Cross-cultural Inspired Speech in 1:8; 2:4
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Tongues as Evidence of the Character of Spirit’s Empowerment in Acts 2:4
As mentioned but only briefly developed in the previous chapter, Luke does not present tongues as a sign of Spirit baptism merely arbitrarily, but because it is logically connected to the purpose of baptism in the Spirit in the way that Luke means the phrase. Luke emphasizes baptism in the Spirit as power to testify for Christ cross-culturally; what better sign to evidence this particular empowerment of the Spirit than inspiration to speak in the languages of other cultures? ¹⁵⁵²
In its first iteration, this essay was an article in a Pentecostal theological journal; in the iteration preceding this one, it was an essay in a book dedicated to the memory of Gary McGee, a noted mission historian and beloved history professor.
Luke does not present tongues as a sign of Spirit baptism merely arbitrarily, but because it is logically connected to the purpose of baptism in the Spirit. Luke emphasizes baptism in the Spirit as power to testify for Christ cross-culturally; what better sign to evidence this particular empowerment of the Spirit than inspiration to speak in the languages of other cultures?
The Focus of Luke’s Pneumatology
Different New Testament writers focus on different aspects of the Spirit’s activity in the life of the church, some of which correspond to emphases in contemporary Jewish literature (especially prophetic activity), whereas others move beyond these.¹⁵⁵³
Prophetic Speech in 1:8; 2:4, 17–18
A survey of uses in Luke-Acts reveals that Luke’s focus is on prophetic activity, that is, on prophecy or other activities that those immersed in the Old Testament would associate especially with prophets (e.g., Luke 1:15–17, 67; 2:26; 4:18; 12:12; Acts 4:8, 25, 31; 7:51, 55; 21:4, 11).¹⁵⁵⁴
This prophetic focus is particularly evident in view of Joel 2:28–32 as a programmatic text for Luke’s second volume:¹⁵⁵⁵ God’s people will prophesy (Acts 2:17–21, esp. 2:17–18). Such an observation does not imply that Luke would have rejected other early Christian emphases, but simply observes that, more than other New Testament writers, he maintains a frequent focus on a particular aspect of the Spirit’s activity.¹⁵⁵⁶
This programmatic text in 2:17–18 coheres naturally with the earlier programmatic passage in Acts 1:8, where the earliest witnesses¹⁵⁵⁷ will bear witness to Christ by the Spirit’s power. Both instances deal with inspired speech for God; indeed, the prophetic dimension of 1:8 is inescapable if we read “power” in the sense in which Luke frequently means it, which often associates it with healing or other signs (Luke 4:36; 5:17; 6:19; 8:46; 9:1; Acts 6:8; 10:38; cf. 3:12; 4:7).¹⁵⁵⁸ This association would certainly fit subsequent narratives, in which healings and other signs are the most common (albeit not the exclusive) method of drawing attention to the gospel (e.g., 3:11–13; 4:14; 5:12–16; 8:6, 13; 13:12; 15:12; esp. 4:29–30; 14:3). Elijah and Elisha provide models for many of the miracles in Luke-Acts;¹⁵⁵⁹ it is therefore likely that Luke construed such signs as prophetic activity.¹⁵⁶⁰
It is also not difficult to see the connection between these two programmatic statements about Luke’s purpose in Acts and the manifestation of the promised outpouring in 2:4. The focus of Luke’s pneumatology in general is prophetic, and in 2:4 the believers engage in inspired speech.
Cross-cultural Inspired Speech in 1:8; 2:4
What 2:4 adds, however, is that the immediate result of the Spirit’s empowerment to speak for God was manifested in inspired speech in languages that the speakers had not learned. What is the significance of such a distinction for Luke’s overall theme?
