Correction: Montanus, Speaking in Tongues & Church History
I have commented quite a bit about the history of the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements, and how they are driven by a false kundalini spirit and legalism. I have also documented these things and their connection to Rome (especially as of Vatican 2) as well as paganism. Many have asked me if I am a ‘cessationist’ because I have claimed that the gifts died out after the 1st century with the apostles. The answer is that I do not define myself by mainstream terminology, because in most cases these definitions are not nuanced enough to encompass the full truth. But with that said, I need to clarify a few things I’ve stated before on these matters.
One thing I’ve stated is that, because the Church marshaled a concerted effort against the 2nd century heretic, Montanus (who was popularizing the gibberish tongues that pagans and modern Charismatics love) -- that therefore this organized effort to do away with him meant the Church recognized these gifts to have ceased. I went off of various reputable sources, like John MacArthur’s ‘Charismatic Chaos’, where he states that, ‘after the apostles tongue speaking was almost entirely isolated to the Gnostics and the Montanists.’ Although there is some truth to this story, this claim is overstated and requires more clarity. In my original research I’ve also stated that there were no writings from patristic sources on speaking in tongues, which is also not true and needs to be correct, albeit with important context.
First we consider John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo, who wrote extensively about tongues but also noted that the gift of tongues had ceased by their era (4th/5th centuries). Chrysostom openly called the phenomenon ‘obscure’ because it no longer occurred, like in his Homilies on 1 Corinthians, 29, where he says the following:
‘This whole place [i.e., I Corinthians 14 and its treatment of tongues] is very obscure; but the obscurity is produced by our ignorance of the facts referred to and by their cessation, being such as then used to occur but now no longer take place. And why do they not happen now? Why look now, the cause too of the obscurity hath produced us again another question: namely, why did they then happen, and now do so no more?’
Augustine says in his Homilies on 1 John 6.10 that these things (tongues) were ‘done for a betokening [sign, symbol], and it passed away.’ These testimonies draw a distinct line that such things were certainly ceased within a few centuries after the cross. But now the question is, what about the time period of the interim?
Polycarp and Papias do not focus on tongues in their writings, and they lived around the 1st-2nd centuries. Irenaeus in the late 2nd century explicitly recorded Christians in his day who spoke in all kinds of languages through the Spirit (Against Heresies, Book 5, Chapter 6, Section 1):
‘In like manner we do also hear many brethren in the Church, who possess prophetic gifts, and who through the Spirit speak all kinds of languages, and bring to light for the general benefit the hidden things of men, and declare the mysteries of God, whom also the apostle terms ‘spiritual,’ they being spiritual because they partake of the Spirit, and not because their flesh has been stripped off and taken away, and because they have become purely spiritual.’
Notable is that these were actual tongues, real languages, not the unintelligible babble that was associated with Montanus. There is also an ambiguous passage in Origen’s writings (Against Celsus, 7.9) around that time. Celsus wrote his work around AD 177 criticizing Christianity, and Origen describes a portion of it as follows:
‘Then [Celsus] goes on to say: ‘To these promises are added strange, fanatical, and quite unintelligible words, of which no rational person can find the meaning: for so dark are they, as to have no meaning at all; but they give occasion to every fool or impostor to apply them to suit his own purposes.’
So here, in the same exact time period, we see the complete opposite of what Irenaeus describes. That means by the late 2nd century we can safely assume that Satan’s counterfeit spiritual gifts were already in full bloom as a parallel and competing movement to the growing Church and God’s gifts. Very likely these things were happening even before that time, as they were part of pagan rites for centuries in many places -- and the pagans were always in close proximity to God’s people by design.
Regardless, an important point is that in general we do not find a lot of writings about this phenomenon that early, and the ones we do find do not give us a clear view of the breadth of what is happening. In other words, we can’t tell from Irenaeus’ writings that this was something happening in every Church community all over (as Charismatics would have us believe) or if this was in a few pockets here and there, consistent with the theory that, even by this early date, this set of gifts was already phasing out. We simply do not know, but given more context we can infer that the latter is likely.
