Spiritual Gifts (Class 03)

Class Summary:

The Azusa Street Revival (Los Angeles, 1906) grew out of the Holiness/Pentecostal stream.

• Charles Parham taught that speaking in tongues is the inevitable evidence of Spirit baptism and expected real human languages that would bypass language schools for missions.
• Agnes Ozman (Parham’s student) was reported to speak/write Chinese on Jan 1, 1901, but what she produced wasn’t Chinese.
• William J. Seymour brought these ideas to 312 Azusa St.; meetings were loud, reported healings/tongues, and drew hundreds.
• While early on mainline churches didn’t adopt Pentecostalism, the broader Charismatic movement spread across denominations in the 1960s, including the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (1967).

Core unifying belief among Pentecostals/Charismatics: all New Testament gifts are for today and should be normative in church life, not merely possible.

I focused on tongues as a case study and offered seven observations:

1. Tongues are rarely mentioned in Scripture (Mark 16:9–20*, Acts, 1 Cor 12–14).
2. Acts 2 shows a clear miracle of real languages (a Babel-reversal sign for global mission).
3. Acts vs. Corinth differ: Acts is public evangelism (no interpreter needed); 1 Corinthians regulates church use (interpreter required; otherwise be silent).
4. Paul doesn’t define tongues; 1 Cor 14:2 can be read as “no one present understands” a real but unknownlanguage; early fathers (Chrysostom, Augustine) understood tongues as human languages.
5. Early Pentecostals expected real languages; when this failed, many redefined tongues as ecstatic utterance.
6. Ecstatic speech appears in other religions, suggesting a learned/psychological phenomenon; some even teachhow to produce it.
7. Worship must be orderly (1 Cor 14:40). I’m cautiously open that God can still grant real-language miracles (e.g., missionary anecdotes), but I question the normative modern practice of repetitive, monosyllabic utterances.