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# Tongues, Chaos, and the God Who Orders Both
A few years ago I sat in a prayer meeting where a woman spoke at length in what sounded like fluent Mandarin. Afterwards the pastor translated — confidently, at length — and I found myself wondering how anyone could verify that. Nobody in the room spoke Mandarin. I am not saying anything sinister was happening. I am saying that the moment crystallised a question I had been avoiding: what exactly does Paul think is going on when someone speaks in tongues, and does he want more of it or less?
I have been a pastor long enough to have sat through both sides of this argument many times. I have watched cessationist friends roll their eyes at charismatic enthusiasm and charismatic friends sigh at cessationist coldness. I have done both myself, depending on the week. What I have come to think is that 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 — the passages everyone reaches for — do not really settle the dispute we want them to settle. They settle a different dispute, and reading them honestly requires both camps to give up something they would rather keep.
## The Corinthian Problem Is Not Our Problem — Except That It Is
Corinth was a port city full of money, status anxiety, and religious pluralism. Recognisable, in other words. Paul's first letter to the church there is essentially one long pastoral intervention against a community that had absorbed the surrounding culture's obsession with hierarchy and then baptised it. The factions in chapter 1 — "I follow Paul," "I follow Apollos" — are not theological disagreements. They are status games dressed up as loyalty. The communion abuses in chapter 11 are not liturgical errors. They are the rich humiliating the poor at the Lord's Table.
By the time we arrive at chapter 12, we are reading a community that has found yet another way to rank itself: spiritual gifts. Some Corinthians, it seems, had decided that certain gifts — particularly the more spectacular ones — marked you out as a more advanced kind of Christian. Tongues, evidently, was near the top of the pile. Paul's response is not to deny the gift exists. He affirms that it does. His response is to dismantle the ranking system entirely and then, with maddening pastoral patience, to construct a different one.
If you read chapters 12 through 14 as a discrete unit on "the gifts of the Spirit," you will miss what is happening. They are a discrete unit on a church that has turned the gifts of the Spirit into a status economy. That diagnosis matters because it determines what the prescription is for.
We do not have the Corinthians' specific problem. We have our own. But anyone who has watched a Christian conference, a podcast feed, or a denominational pissing match knows that the underlying disease — using spirituality to rank ourselves — is alive and well.
## What Paul Actually Says Tongues Are
Here is where the text becomes slippery, and I think we ought to let it stay slippery.
In 1 Corinthians 12:10 Paul lists "different kinds of tongues" and "the interpretation of tongues" among the manifestations of the Spirit. In 13:1 he speaks of "the tongues of men or of angels" — a phrase often pressed in one direction or the other, but which on its face simply allows for both. In 14:2 he says that "anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to people but to God. Indeed, no one understands them; they utter mysteries by the Spirit." In 14:14 he describes praying "in a tongue" such that "my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful."
Now compare this with Acts 2, where the tongues at Pentecost are unmistakably human languages — Parthians and Medes and Elamites hearing the gospel in their own tongue. There is at minimum a phenomenological difference between what happens at Pentecost and what Paul is describing in Corinth. Pentecost is a missionary miracle of communication. The Corinthian gift, by Paul's own description, is largely incommunicative without interpretation, and even with interpretation it remains "mysteries."
The text does not resolve the question of whether tongues are always known human languages, or always a non-cognitive prayer language, or both at different times. Paul does not seem worried about resolving this. He is worried about what the gift is for and how it is being used. The premature theological tidying that insists tongues must be one specific thing, Mandarin, or angelic ecstasy, or whatever, is exactly the kind of move the chapter is trying to prevent.
What we can say is that for Paul the gift is real, it is from the Spirit, it is directed primarily Godward, and on its own it is largely useless to anyone else in the room.
## The Hierarchy Paul Builds, and Why It Embarrasses Everyone
Paul does something curious in chapter 12 that we tend to skip over because we have been told he is about to say all the gifts are equal. He is not, in fact, about to say that.
"And God has placed in the church first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, of helping, of guidance, and of different kinds of tongues" (12:28). Tongues, you will notice, is at the bottom. He repeats the point even more bluntly in chapter 14: "I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue" (14:19).
This is awkward for everyone.
It is awkward for charismatic communities that have, in practice, treated tongues as the marker of a Spirit-filled believer, the gift you ask for first, the gift you pray over new converts to receive, the gift whose presence or absence determines whether someone has had a "second blessing." Paul ranks it last. Not because it is bad. Because in the gathered assembly, intelligibility builds people up and unintelligibility does not.
