ANGELIC/PRIVATE PRAYER LANGUAGE
Didn’t Paul say he spoke in angelic tongues?
No. This is what Paul said: “If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.” (1 Corinthians 13:1) He said nothing more, nothing less; Paul made a hypothetical proposal:
if I speak in angelic tongues,
if I moved mountains,
if I could do some other impossible thing but do not have love… See THAT is the point: If I don’t have love, no matter what wonderful thing I can do, I will be like a falsely reverberating instrument.
Of course Paul could have used something else to make his point. Yet charismatics concocted an entire system of “tongues of angels” and “private prayer language” based on a solitary, hypothetical analogy.
1 Corinthians 13:1 fails to make the case for people praying in some sort of “angelic tongue” or “private prayer language”. To be sure, angels communicate, but it is highly unlikely they would use a system requiring human vocal chords and much less that we could perceive angelic communication with earthbound senses.
“Private prayer language” of course implies a type of prayer that is to be used in private. Except charismatics rattle off the same mumbo-jumbo "tongues" in private as they do at prayer meetings, conferences and charismatic masses. So then what makes charismatic tongues a “private prayer language”? Anyone can pray the Our Father in private, but that does not make the “Our Father” a private prayer.
So then who would benefit from praying in a language nobody understands when nobody is around? The charismatic explanation is we do not know what we need, but the Holy Spirit does. That of course is true, but it fails to make a case for mindless babble. In the same way we do not have to verbalize for God what he already knows. The “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary” covers all the bases so to speak or we can just repeat Jesus’ plea to the Father from Matthew 26; pass this cup from me, but not my will, your will be done!
