A few months back I looked at Pentecostals trying to claim Luther spoke in tongues. Recently I came across an excellent overview of Luther’s interpretation of “speaking in tongues” in the book The Charismatic Movement (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing company, 1975).
“Luther did not have direct contact with the more unusual gifts of the Spirit catalogued by Paul in I Corinthians 12, notably glossolalia, interpretation thereof, and healing. However, as an exegete and preacher using the lectionary, he occasionally had to advert to our charismatic passages. He was also familiar with the Zwickau Prophets, who derived something of their charism from the Hussite tradition.
Luther believed that in apostolic times, people had spoken "new tongues" as a sign and "witness to the Jews." In his own day, however, Christianity no longer required the confirmation of such signs. Although they had ceased, each justified believer might expect to receive one or several other gifts of the Holy Spirit. There would always be a diversity of gifts in the true church, and these would operate in harmony, whereas among "fanatical spirits and sectarians," everyone "want[ed] to be everything."
Luther's clearest exposition of the meaning of the Corinthian texts for his day was in a treatise he published in 1525 against Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt. Drawing on Paul's first letter of advice to the troubled Corinthian church, Luther accused Carlstadt of misunderstanding the expression "speaking with tongues. Paul, he declared, had been concerned primarily with the office of preaching and the listening and learning of the congregation. With this as his premise, he used the passage on tongues to develop his case for preaching in the vernacular:
‘Whoever comes forward, and wants to read, teach, or preach, and yet speaks with tongues, that is, speaks Latin instead of German, or some unknown language, he is to be silent and preach to himself alone. For no one can hear it or understand it, and no one can get any benefit from it. Or if he should speak with tongues, he ought, in addition, to put what he says into German, or interpret it in one way or another, so that the congregation may understand it.’
Carlstadt had used Paul's directives to the Corinthians to prove that all speaking in tongues (i.e., preaching in Latin) was wrong. Luther, on the other hand, demanded only that the "tongues" be interpreted into the appropriate vernacular, and used Paul's writings to defend his position: "St. Paul is not as stubborn in forbidding speaking with tongues as this 'sin-spirit' [Carlstadt] is, but says it is not to be forbidden when along with it interpretation takes place."
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