(We continue sampling from Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text.)
1 Corinthians 14:21
It would be easy to get a rise out of the Neo-Pentecostals and Charismatics on what they consider their turf here. The Corinthians were excessively hedonistic and treated speaking in tongues like a cheap thrill. Paul was trying to point out that glossolalia was the very entry level, not the pinnacle of experiencing God’s power. The Corinthians had inverted the moral and spiritual value of things, as usual. Paul likens this to childish behavior.
Who hasn’t experienced a smart-aleck kid arrogantly proclaiming something they just learned yesterday, which learning is inaccurate and lacking any nuance and depth? In the immediate context of this verse, Paul warns them that there is nothing here to justify any kind of pride. He quotes from Isaiah 28:11-12, where the ancient prophet warns both the Northern and Southern Kingdoms that they are acting as arrogant children. On the one hand, we encourage children to learn. On the other hand, we endure a lot from their very unwise posturing. Were they actually children, it might be more tolerable, but God was sick of their refusal to grow up when it was centuries past their national childhood. Their petty human wisdom was intolerable arrogance before the God who made them. The beauty of how Isaiah artistically weaves together the images of prattling children with incomprehensible dialects of foreign conquerors often passes over the heads of Bible commentators. Isaiah’s audience had inverted the value of things, calling God’s wisdom childish and their own human intellect as serious professionalism. You won’t listen to God? Would you prefer a foreign empire that plunders and murders your whole kingdom?
This is the image Paul uses to slap some sense into the silly Corinthians. The excess of glossolalia was a sign they deserved God’s wrath, because they were long past due for better things. For example, prophecy was a lot more useful in bringing glory to the Lord. Grow up, Corinthians. God grants the wow factor to folks who haven’t had time to rise into a proper moral understanding. As long as you chase that wow factor, morally mature folks will consider you childish, at best. Meanwhile, outsiders wandering into the church meeting might be entertained by the speaking in tongues, but how does that help them find the call to repentance? Don’t cultivate an experience that thrills you on that level or you’ll stay there. Cultivate a taste for sacrificing your own human thrill for something that thrills on a far higher level. Meanwhile, we are highly amused by the semantic acrobatics of those who fail to get Isaiah’s message, and thus fail to understand how Paul uses it here.
