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I gave a great deal of thought to the subtitle to this thread... because I agree with the things you just posted, Raf. I respect your thinking, it's just that you and I have some different basic assumptions at this stage of the game... and de gustabus non est disputandum! In fact, I'm really glad you posted so that we could make sure that the air is clear and there is no animosity between us. I did think of you while I was writing this paper, because I chose to do it in a more journalistic rather than an academic style. My dad was a newspaper man, and that has always inclined me to trust you. This paper is actually the result of about 21 years worth of thinking and researching. Two things have impressed me the most. The first is how much the Old Testament has to offer on the subject. The New Testament writers didn't bother to make explicit all the connections because they took it for granted that their readers would already understand the connections. For instance, WHY Pentecost? To me it seems blatantly obvious, but none of the commentators I've read seem to make the connections, and neither do my professors... yet. And Wierwille's parroting of dispensationalism cut us off from considering anything as valuable that came out of the Old Testament or the Gospels. The second thing that has impressed me has been an appreciation of the massive impact of the Pentcostal/Charismatic movement on the whole world over the past hundred years or so. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (December 19, 2011) Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian Population p. 67, there were over 500,000,000 Pentecostals/Charismatics in the world at that time... that's over 500 MILLION! What was the highest estimate for grads of PFAL... about 100,000? That means there are over 5,000 Pentecostals/Charismatics for every single grad of PFAL!?! Wierwille's teachings on speaking in tongues, which he stole from J.E. Stiles, were like a little parasite, a tiny flea, riding on the back of an elephant. Not all of those Pentecostal/Charismatics know that they can speak in tongues, but ALL of them can, and many, many of them DO. To conclude that speaking in tongues is not real because of exposure to Wierwille's miniscule chicanery is to fly in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence. I stopped and thought about how many Pentecostal/Charismatics there are around apart from the people who were involved with TWI. In my extended family there are four nuclear families who speak in tongues. The other three, apart from my own nuclear family that was from TWI, came out of three DIFFERENT faith communities. I would have had to write this paper for mutual understanding in my own extended family, if for no other reason! I took a class on Christian ethics last May, and an incident that happened in that class also contributed to my decision to write this paper... The professor was African-American along with about half of the students. One of the African-American students wrote and presented a paper in class on race relations within the American church. The races came together during the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties, but afterwards they separated again... except for the Pentecostals. The student posed the following as a question for class discusssion: What are the Pentecostals doing right? I hadn't spoken before in any of my classes about speaking in tongues. It is a relatively taboo subject at the SOT because there have been arguments in the past about the subject. But in this case, I couldn't keep quiet. An African-American named Marcus and I had some remarkable interactions while I was a WOW in Tucson, in spite of our radical racial differences, demonstrating to each other the love of God. I know that happened because we each respected the fact that we both spoke in tongues. I related the incident in class, and all sorts of people started saying all sorts of things about tongues, because I had made it safe for them to do so. There is a need at the SOT for us to come to a common understanding of tongues based on what is actually written in the Bible. The title of my paper is What does the Bible really say (and really NOT say) about speaking in tongues? I take it for granted that what the Bible really says (my own translations from the Greek) are reliable, and that modern speaking in tongues is generally genuine, even though some people do it indecently or out of order. Those are premises from which I have started. Members of my intended audience and myself will not be able to come to any common understanding if we don't respect those presuppositions. If anyone wants to present arguments that the Bible is not inherently reliable, or that speaking in tongues is all delusional, well... that's a wonderful thing, but it's not what this thread is about, and that's why I deliberately subtitled it "NOT an argument with Raf..." :beer:/>/> Love, Steve