Therefore the next important piece of context to consider is the matter of the Bishop of Rome, Tertullian and Praxeas. Praxeas was an early proponent of Modalism, teaching that the Father and Son were the same person, and so he was embroiled with christological debates of his time. Tertullian wrote against Praxeas around the beginning of the 3rd century, so 20-30 years after the Origen and Irenaeus writings cited previously. In his Against Praxeas, Chapter 1, Tertullian describes Praxeas’ efforts at convincing the Bishop of Rome at the time (probably Eleutherius or Victor I) to recall the ‘letters of peace’ that were written to the Monetarists as a sign of goodwill. So Rome basically supported this false spirit in the beginning (surprise surprise, and you thought all of that started with Vatican 2?) -- however the confounding part of this situation is that Tertullian was not in favor of this retraction and criticized Praxeas as having done a ‘twofold service for the devil at Rome: he drove away prophecy, and he brought in heresy; he put to flight the Paraclete, and he crucified the Father.’
So Tertullian accused Praxeas of serving the devil by convincing Rome to repent of endorsing Montanus, because Tertullian was himself a Montanist. The story gets worse when you consider that Tertullian eventually broke away from the Montanists and formed his own denomination of sorts (the ‘Tertullianists’) driving people into delusion even further. In this sect, second marriages were strictly condemned as a form of adultery, extensive fasting was aggressively mandated and fleeing from religious persecution or martyrdom was absolutely forbidden. They also rejected the mainstream Church’s authority to absolve major sins (like adultery, murder, or apostasy) committed after baptism. They believed such sins permanently compromised a person’s salvation, offering no path back to Church fellowship. They also believed in an immortal but corporeal soul, a soul that was made out of a physical substance of some kind, and that the soul-substance therefore could be passed down from parent to child -- philosophical ideas that have developed the Catholic version of original sin or the modern Charismatic notion of ‘generational curses.’ Tertullian even believed, according to Augustine’s records, that the souls of the worst, most wicked humans actually transformed into literal demons after death.
Taking this all into account hopefully reveals the absolutely haphazard nature of the early Church, and also the self-contradicting nature of the ‘Church Fathers.’ As I have said many times, they were all over the place. Tertullian accused Praxeas of being a heretic, and yet he himself deluded people into legalism and participated in heresy. Whether these men were genuine believers or not only God knows, which is why you have to consider context and history very carefully. Nevertheless, what is true is that by the 2nd century, within 100 years of the cross, you clearly see two parallel threads when it comes to the gift of tongues: on one side you see some evidence of the continuation of biblical tongues in various pockets, while on the other you see a massive wave of Satanic activity sweeping the Church and causing chaos. This is in tandem, mind you, with gnosticism, Judaizing, Roman persecution, fasting controversies and a myriad of other attacks. Within another century and a half (by the mid-300’s), the former was perceived to have been completely passed while the latter continues to this day and indeed has only come into the world more and more in the last century as we approach the end and maximum delusion.
So what do we take from these things? First, and importantly, Montanus was rejected as a heretic but not because there was necessarily a consensus in his time (mid-to-late 2nd century) that the gifts had completely ceased, but rather because of the manner of which he and his followers were claiming to be experiencing said gifts. Crucially, we must also define what we mean by ‘gifts’ here lest anyone misunderstand. Nobody by Montanus’ time believed there were still apostles like Peter and Paul, and nobody was raising people from the dead or performing crazy miracles like in the gospels. Furthermore, nobody believed the canon was still being written at that time, as John’s Revelation (although it took another two centuries to be formally accepted) was the last thing to have been given by God to the Church.
