The Foolishness Of God A Linguist Looks At The Mystery Of Tongues

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 109-169

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Del Tarr, Te Foolishness of God: A Linguist Looks at the Mystery of Tongues (Springﬁeld, MO: Te Access Group, 2010). xviii + 447 pp. $20.00 paper.

Del Tarr is familiar to many readers of Pneuma as a prominent leader within the General Council of the Assemblies of God (USA), a former President of both Assemblies of God Teological Seminary and California Teological Seminary, a long-time professor at several AG institutions teaching in multiple languages, an experienced missionary in West Africa and pastor in the USA, and globe trotter over the past several decades. Tis book is endorsed by Jack Hayford, George Wood, Vinson Synan, Randy Hurst, and William Menzies. For these reasons alone, Tarr’s book merits attention by SPS members. Dr. Tarr warns the reader in the opening pages that the book is not a theological treatment but rather brings a per- spective from the social and behavioral sciences to bear on glossolalia; speciﬁcally insights from communications theory, linguistics, and social semantics. Te target audience is not academics in theology or social and behavioral sciences. Te exact audience for the book is not speciﬁed but presumably includes pastors, Pentecostal educators, and lay persons of Pentecostal persuasion, along with an occasional Pentecostal critic here and there who might chance upon the book.

Te publisher of record, Te Access Group, seems to be an imprint established by the Gospel Publishing House, since no independent entity of this name can be found in Springﬁeld, MO. Te publisher has not served the author well as the book is riddled with grammatical and stylistic errors, inconsistent use of endnotes and footnotes, incomplete citations and even occasional sentences, and a number of problems that will annoy many readers. Even experienced authors like Dr. Tarr beneﬁt from the sagacious pen of a good editor and its acute absence in this case seriously detracts from the value of his argument. Te book’s title is also somewhat misleading as the whole point of the book is to apply com- munications theory to understand the value and purpose of speaking in tongues and not a “linguistics” analysis. Te author’s expertise is not in linguistics but in communications, as a 1980 Ph.D. graduate of the well-known communications studies program at the Univer- sity of Minnesota (from which several other AG leaders have earned terminal degrees over the years).

Te book blends Tarr’s personal anecdotes and experiences across many continents and cultures, especially Africa, with a well-presented and explained set of older inﬂuential theo- ries in communications studies, particularly the transactional model of Raymond Ross. Te central thesis of the book is that God deliberately bestows upon people the irrational phe- nomenon of tongues speaking precisely because it forces us out of the realm of rationality and the ways in which we reduce the ultimate nature of reality to that which can be ratio- nally examined, understood, and articulated in our native languages. Tongue speaking is “orality” in action and the additional openness it provides enables us to experience more of God and more of the world He has created, including our fellow human beings. It is for this reason, Tarr asserts, that it is not accidental that Pentecostals are far more numerous in orally-oriented cultures and that this opens up an opportunity for a witness from these oral cultures to Western, rationally and empirically-oriented cultures. Te impact that the oral nature of Pentecostal spirituality engenders provides transcendence and is God’s way of confounding the wisdom of the world. Te book’s focus then is an apologetic for

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 109-169

Pentecostal experience, particularly that of speaking in tongues, but contrary to prior eﬀorts, it grounds the argument in an appeal to the insights of social and behavioral theo- ries of human communications. Along the way Tarr reiterates many of the classic Pentecos- tal responses to critics of tongues speaking and having many of these arguments collected in one source is another plus.

Tere is much to appreciate in this extensive cross-disciplinary foray into considering another set of reasons why God bestows the “gift” of tongues. Te book lays down a chal- lenge to Pentecostal scholars to explore more systematically and rigorously what Tarr asserts apologetically. But most of the research he draws upon is more than forty years old and the ﬁeld of communications, like all the social and behavioral sciences, has evolved substan- tially from these earlier communications theories. Tarr is implicitly aware of this fact but only has very scattered references to newer work; in fact of the over 300 references cited, fewer than ten are from 2000 to 2007. He does not engage with the large body of recent work in areas such as persuasion (e.g., the summary of recent work by Richard E. Petty, Pablo Brinoli, “Persuasion: From single to multiple metacognitive processes,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3:2 [2008]: 137-147), cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Uﬀe Schjoedt, “Te religious brain: A general introduction to the experiential neuroscience of religion,” Method & Teory in the Study of Religion, 21:3 [2009]: 310-339), social psychology, brain imaging, stress responses, and studies of ecstatic and extrasensory experiences outside of Pentecostalism (e.g., in the work of Amos Yong). Commensurate with engaging with recent work in the social and behavioral sciences, it is important to wrestle more thoroughly and deeply with the biblical and theological literature pertinent to this topic and employ each set of insights to creatively reimagine the other. One wonders what progress might be made by a multidisciplinary, sustained study of issues raised by this book by a research team that includes experts in communications theory, neurosciences, psychology, and theology. Tarr has performed a useful service by setting out a preliminary argument whose many aﬃrma- tions and hunches could be fruitfully expanded, explored, reﬁned, and reconﬁgured to advance understanding of “the mystery of tongues.”

Reviewed by Dennis W. Cheek, Ph.D.

Continental Teological Seminary, Sint Pieters-Leeuw, Belgium [email protected]

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