The Dangers of Pentecostal Practice

Abstract This article reevaluates the formative power of speaking in tongues through dialogue with Lauren Winner’s The Dangers of Christian Practice . It uses Winner’s notion of ‘characteristic damage’, her idea that the characteristic good of a practice can be damaged in unique ways, to engage previous scholarly accounts that have argued for the formative and deformative potential of glossolalia and xenolalia . By juxtaposing these accounts with one another, in light of Winner’s framework, this article seeks to enrich the theological perspective on tongues. Ultimately, its examination of these conflicting accounts yields a constructive synthesis that posits entanglement as the characteristic good of speaking in tongues, both as glossolalia and xenolalia . This final synthesis enables an account of God’s gifts that is honest about both the goodness of the gift and the brokenness of the recipient.