find a new teacher or find a new church
I appreciate the suggestion, but I want to clarify that neither my church nor the teacher are charismatic at all. In fact, I and many of the people in the Sunday school seemed to be against that idea and were constantly throwing questions at him challenging his interpretation on that. I had him as a teacher for several classes so far and this issue was the only thing on which I have disagreed with him. The fact that he is very conservative and deep in his studies surprised me that he came up with that kind of explanation.
He had never claimed that he had this "gift of tongues" nor did he claim that he had ever seen someone else practice it. He just claimed that he had studied for 14 hours on the subject and arrived at the conclusion that that was what Paul was talking about and acted embarrassed about even talking about it because he knew it would ruffle some feathers.
One question I asked him that got him thinking was something like "If you claim that the context here for
edifying others always has to do with
understanding what is being said, how does one
edify himself if you're claiming that the speaker of the tongue
doesn't even know what he is saying?" He looked a little shocked and said something like, "That is a really good question and I actually thought about that a couple times. I'm not exactly sure how that works. Maybe it has something to do with the 'emotional experience' gained during the event. I really don't know." My next question would have been "If the speaker somehow gets an 'emotional experience' from these 'tongues' why can't others who listen to him speak get the same 'emotional experience'? Is there any
reason for the
words themselves?" but he moved on to the next verse.
I think he just needs to think this through a little more. Maybe time will tell. Heh.