Thus it seems that this refrain is a fi ll-in of sorts for the failure of our
ability to express with language that which we know within the depths of
our being. At this point, we might ask if the utterance of “I know that I
know that I know” in some way signals an approaching of the stillness of
language that lets what is suffi ce itself in itself. 37 Through a pentecostal
reading of Heidegger, we might say that indeed it is. The stillness, after all,
does not indicate silence. Rather, in the stillness, language simply is what
it is, language. It unfolds into itself, as do we. The world is let alone to be
in itself that which it is.
In a pentecostal sense, glossolalia is itself a letting be of what is. There is
no longer an attempt to control language nor an attempt to say anything,
at least not in any way that we can determine. Rather, in the glossola-
lic moment one surrenders to the manifestation of language as language
itself wishes. Heidegger asks when it is that language “speaks itself as lan-
guage.” 38 He answers that it is perhaps in that moment when we cannot
fi nd the right word and thus leave unsaid what we might have wanted to
utter. And it is then, he continues, that language seems to have “touched
us with its essential being.” 39 He continues that if, however, we are pressed
to speak what has never been spoken, then it is up to language to “give or
withhold the appropriate word.” Is the glossolalic utterance the appropri-
ate word? Perhaps it is. At the very least, glossolalia is the linguistic expres-
sion of transcendence. To speak in tongues is to move beyond language,
to utter what otherwise has escaped us and allows language to speak itself
and thus reveal the essence of being.
Finally, we are led to the hermeneutical moment. Hermeneutics as
an act of interpretation is about making sense, about uncovering and
unconcealing. In this way, hermeneutics extends into experience. Smith
understands, through Heidegger and Gadamer, that experience, being-in-
the-world, is to exist in a way that is always a making sense of the world
in which we are. As Smith puts it, “experience is interpretive.” 40 If then
our Being, our very being-in-the-world, is that which defi nes the essence
of our humanness, then “to be human is to interpret: to experience the
world is to interpret the world.” 41 Thus for Smith, pentecost does not
merely have a hermeneutic; it is a hermeneutic. Pentecost signals being in
the world in a particular way that situates one in the world in a particular
way and engenders a particular way of interpreting the world. 42
The work of glossolalia is hermeneutic in nature; it is concerned with
understanding. 43 Understanding here refers to what happens in the still-
ness of language, in the letting be. Interpretation, understanding—these
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