It is also awkward for cessationist communities that would prefer to wave the whole list away as a first-century phenomenon. Because Paul is not embarrassed by the list. He is not apologising for the existence of these gifts. He is arranging them, valuing them, regulating them, the posture of someone who expects them to continue, at least for the foreseeable horizon of the church he is writing to.
The chapter embarrasses both tribes because it refuses to do what either tribe wants. It will not let the charismatic celebrate tongues as the height of spirituality, and it will not let the cessationist dismiss the gifts as a closed canon of historical curios.
## Love as Hermeneutic, Not Sentiment
Chapter 13 is the part everyone has heard read at a wedding. "If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love…" It is beautiful. It is also, in its original context, doing something far more bracing than the wedding reading suggests.
Chapter 13 is not an interlude. It is the load-bearing argument. Paul has been talking about how the body of Christ functions with diverse gifts, and he is about to give detailed instructions about the ordering of worship. In between, he tells the Corinthians that any gift, however spectacular, exercised without love is noise. Not "less effective." Not "spiritually weaker." Noise. A resounding gong. A clanging cymbal.
This is a hermeneutical claim, not a sentimental one. Paul is telling the Corinthians how to evaluate spiritual practice. The criterion is not whether the practice feels powerful, or whether it produces an emotional response, or whether it confers status. The criterion is whether it builds up the other person. Does this gift, in this moment, in this room, serve the brother or sister next to me? If yes, it is valuable. If no, it is noise, regardless of how spiritually impressive it looks.
That is a structural claim about what the church is. Not a soft suggestion that we should be nice to each other, but a hard claim that the entire purpose of the gifts is the building up of the body, and any use of them that does not do that has missed the point so completely that it has become its opposite.
When I see this principle taken seriously, I notice it cuts in unexpected directions. It cuts against the charismatic preacher whose use of tongues in public has more to do with their own platform than the congregation's edification. It cuts equally against the reformed teacher whose meticulous expository sermon is delivered with such contempt for the unlearned that no one is built up by it. Love is the hermeneutic. Everything is judged by it. Including the sermon.
## Order, Intelligibility, and the God Who Is Not Confused
Then comes 14:33: "For God is not a God of disorder but of peace."
This is not throat-clearing. It is a theological claim about the character of God that is doing a great deal of work in the argument. The God who speaks the world into ordered existence in Genesis 1, who separates light from darkness and waters from waters and assigns each creature its kind, is not in the business of producing chaos in the assembly that gathers in his name. The God who confused the languages at Babel because human pride had become destructive is also the God who at Pentecost gave intelligible languages so that the gospel could be heard.
Order, in Paul's argument, is not a stylistic preference. It is a reflection of who God is. A worship gathering that is structurally incomprehensible, where everyone is speaking at once, where the spectacular drowns out the instructive, where outsiders come in and conclude that the Christians are "out of your mind" (14:23), is not just inefficient. It is theologically misrepresentative. It tells a lie about God.
Conversely, and this is the bit cessationists sometimes miss, a worship gathering so tightly controlled that the Spirit has no room to disrupt our managed liturgies may be telling a different lie about the same God. The God of order is also the God who descended on Sinai in fire and smoke, who showed up at Pentecost as a rushing wind, who has a habit of refusing to stay in the boxes his people build for him.
Paul's instruction is not "be tidy." It is "be intelligible, because God is intelligible, and the assembly should reflect the God it gathers to worship."
## The Cessationist Case, Stronger and Weaker Than It Thinks
The classical cessationist argument runs roughly like this: the miraculous gifts, including tongues, were given to authenticate the apostolic message in the founding generation of the church. Once the canon of Scripture was completed and the apostles had died, the function those gifts served was fulfilled, and they ceased. 1 Corinthians 13:8-10, "where there are tongues, they will be stilled… but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears", is sometimes cited, with "completeness" read as the closed canon.
There are real strengths to this position. It takes seriously the unique apostolic moment. It takes seriously the historical fact that, for long stretches of church history in many places, reports of tongues-speaking have been rare or absent. It takes seriously the genuine excesses and frauds that have attached themselves to charismatic movements over the centuries. And it is right to be sceptical of any practice that cannot be verified, that bypasses the mind, and that lends itself to manipulation.
