Corita Kent, Pentecost (unknown date) Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
Political theorist Hannah Arendt argued in her 1951 seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, that European totalitarianism is historically and conceptually rooted in antisemitism and imperialism. While antisemitism already had a long history in Christian texts and theology, Arendt argued that the phenomenon of imperialism emerged from economic expansionism and was not limited by any political boundaries. I suggest that imperial expansionism is also rooted in Christian texts and their receptions, and I will illustrate my contention by briefly tracing the reception of Pauline discourse on speaking in tongue(s) in 1 Corinthians 14.
What is this phenomenon of speaking in tongue(s) (glōssais or glōssē lalein)? Today, many scholars consider it an ecstatic phenomenon. In the fourth and fifth centuries, however, the readers of Paul like John Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzus, and others[1] believed that tongue(s) is a phenomenon of human languages, or put more plainly, of speaking in different known languages. Theodoret of Cyrrhus (in the fifth century) particularly insisted that tongue(s) is the ability to speak foreign languages to preach the gospel to different groups of people (Persians, Scythians, Romans, Indians, and Egyptians). In other words, for him the main purpose of tongue(s) is to expand Christianity beyond linguistic borders. Paul needed to silence tongue(s), according to Theodoret, because it was a useless phenomenon in Corinth (Theodoret, Commentary on the Letters of St. Paul, 1 Cor. 14:1-2). This is an evangelistic-expansionist understanding of the term and it was the dominant interpretation of 1 Cor. 14 until around the late eighteenth century.
From that point on and throughout the nineteenth century, however, there was an explosion of scholarship on tongues in Germany. Biblical scholars, such as Johann Herder, Friedrich Bleek, Hermann Olshausen, F.C. Baur, and August Neander, began to introduce a new way of understanding this phenomenon grounded in German Romanticism and nationalism. They typically argued that tongue(s) is not a multilingual phenomenon because as a people (Volk), Corinthians merely needed to speak Greek to communicate with each other. So if it is not a multilingual phenomenon, then what is it? These scholars insisted that it must have something to do with feelings of excitement or enthusiasm. It is no surprise that tongue(s) speakers were often called “enthusiasts” in the nineteenth century—an appellation found in many books to this day. By the end of the nineteenth century, the attribution of feelings or enthusiasm to tongue(s) had completely overtaken, overcome, and eventually erased the linguistic nature of the phenomenon. Now tongue(s) was no longer understood as referring to the diversity of languages, but to an ecstatic-unintelligible explosion of human feelings. Still today this remains the dominant view in biblical scholarship.
That said, the Romantic-nationalist logic behind modern biblical scholarship on tongue(s) arguably also expresses itself in a European imperial expansionism. The global expansion of English today, for instance, is an example of a national identity marker turned into a linguistic imperial project. Linguist Robert Phillipson calls this phenomenon “linguistic imperialism” or “linguicism.” Christian missionaries do not only learn local languages to Christianize and “civilize” others, they also teach them English—often in a systemic way (e.g., through boarding schools, TEFL, etc.). Thus, Theodoret’s evangelistic and European nationalist-Romantic readings remain the modus operandi of Christian colonial expansionism today.
How do we decenter this expansionist exegetical logic? The works of decolonial scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Frantz Fanon, among many others, might help us see that the encounter between non-European and European languages always happens in an unequal relation of power. The expansion of a colonial language often results in the complete silencing or the death of minority languages. Therefore, the step toward “decolonizing the mind”—to borrow an expression of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o—is critical in our reading practices.
One strategy of decolonializing the mind is to shift our interpretative allegiance from the dominant voice (the voice of the author, the master) to the subaltern voices. This means moving away from the hermeneutics of authorial primacy that established the author’s opinion as having the final say to the hermeneutics of resistance. Although they interpret the text differently, Theodoret and the European scholars remain faithful to the words of Paul, considering it as authoritative and final. In this mode of interpretation, Paul as the author has the right to tell us what and who tongue(s) speakers are. Those tongue(s) speakers are the cause of chaos, so following Paul’s argument, they should be silenced. The hermeneutics of resistance, on the other hand, requires a change of our interpretative loyalty from Paul to the tongue(s) speakers, from the representer to the represented, from the speaker to the silenced. It means moving beyond an authorial intention and become a “resisting reader,” as Judith Fetterley puts it, a reader who resists the imperialistic grain of the text and its reception.
[1] For a more comprehensive analysis of the reception of this text in Late Antiquity, see Yuliya Minets, The Slow Fall of Babel: Languages and Identities in Late Ancient Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Ekaputra Tupamahu is an Assistant Professor of New Testament and Director of the Masters Programs at Portland Seminar of George Fox University.