I wrote this related article: Paul: Praying in Tongues is “Speaking to God, Not People” — “no one understands,” “he speaks mysteries,” “edifies himself” — in languages of “men or angels”
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Thomas R. Schreiner is JAMES BUCHANAN HARRISON PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION AND PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY (1997) at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
I looked through the comments under Thomas Schreiner’s video, and post the best-of below. This one introduces Gordon Fee’s excellent article:
Dr. Schreiner is a major NT scholar and I think he has some valuable insights on a lot of the NT. But on the matter of “speaking in tongues” his own lack of experience or the experiences in his churches make him myopic to the text. We need to be careful not to read our own experience or lack of experience, as is Schreiner, back into scripture. The scriptures are addressing people who had certain common experiences, and IF we today have a similar experience to them, the texts make much more sense. For example, Paul’s epistles are addressed to first generation Christians who mostly experienced a dramatic encounter with the Holy Spirit in their conversion. They knew the joy of sins forgiven, deliverances from demons, and Gods love poured out in their hearts; and as Paul says to the Corinthians, “they lacked no spiritual gift.’ I mean, Paul’s explanation in 1 Corinthians 12-14 was not instruction to those who knew nothing in experience of these things. He was correcting certain abuses. …
An opposing view from another eminent NT scholar [Gordon Fee], for those who really seek to know the word.
The Essential Nature of Speaking in Tongues
In his article, Gordon Fee writes:
..it is a common error among Cessationists to interpret all accounts of the gift of tongues through the events of Pentecost in Acts 2, in which tongues was clearly understood by the Jewish observers as human languages/dialects. This is a grievous error, because instead of taking all of the accounts of tongues in to account and then forming a theology of the nature of the gift, Cessationists force the well-rounded peg of the full Scriptural witness through the square hole of one passage. The Pentecostal interpretation, on the other hand, takes all of the passages into account first, and then puts together a holistic theology of tongues. … Continue reading “Refuting Baptist Professor Thomas Schreiner’s ‘What is the gift of tongues?’ — “It is a common error among cessationists to interpret all accounts of the gift of tongues through the events of Pentecost in Acts 2” – Gordon Fee”
