Subject: is tounges a sign of holyghost |
Bible Note: Doc Okay we have established the fact that tongues in one form or another did function from the early church to the present. You used Montanism as your first example and made it appear that tongues was the problem with the teaching however that by fact was not the problem. The problem was “Montanus encouraged his followers to consider themselves as the elect of God and to prepare for the Second Coming by separation from the world, fasting, prayer, and the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit. Montanists placed special emphasis on ecstatic prophecy, and Montanus described himself as a prophet. They welcomed persecution, so that the church would be purified and made a fit bride for the coming bridegroom. From the beginning the sect was persecuted by the official church, and by 220 it was proscribed. The Synod of Iconium refused to recognize the validity of Montanist baptism. Thereupon, it went underground but continued to be active for many centuries.” Kurian, G. T. (2001). Nelson's new Christian dictionary : The authoritative resource on the Christian world. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson Pubs. To summarize they added to scripture thus forcing the issue of the closed cannon that was the objection to Montanism. Then you gave us a lot of if's and if not's. By that I mean you state the is no verifiable church fathers who attests to speaking in tongues then you mention Irenaeus did say he knew people that spoke in tongues. As you say we move on and to the middle ages and many mystical things happened there as if to say if it happened it was magic and not of God. But can we really say that? Especially when we talk to nations evangelized by early missionaries that were able to converse with the natives yet their language was at that time unknown. Let us not linger here and move on. Next we come to the 1500 and a man that seems to have a verifiable account but we will sort of dismiss it. Okay Then we move to early American history and you make a statement that Pilgrim fathers, Puritan leaders, Baptist preachers, Presbyterian divines, and Methodist laymen did not at all indulge in these practices. And that is simply not true read denominational history many times they did and this caused conflict in the denominations. Methodist more than the others openly accepted it but the practice died a natural death a few decades later. Your last statement, “It continues to predominate outside of orthodox Christian circles.” Clearly shows the bias of the material you were using. Pentecostalism has been declared orthodox by those that make those decisions. More over there are well over 75 million adherents to the practice world wide. The Assemblies of God have alone has 50 million members. Again many adherents to the practice do so from the experience of having missionaries visit them that could not speak their language yet when the missionary preached the word of God these people clearly heard and understood them. Now you might say this is undocumented but there are written testimonies on record of such incidents, they are verifiable if you want to travel to a one of these nations and interview the people. Once again we know speaking in tongues is authentic as seen in the New Testament, we also know that one day it will pass away, the hinge to the whole thing is “when the perfect comes”. Since we do see some tongues used today to glorify God and Jesus assured us the adversary wouldn’t do that, as a house divided would soon fall, then we must assume the perfect has not yet come. If we believe the inverse then the perfect has come and all present day tongues are counterfeit from the adversary. And since they give often give glory to God then we must assume Jesus was wrong when He said the adversary wouldn’t do that. Seems we have a problem. EdB |