and that intermarriage had caused the Flood.

Documented controversies

  • Azusa Street. He denounced the revival in October 1906 as "a darky camp meeting", "spiritual power prostituted", and attacked its interracial worship, writing later of "white people imitating unintelligent, crude negroism".†
  • The 1907 arrest. As above. Historians are divided over what happened; the charge was dropped, and the evidence is not conclusive either way.
  • Race. His biographer James Goff records that he praised the Ku Klux Klan for its "high ideals" and spoke at Klan gatherings, still commending it in 1927.
  • Durham's death. He claimed the death of his rival William Durham in 1912 as divine vindication of his own teaching on sanctification.†
  • Holy Land expedition. He announced plans to find the Ark of the Covenant, and later raised funds for a trip to the Holy Land in 1927-28.

†

Death

In January 1929 Parham collapsed while lecturing in Temple, Texas. He was taken home to Baxter Springs, Kansas, where he died of heart disease on 29 January 1929, aged 55. His gravestone is shaped like a pulpit, bearing John 15:13. †

Legacy

Parham is the doctrinal founder of classical Pentecostalism: the initial-evidence teaching he formulated is still held by the Assemblies of God and many other Pentecostal churches, which together with the wider Pentecostal-charismatic movement number several hundred million people. His own Apostolic Faith churches remain small.

Pentecostal historians now acknowledge his racism and the questions over his conduct openly, and generally give Seymour and Azusa Street the greater place in the movement's history.

Measured against the creeds

The four traditions confess that the Holy Spirit is given in baptism and in the laying on of hands (confirmation or chrismation), as in Acts 2:38 and 8:14-17. Parham's teaching that there is a later "baptism of the Spirit" that every Christian must seek, and that it is always shown by speaking in tongues, has no basis in the Church's tradition. St Paul asks, "Do all speak with tongues?" (1 Corinthians 12:30), expecting the answer no. The Fathers - St John Chrysostom and St Augustine among them - regarded the tongues of Pentecost as a sign for the founding of the Church that was not expected to continue in the same form.

His claim that tongues are foreign languages for missionary preaching was tested by events and failed. His teaching that only the Spirit-baptised form the bride of Christ divides the one Church, and his annihilationism and British-Israelism depart from the creeds and from the apostolic teaching that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek" (Galatians 3:28). His racial teaching is incompatible with the gospel.

Major writings

  • Editor, The Apostolic Faith (from 1899)
  • A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1902)
  • The Everlasting Gospel (1911)
  • Sarah E. Parham, The Life of Charles F. Parham (1930)
Alfred Goodrich Garr1874–1944 Azusa Street missionary who went to Calcutta expecting to preach in tongues and found he could not
Affiliation
Holiness pastor in Los Angeles; Pentecostal missionary to India and Hong Kong (1907-08); later healing evangelist
Appears in
The history of tongues, The modern movements in India
Card
Link to this card

Teachings and claims

Received tongues at Azusa Street in 1906 and believed, with his wife Lillian, that they had been given Indian and Chinese languages for missionary work. Arriving in Calcutta around the end of 1906, they could not communicate in any local language and preached through interpreters. Garr came to teach that tongues were not given for preaching.

Documented controversies

His experience undermined the early Pentecostal doctrine of missionary tongues.†

Death

Died in 1944.†

Legacy

A significant early Pentecostal missionary whose honesty about missionary tongues helped the movement change its understanding.

Every personality in this section

Answering a modern Christian

"Tongues are the language of heaven." Paul does mention "the tongues of men and of angels" - in a sentence saying that without love they are nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1). He does not say that the Corinthians were speaking angelic languages. It is worth knowing that the first Pentecostals did not believe this: they believed they were speaking Chinese and Hindi for missionary work, and changed their view when that was tested.

"I've heard of people speaking languages they never learned." So have many people, and some of the testimonies come from honest witnesses. But when a linguist went looking for a documented case - recorded, independently identified, with the speaker's ignorance of the language established - he could not find one. When early Pentecostal missionaries staked their lives on it in India and China, it did not happen. A claim that God is doing this widely should be able to show at least one well-documented case.

"Paul said, 'Forbid not to speak with tongues.'" He did (1 Corinthians 14:39), and the four traditions do not forbid private tongues. In the same chapter he said that in church he would rather speak five words with understanding than ten thousand in a tongue, that tongues without interpretation should be silent, and that "all things be done decently and in order". He also asked, "Do all speak with tongues?" The historic Church holds all of those verses together.

Work with it

Check yourself

What did the first Pentecostals believe tongues were?

Check yourself

What happened when A.G. and Lillian Garr reached Calcutta in 1907?

Check yourself

What did the linguist William Samarin conclude about glossolalia?

Check yourself

How did Augustine understand the tongues of Acts?

Objection drill

Your linguists start from the assumption that God doesn't act. Of course they find nothing. God doesn't perform for scientists. The tongues in 1 Corinthians were never human languages anyway - they were the Spirit praying through us.

Memory work

Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.