No Revelation, No Knowledge

    This is a companion piece to The MAGA Glossolalia, built from the same scaffold — 1 Corinthians 14, the same Paul passage about tongues and intelligibility and the failure of speech to communicate — but they're doing completely opposite things with it.

    The MAGA Glossolalia was extroverted and performative. The speaker was loud, certain, facing a crowd, wielding language as domination. His tongue was a weapon. The unintelligibility was a feature — meaning hidden from the intellectuals, the barbarians getting barbarous tongues. The speaker had all the best words and didn't care that they communicate nothing because communication was never the point. Power was.

    This piece is the not that.

    The same diagnosis, one delivered as exposure, one as confession. The same theology. Different rooms.

No Revelation, No Knowledge 

    “I love you.”

    These are words easily spoken. These are words easy to understand. These are words spoken white-knuckle into the air.

    “I do. I will.”

    We speak by revelation –the things we do not know. A model of the Christian faith and maturity through marriage, sex, and children.

    We speak by knowledge – in romantic statements, most curious and long out of love. Obstinate and distant.

    We speak by prophecy – more frightful than hell, captured by solitude, the net of eternal damnation.

    We speak by words of instruction – Brutally honest. Lights off, frigid and fearful. Increasingly distant. The seemingly impossible and the least likely to succeed.

    Speak in a tongue, any tongue, any language and speak to God but never to me. Disconnected from reality. And not to other people because nobody understands anything anymore. Preaching the entire Bible but the meaning is hidden. Frustrated and afraid. Defeated. I needed help but didn’t know how to ask.

    I love you, please.

    Maybe she knows she’s giving a half-truth and doesn’t care. Maybe she’s too lazy to look deeper, to investigate. What she’s heard confirms what she already believes, so she won’t bother to look. Maybe she’s as lost as me. Either way, stop dressing up like a grieving widow and speak to me, please.

    Flute or lyre or trumpet – it’s all the same note without a melody. I do not understand the meaning of the sounds you are making. All of our conversations are like this - no sound doctrine, no meaningful discussion. A drone or a dirge unsung forever.

    No revelation.

    No knowledge.

    No prophecy.

    No doctrine.

    My heart derives no comfort from ten thousand words in this unknown tongue.