But the exegetical case is thinner than its proponents like to admit. The reading of "completeness" in 13:10 as "the closed canon" is, frankly, not what the passage is most naturally about, Paul goes on to speak of seeing "face to face" and knowing "fully, even as I am fully known," which sounds rather more like the eschaton than the Council of Carthage. And the historical case has to contend with reports from across the centuries and across the continents, not all credible, certainly, but not all dismissible either.
The cessationist instinct that something has gone wrong in much contemporary charismatic practice is, I think, often correct. The systematic theological argument that the gift itself has been withdrawn from the church is harder to sustain from the text than its defenders allow.
## The Charismatic Case, Freer and More Constrained Than It Thinks
The continuationist argument is essentially that Paul tells the Corinthians to "eagerly desire the greater gifts" (12:31) and to "be eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues" (14:39), and that nothing in the New Testament suggests these instructions have an expiration date. Absent a clear textual reason to think the gifts have ceased, we should assume they continue, and we should expect to see them in the life of the church.
I find this case persuasive on its own terms. What I find less persuasive is the way it is often practised.
Paul lays down explicit restrictions on the use of tongues in the gathered assembly: only two or three should speak, one at a time, and only with an interpreter; if there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep silent in the church and speak to themselves and to God (14:27-28). These are not vague suggestions. They are concrete pastoral instructions.
In a lot of charismatic worship I have observed, these instructions are simply ignored. Whole congregations speak in tongues simultaneously, with no interpretation offered or expected. The practice that Paul most explicitly regulates is the practice that is least regulated in communities that claim his authority for it.
This is not a small thing. The continuationist who wants to stand on 1 Corinthians 14 to defend the ongoing exercise of the gift cannot then ignore the half of 1 Corinthians 14 that tells them how to exercise it. You do not get the permissions without the restrictions. The same chapter that says "do not forbid" also says "let all things be done for building up" and "in a fitting and orderly way."
## What a Church in a Divided City Should Do With All This
I pastor a church in London, and London is a city that ranks people relentlessly, by postcode, by accent, by school, by salary, by the brand on the bag they are carrying. The whole apparatus of the Corinthian problem is alive here, just wearing different clothes.
The question for a church in this kind of city is whether we will reproduce the ranking systems of the surrounding culture inside our own life, or whether we will be the kind of community where the categories that divide everyone else dissolve. Paul's argument in these chapters is fundamentally about that. He is not really arguing about the metaphysics of tongues. He is arguing about whether spiritual practice will serve the building up of an unlikely community of people who would not otherwise be in the same room, or whether it will become one more way for some people to assert their superiority over others.
A church that performs spiritual status, whether the status is "I speak in tongues" or "I have read more Calvin than you", has simply replaced Corinth's factions with new ones. The theology of gifts is almost beside the point. The pathology is the same.
If we are serious about the unity Christ purchased for his church, then the test of any spiritual practice in our gatherings is not whether it is impressive but whether the cleaner from Lagos and the consultant from Clapham are both built up by it. If yes, do more of it. If no, stop, regardless of how spiritually advanced it makes you feel.
## Earnestly Desire, But Desire What, Exactly
Paul ends his long argument with an imperative: "Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy" (14:1).
I want to land here, because I think this verse is often misread as a green light to chase particular spiritual experiences. It is not, quite. The grammar puts love first, as the way one walks, and the gifts second, as things one desires within that way of life. The desire is real, Paul wants the Corinthians to want the gifts. But the desire is shaped by, and accountable to, the love described in the preceding chapter.
So here is what I would say pastorally, to you, reading this.
If you are from a tradition that has been taught to fear or dismiss the gifts, ask whether your fear is doing more theological work than the text actually warrants. The God who is not a God of disorder is also not a God of tight liturgical control as a hedge against the Spirit. Be open. Read the chapters again without your tradition's defensive instincts running in the background.
If you are from a tradition that has prized the spectacular, ask whether your community is genuinely being built up, or whether the practice has slid into performance. Ask whether Paul's actual restrictions are being honoured in the actual rooms where you actually worship. If they are not, that matters more than you have been told it matters.
And whichever direction you come from, ask the harder question underneath all of this: do I want spiritual gifts because I want the people next to me to be built up in Christ, or do I want them because I want to be a more impressive version of myself?
The God who orders both creation and assembly knows the difference. So, if we are honest, do we.
"Follow the way of love." Everything else is downstream of that.