A caller experiences many Protestant pastors speaking in tongues and wonders why it is so emphasized in Protestantism and in charismatic Catholic circles. Jim Blackburn explains what speaking in tongues is, how it got started, and why these groups of people use this gift of the Holy Spirit so often.
Transcript:
Host: Brian in North Augusta, South Carolina watching again–well we got a lot of YouTubers today–watching again on YouTube, you are on with Jim Blackburn, what’s your question Brian?
Caller: Hey guys, I absolutely love y’all’s show, I watch it every day on videos even if it’s not live. But anyway, I’m 23 years old and last year around this time actually went into rehab for drug addiction and I went into a Protestant-based rehab, I didn’t realize it was then I got in, and every Sunday, whenever we went to different denominational churches, I got to noticing the trend of pastors standing there talking in tongues. Now I understand the scripture of St. Paul and gifts of the Spirit but, like, why is it that they kind of really emphasize that, and what is the Catholic Church’s kind of outlook on the gifts of the Spirit, and talking in tongues, and why isn’t the charismatic Catholics emphasizing it more than we do?
Jim: Okay, well, first, the gift of speaking in tongues, or the way that that is presented in the New Testament, in Acts for example on the day of Pentecost, it is presented in such a way that God gave this special gift to Peter and the other Apostles so that they could speak in different languages. Tongues in this sense means languages. We still use tongue and in that, with that meaning today, you know, “What is your mother tongue?” “What is the primary tongue of a particular land?” It means language, and that’s how it’s always been understood that that’s what was happening in Acts of the Apostles, that this is something that the Holy Spirit enabled the Apostles to do so that they could share the Word of God with everyone. They could speak everyone’s language no matter what language it was. So that’s that’s how it was then.
In Pentecostal circles, this is something that a little over a hundred years ago became a kind of a big deal where–but but they saw it as something a little different. They saw this as kind of a new language, as the Holy Spirit speaking through them in a language that they don’t even understand, and that others might attempt to interpret, but it’s not a real human language, it’s not a real language that it can be understood. So from that regard, that’s something that as Catholics we don’t, typically, we don’t see that in Catholic teaching. Doesn’t mean that it’s not something that God could allow, so the Church to my knowledge hasn’t condemned that idea, but it’s not something we typically find in in Catholic circles.
There’s a charismatic movement in the Catholic Church, but in that movement itself I’m not sure that they are seeing it in quite the same way as the Pentecostals do. In addition to that, in the Catholic Church we see the gifts of the Holy Spirit as kind of a fullness, a special way of receiving strengths from the Holy Spirit to help perfect us in our Christian lives. In Baptism, we receive sanctifying grace, we receive certain gifts, but we receive a fuller sense of these gifts, and gifts that we as adults can use–and when I say adults, I mean people with the use of reason can use–and then those typically come to us through Confirmation. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1831 speaks of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit in this regard, so you might want to take a look at that.