That leaves situational prophetic utterances and guidance, and speaking in foreign tongues spontaneously (as well as interpreting such phenomenon) as what we mean by ‘gifts’. Today people conflate the term ‘gifts’ to include basically everything that happened in the New Testament with Jesus and the apostles, but this is clearly not the case and history shows us a tranche-style removal of these things as the Church expanded, which proves the thesis that they were explicitly designed for the early Church as a symbol and sign, and gradually (but nevertheless quickly historically speaking) were taken away.
But Satan has been active throughout time, and he is not going to waste any moment that he can be on the offensive. This much is abundantly clear. The counterfeit spirit that existed in paganism migrated aggressively into the Church through people like Montanus and those after him. Montanus and his followers experienced frenzied ecstatic manifestations and lost all self-control in their ‘prophetic’ circles, and Montanus claimed to speak in the first person as the Holy Spirit, believing to be possessed by God in a sense. Not at all different than modern heretics like Paula White who claim that wherever they walk, God walks, and therefore where they stand is holy ground. It was for these heretical and chaotic practices, much akin to pagans in their area (Pythia, Delphi, etc.) that Montanus was rejected, not because there was universal consensus on this issue at that time. The Church historian Eusebius described these babbling frenzies (Ecclesiastical History 5.16), citing an anonymous writer who in turn cited an earlier historian named Apolinarius of Hierapolis (who criticized Montanus, because they were from the same time period), and how they were much like modern Charismatic events, saying they were ‘contrary to the constant custom of the Church handed down by tradition from the beginning.’
Some take this to mean that Apolinarius is validating a continuation of these things into the 2nd century and criticizing Montanus for going against the grain of what was already being done by the Church. Others who are more conservative would argue that Apolinarius is merely pointing to scripture as the test, because that is what was handed down to the Church as guidance (and according to Paul’s guidance on this it was clearly against it). I think given the various testimonies of others, what is likely is somewhere in between: at that time there were people speaking in foreign tongues spontaneously and giving various prophetic utterances (although not creating canon, which is important), yet you also had the counterfeit competing with this move of God to try to subvert it. And everyone was watching carefully and trying to discern what was true and what was false, because the Church was being attacked aggressively from all sides by Satan.
The mainstream, Charismatic takeaway from this is that, because of Montanus, the Church became more skeptical of the gifts and therefore they stopped experiencing it because they ‘shut themselves off to the Holy Spirit’ (hence the justification for modern ‘revivals’). But this puts the focus on man as the determiner of history, not God. God is sovereign and determines the allotted boundaries and appointed times for all things (Acts 17:26), which means God determined that such gifts would phase out early on -- allowing Satan to infiltrate and achieve his purpose. In other words, it was God’s will that these things cease. Had it been God’s will that people could replicate Christ’s miracles or raise people from the dead or speak in foreign tongues spontaneously (or understand them) for the entire life of the Church, then such things would have continued. But they didn’t, because these things were only part of the plan for the early Church, as a testimony and sign for God moving in the world so that those people could believe.
But does this mean God doesn’t give any gifts anymore? No, not at all. God is always giving gifts and blesses people with all manner of talents, wisdom, wealth, health, humor, curiosity, intelligence, compassion and humility. Everyone has gifts, and God is always giving gifts to His children. And the gifts God gives you are irrevocable (Romans 11:29), which of course includes the gift of salvation. But the gifts we receive today are different than they were before, because the environment of the Church has changed with every generation. That doesn’t make them any less valuable. Today we can flip through the Bible and read multiple versions, do word searches instantly, analyze patterns, translate foreign languages immediately or have technology analyze hundreds of pages of text for patterns instantly -- all from the palm of our hand. By any standard, these things would be perceived as supernatural 1,800 years ago and people would have been jealous of what we, today, consider as ‘ordinary’ because indeed it is actually quite ‘extraordinary’.
For a treatment of these and other theological topics in detail, please see my book “The Seven Transformations: Finding the Narrow Road by Pursuing a Sovereign Christ.”
