What do you call a series of four books? A quadrilogy?

Nope! It’s a tetralogy, and this is quite a work that I had the honor of seeing grow and solidify over the past six years, starting from conversations with my former philosophy professor, Dr. Philip Blosser of Sacred Heart Major Seminary (to be clear, our conversations did not start his work, but we talked about his work long ago when he was beginning to chew on the issues).

By way of a quick introduction: the Catholic world right now has a large segment of devout, pious, and very moral people (they call themselves the Charismatic Renewal) who adhere to the idea of speaking in tongues. Their belief is that the Holy Spirit fills Christian believers with the ability to speak in a private prayer language that only God understands, but seems unintelligible to any other person. However, they root this belief in Scripture and claim that even the Apostle Paul understood speaking in tongues to be this same phenomena that they believe it to be.

Yet, when one reads all the Scriptural passages relating to speaking in tongues, there is actually no support for the Charismatic Renewal’s belief. From the time of the Apostles, through the Church Fathers, to the medieval scholastics, and throughout all the Catholic Church’s long history, never once does the Charismatic Renewal’s understanding of the gift of tongues find support — or even a hint of support — if one examines the history carefully. This finding is shocking, considering the claims of the CR and its continued promoting of practices to “prime yourself to speak in tongues” or even to “keep saying random sounds until the Spirit takes over”. Instead, speaking in tongues and the gift of tongues always referred to real human languages — not a personal private prayer language that existed only between God and the speaker, unintelligible to all else.

After reading each volume in this series, and full disclosure: also helping proofread volumes 3 and 4, I can say firsthand that Dr. Blosser and Charles Sullivan (both co-authoring the series) have gifted the Church and all Christian believers a monumental and irreplaceable series. Their research, the depth, their devotion to Truth and Scripture, are astounding, and what they uncover is not only eye-opening, but absolutely clicks — it all rings true. For me now, reading those parts of Scripture they analyzed makes much more sense: the experience is like finally finding lost pieces of a massive puzzle while others tried to give counterfeit pieces that didn’t quite fit.

So if you want to know what I now know, and how to make sense of what St. Paul means when he mentions speaking in tongues, give Dr. Blosser and Mr. Sullivan some time and pay their pages a visit. BONUS: use code YOUR40 on their series’ publisher website at checkout for 40% off! Also available on Amazon, but without the big discount.

For words from Dr. Blosser himself, please see this excellent article from the Catholic Herald where he introduces his research and tetralogy.