The theme of Acts is the church’s cross-cultural mission. Whereas Luke’s Gospel embraced the church’s heritage, beginning and ending in Jerusalem, Acts shows the transition from heritage to mission, moving from Jerusalem to Rome. The focus of Luke’s prophetic pneumatology in Acts is how this mission comes about, the Spirit repeatedly leading God’s agents across cultural, ethnic, and geographic barriers to bring the gospel to everyone. With this focus in view, we may revisit 1:8, which explicitly lays out this theme.
Scholars have often identified Acts 1:8 as a key programmatic statement introducing the subject of Acts and even providing a very rough (and asymmetrical) outline for Acts. Ancients did sometimes provide a thesis statement close to the beginning of their work, as well as, at times, an outline of what would follow, not only in speeches (where they are most conventional) but even in works of historiography.¹⁵⁶¹ Acts 1:8 not only speaks of prophetic speech (as in 2:17–18), but emphasizes that it will ultimately cross cultural barriers—exactly as speaking other cultures’ languages does.
For Luke, this empowerment represents a crucial step forward in salvation history. Acts 1:8 draws on two major lines of Old Testament pneumatology. First, its connection with the ascension recalls Elijah passing on a double portion of the Spirit to Elisha before his ascension (2 Kgs 2:1–14); Jesus similarly prepares to empower the church to carry on his ministry after his ascension.¹⁵⁶² The language of “Spirit,” “witnesses,” and “the ends of the earth,” however, evokes Isaiah’s prophecies of the eschatological remnant of Israel sustained by God’s Spirit announcing the true God to the nations.¹⁵⁶³
Luke’s use of such biblical background demonstrates that for him, the Spirit’s empowerment to cross cultural boundaries is not simply an afterthought, but grounded in the heart of God’s promises to his people, now being fulfilled because the Lord’s Messiah has been enthroned (2:33–36). As a sign that God had empowered his people to cross cultural barriers, the inspiration to worship God in unlearned languages becomes a significant marker of God carrying out this long-range plan.
Other Tongues as a Sign of the Universal Mission
Many, perhaps most, scholars recognize Luke’s depiction of Pentecost in Acts 2:5–13 as either a reversal or recapitulation of Babel.¹⁵⁶⁴ As Genesis follows its table of nations (Gen 10:1–32) with its narrative of God scattering the languages (Gen 11:1–9), so here Luke associates his summary of locations with a scattering of languages (Acts 2:4, 8–13).¹⁵⁶⁵ But whereas in Genesis God scatters the nations for judgment, here God unites his church around the common worship of God (2:11) and (in the lingua franca of most of the Jews gathered on Pentecost) their common message (2:14–41).
Most scholars recognize in this narrative a proleptic foreshadowing of the “gentile mission.”¹⁵⁶⁶ After this narrative, God scatters the church for mission (8:1, 4; 11:19–21), and the Spirit at each step leads the church into its cross-cultural mission (e.g., 8:29, 39; 10:19; 11:12; 16:7; 19:21). Luke also illustrates that Jesus continues to fill new believers with the Spirit (8:17; 9:17; 10:44; 19:6), in two cases mentioning specific manifestations, which in both instances include tongues (19:6; see esp. 10:44–46, where it specifically functions as a sign of having received the Spirit as at Pentecost). The purpose of the empowerment and the sign is presumably the same as at Pentecost: empowerment to proclaim Christ cross-culturally (cf. 2:38–39 with 1:8).
Many interpreters of this passage, including myself, point to its implications for ethnic reconciliation or cultural sensitivity for those who embrace as authoritative its message today.¹⁵⁶⁷ Luke’s goal for such reconciliation is the church’s multicultural unity, achieved through the church’s multiethnic mission to bring all humanity to recognize its rightful Lord, Jesus Christ. Other kingdoms, such as the empires of Alexander or Rome, sought to unite diverse cultures under a common rule;¹⁵⁶⁸ but Jesus alone is humanity’s rightful Lord (cf. 2:34–36).
