Pentecost Miracles (with D. D. Home)

Pentecostalism

A modern revival movement within free church Protestantism characterized by the appearance of the biblical gifts of the spirit as outlined in the Apostle Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians 12. These gifts include the working of miracles, healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues. Of the several gifts, the speaking in tongues has been the most controversial.

The Pentecostal movement began in 1901 in a Bible school in Topeka, Kansas. The school's teacher, Charles Parham, assigned his students the project of researching the sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the first Christian apostles. Upon questioning, the students agreed that the baptism of the spirit was always accompanied by the individual "speaking in tongues." Thus the group began to pray for the baptism, and on January 1, 1901, Agnes Oznam was the first to receive an answer to her prayer and began to speak in tongues. The other students also soon spoke in tongues, and over the next few years news of the experience was spread through Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. In 1906, a student from Parham's school in Houston carried the experience to Los Angeles. William J. Seymour, an African American led a small black congregation that became the center from which the movement spread to the world. It eventually took organizational form in a number of denominational bodies such as the Assemblies of God and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee).

It is a doctrine of Pentecostals that every person who receives the baptism of the Holy Spirit will initially speak in tongues, and then subsequently manifest one or more of the other gifts of the spirit. Within Pentecostal congregations, members look for manifestations of all of the gifts.

The early Pentcostals believed that they were living in the last days prior to the return of Jesus. Therefore they interpreted the sounds which they heard as people were speaking in tongues as a foreign language, a supernatural tool to assist them in converting the nations of the world. Numerous accounts appear in the early Pentecostal literature of someone recognizing a specific foreign language being spoken despite the ignorance of the person speaking of that language. The speaking of a foreign language while in an altered state of consciousness is termed xenoglossia. Documented cases of xenoglossia are quite rare.

However, most people who speak in tongues speak sounds not translatable into any known language. In the Bible, the words spoken are described as the "words of men and of angels," and many have suggested that the unintelligible sounds were really angelic. These unintelligible vocalizations are referred to as glossolalia.

With the popularization of Pentecostalism in the last half of the twentieth century, research on the nature of glossolalia has been done. Among the most useful was the work of linguist William Samarin who studied a number of people who spoke in tongues and discovered that their vocalizations constituted a proto-language. The sounds were related to the language they spoke every day, but had only a limited number of vowels and consonants. Their speech did not have enough different sounds from which to construct a language, but was quite distinct from the gibberish spoken by someone trying to imitate someone speaking in tongues.

Pentecostal Happenings in Spiritualism

Within Spiritualism, the full range of phenomena generally referred to as the gifts of the spirit by Pentecostals also manifest. Among notable examples is the "Martian" language spoken by French medium Helene Smith and reported by Theodore Flournoy. Smith claimed that she had astrally visited Mars and while in trance spoke "Martian." Her claim was thus that she exhibited an instance of xenoglossia. Flournoy demonstrated that the language was related to her everyday French, that is, she was demonstrating glossolalia.

Viscount Adare, in his book Experiences in Spiritualism with Mr. D. D. Home (1870), claimed to have witnessed a broad modern duplication of the Pentecostal experience in the medium-ship of D. D. Home:

"We now had a series of very curious manifestations. Lindsay and Charlie [Charles Wynne] saw tongues or jets of flame proceeding from Home's head. We then all distinctly heard, as it were, a bird flying round the room whistling and chirping, but saw nothing, except Lindsay, who perceived an indistinct form resembling a bird. Then came a sound as of a great windrushing through the room, we also felt the wind strongly; the moaning rushing sound was the most weird thing I ever heard. Home then got up, being in trance, and spoke something in a language that none of us understood; it may have been nonsense, but it sounded like a sentence in a foreign tongue. Lindsay thought he recognized some words of Russian. He then quoted the text about the different gifts of the spirit, and gave us a translation in English of what he had said in the unknown tongue. He told us that Charlie had that day been discussing the miracles that took place at Pentecost, and that the spirit made the sound of the wind; of the bird descending; of the unknown tongue, and interpretation thereof, and the tongues of fire to show that the same phenomenon could occur again."

(See also Daniel Dunglas Home ; Luminous Phenomena ; Sounds ; Winds ; Xenoglossis )

Sources:

Dunraven, Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin. Experiences in Spiritualism with Mr. D. D. Home. Glasgow: R. Maclehose & Co. Ltd., 1924.

Flournoy, Theodore. From India to the Planet Mars. New York: Harper, 1901.

Goodman, Felicitas D. Speaking in Tongues: A Cross Cultural Study of Glossolalia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Kydd, Ronald A. N. Charismatic Gifts in the Early Church. Pea-body, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1984.

Samarin, William J. Tongues of Men and Angels. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

Synan, Vincent, ed. Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins. Plainfield, N.J.: Losgos International, 1975.