Packer: (Mis)Interpretation of Tongue-speaking
In chapter 12 of J.I. Packer’s Seeing God in the Dark, he offered “Theological Reflections on the Charismatic Movement.” In some places I think his analysis is too generous. But he does offer some helpful observations about it. For examples, he discusses the interpretation of present-day tongues. He notes that “Paul certainly speaks as if the Corinthian sounds carried translatable meaning (1 Cor. 14:9-13),” but then this is what happens today:
Interpretations are as stereotyped, vague, and uninformative as they are spontaneous, fluent, and confident. Weird mistakes are made. Kildahl tells how the Lord’s Prayer in an African dialect was interpreted as a word on the second coming. An Ethiopian priest whom I tutored went to a glossolalic gathering which he took to be an informal multi-lingual praise service, and made his contribution by standing and reciting Psalm 23 in Ge’ez, the archaic tongue of his native Coptic worship; at once it was publicly interpreted, but, as he said to me next day in sad bewilderment, ‘it was all wrong.’ Kildahl also reports that of two interpreters who heard the same tape-recorded glossolalia, one took it as a prayer for ‘guidance about a new job offer’ and the other as ‘thanksgiving for one’s recent return to health after a serious illness.