It is precisely the disciples’ worship in languages they have not learned that draws attention to this multilinguistic paradigm. Granted, tongues are not specifically noted as intelligible to anyone present on the subsequent occasions of 10:46 and 19:6; in fact, they likely were not understood by those present. (Compare the need for Spirit-inspired interpretation in Paul’s approach to tongues.) Luke is explicit, however, that the essential phenomenon is the same (10:45–47), and that Acts 2 provides the paradigm through which we should read the later accounts (10:47; 11:16–17). In other words, it is impossible to disconnect Luke’s use of tongues from the cross-cultural mission that 2:5–13 foreshadows.
Theological Ramifications
These observations have ramifications for understanding Luke’s theology, hence some ramifications for Pentecostal and charismatic theology today. Luke emphasizes tongues because this experience signifies cross-cultural empowerment.¹⁵⁶⁹
I should, however, begin by warning against construing more from the above argument than it is intended to bear. Granted that Luke uses tongues as a sign of cross-cultural empowerment, and granted that (as many scholars have argued) Luke’s narrative is paradigmatic, it need not follow that Luke expected every individual who receives the Spirit in the Lukan sense to speak in tongues.¹⁵⁷⁰ Luke uses ability to speak under inspiration in unlearned languages to evidence the purpose of Spirit baptism; that he does not narrate that evidence in every instance of Spirit baptism, however, makes it more difficult to argue that his agenda is to teach that each individual who receives cross-cultural empowerment must speak in tongues.¹⁵⁷¹ Scholars might argue for or against that conclusion, but it need not logically follow from the connection we have noted above.
What does logically follow is that glossolalia is logically connected with Luke’s emphasis on baptism in the Spirit as empowerment for mission. It is not an arbitrary sign, but the one sign, of any Luke might have narrated, that most effectively communicates the purpose of baptism in the Spirit as an empowerment for universal mission.
This observation has theological ramifications for Pentecostalism. The earliest Pentecostals often believed that tongues would function as missionary languages, so they could testify of Christ in local languages without having first learned them. On reaching the mission field, most quickly discovered that this was not the case, yet proceeded with their missions task unabated, while continuing to pray in tongues.¹⁵⁷² The early Pentecostals were able to survive this transition in their understanding of tongues fairly smoothly because it did not affect their experience of empowerment or their basic, and correct, insight into the nature of tongues. Even if speaking in tongues did not normally provide missionary languages, it did attest the Spirit’s empowerment for the church’s global mission.
The remarkable global expansion of Pentecostalism in the past century suggests that the early Pentecostals had this basic insight correct. Many estimate global pentecostalism (which encompasses both Pentecostals and charismatics) at some half a billion adherents, and speak of it as the fastest-growing movement in Christian history; even if some would prefer lower estimates, the numbers and growth have been massive.¹⁵⁷³
Non-Pentecostals have often wondered how a movement apparently centered on tongues would fulfill late nineteenth-century aspirations to holiness and missions, but they have missed the actual focus of Pentecostal empowerment. Those who object to the centrality of tongues may be correct, but that is because historically much of the actual focus of the Pentecostal movement has not been its more distinctive sign of tongues, but its devotion to cross-cultural mission. Yet tongues is a logical, and not arbitrary, sign of the church’s cross-cultural anointing for mission. This logical connection confirms an insight of early Pentecostalism that undergirds the history of the entire movement.
This connection also has theological implications for both non-Pentecostal and Pentecostal practice today. It invites non-Pentecostals interested in the church’s mission and recognizing their need of the Spirit’s empowerment not to despise the logical sign of that empowerment as articulated in Acts. Cross-cultural mission is not the sole domain of those who pray in tongues, but tongues is not simply an arbitrary interest of Pentecostals.
The connection also invites Pentecostals to remember the empowerment to which tongues points. To pray in tongues, yet fail to be involved in the biblical task of cross-cultural, global evangelism, is to neglect the purpose of the anointing to which, in Luke’s narrative, glossolalia bears eloquent witness.