Sacraments and speaking in tongues

Ruth and I have a great many books. The vast majority of them are in Stockholm, where we packed and stored all our belongings when we moved to Riga three years ago. (Intial three year assignment)

We brought with us a select number of books in the move to Latvia, and from time to time I go to the bookshelf to look for a book to read, or perhaps read a second time. Last week I found a little book that I read at the end of the 70s during the ignited charismatic movement. It was one of the many books that "everyone" read at the time. The book is called "Walking in the Spirit" and is written by the Anglican priest Micharl Harper. Today you can find the book in ‘used’ bookstores. You can also find it if you google the title and / or author. (Bethany House Publishers, 1 Jul 1983 )

There were a number of  "new" things many of us had to come to terms with, whether we were Anglicans or Salvationists. One interesting little detail in the book is how Michael Harper relates to speaking in tongues. He writes: "Speaking in tongues is like a sacrament; an outward, visible sign of an inherent grace." Here he uses the classic definition of a sacrament, and so he thinks that speaking in tongues  fits well under that description.

And why not? The early church father Augustine did not simply count two sacraments as did the Lutherans, or even seven sacraments as did the Catholics. For Augustine, there was an undefined number of sacraments. For him, as an example, the ‘signing’ of the cross was a sacrament, praying the Lord's Prayer was a sacrament, and he had no need to determine just how many sacraments there actually are.

There Augustine comes close to the Salvation Army's view that one’s life is a sacrament (= sacred act) and that we should not partmentalize life into sacred and non-sacred acts. For Christians, every action ought to be holy.





Peter Baronowsky, translated into English by Sven Ljungholm on fsaof.blogspot.com