Why Do (Some) Seminaries Still Require the Biblical Languages?
The following is reprinted with permission from Paraklesis, a publication of Baptist Bible Seminary. The article first appeared in the Summer ‘09 issue.
Why learn Hebrew and Greek?
I want to address just one facet of the question in this essay. The primary purpose of Baptist Bible Seminary is to train pastors. We have made a deliberate choice to focus on only one narrow slice of graduate-level biblical-theological education. I am thinking first and foremost of the pastor when I think of the place of the biblical languages in the curriculum. In its biblical portrait, the central focus in pastoral ministry is the public proclamation of the Word of God. There are certainly other aspects of pastoral ministry, but it can be no less than preaching if it is to be a biblical pastoral ministry.
How does preaching relate to the biblical languages?
I have some serious concerns about the state of the pulpit these days. My concern could be stated fairly well by adapting the wording of 1 Sam. 3:1 and suggesting that biblical preaching is rare in our day, and a word from God is infrequently heard from our pulpits. Some of today’s best known preachers echo the same sentiment. John Stott, for example, says that “true Christian preaching…is extremely rare in today’s Church.”1
As those who stand in the pulpit and open the Word of God to a local congregation, pastors have the same charge as that with which Paul charged Timothy: “Preach the Word” (2 Tim 4:2). That is an awesome responsibility. The apostle Peter reminds us that “if anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God” (1 Pet 4:11).
The Word of God is a most precious treasure—equal to our very salvation in worth, for if we had no Bible we would know nothing of God’s Son, the forgiveness that His cross-work provided, and the new covenant relationship which that work inaugurated.
Although the Word of God has been given for all, the pastor is entrusted with the Word of God in a special sense due to his primary responsibility of proclaiming that Word to a congregation. Handling the Word of God correctly is an enormous responsibility. As James exhorted his hearers, “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly” (James 3:1).
There ought to be a very real sense in which the pastor recognizes and acknowledges his inadequacy for such a great task. Richard Baxter, the famous 17th century preacher, reminds us that “it is no small matter to stand up in the face of a congregation and deliver a message of salvation or condemnation, as from the living God, in the name of our Redeemer.”2
Preaching is directly influenced by our theology. If we really believe, not just as a matter of academic statement, but as genuine convictions, that the Bible is God’s revealed truth, inspired and inerrant in the originals, then our preaching and teaching of that revelatory corpus must, of necessity, be based on our careful study of the text in the original languages.
There is no other way to have the immediate confidence necessary to undergird our proclamation of “thus says the Lord.” If you cannot read the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, you will always be at the mercy of those who claim to to be able to do so. The pastor may never become a scholar in the languages, but he absolutely must learn to understand the text as God saw fit to have it written. He must learn to read the text, use a lexicon, and evaluate and profit from the commentaries and grammars. He cannot depend on software to do this for him.
Yes, any of the decent language-based software tools will parse every word for you, but if you don’t know what to do with that information, what good is it? There is a world of difference between pieces, even mountains, of data and comprehension.
Works Cited
1 Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 15.
2 The Reformed Pastor, edited and abridged by Jay Green (Grand Rapids: Sovereign Grace, 1971), 17.
Dr. Rodney Decker has served as Professor of Greek and New Testament at Baptist Bible Seminary since 1996. He has published several books and scholarly articles. He also edits and maintains NTResources.com and has created several specialized TrueType fonts for Greek.
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[Don] uses a seriously flawed preacherNot an ideal choice, I’ll give you that. I’d say though that he doesn’t use a “seriously flawed preacher”—he uses a good point in a good book that was written by a seriously flawed preacher.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
FIRST, I am not against quoting Stott or anyone else for that matter if the occasion warrants it.
BUT Decker is making this point:
I have some serious concerns about the state of the pulpit these days. My concern could be stated fairly well by adapting the wording of 1 Sam. 3:1 and suggesting that biblical preaching is rare in our day, and a word from God is infrequently heard from our pulpits.Yeah, sure, we can agree with that concern if we are talking the broader Christian world. It’s almost a given.
But then FOR SUPPORT he uses a quote that agrees with his point from a guy who is a prime example of “And the word of the Lord was rare in those days” (1 Sam 3.1). The word of the Lord from Stott is rare because he denies the word of the Lord.
Surely there are plenty of other “famous preachers” that could be used to make that point. Try Piper, MacArthur, Dever, Mahaney, Mohler, any of the Togetherness boys, and I am sure you can find a quote from them somewhere that is similar to what Stott said.
It is just too ironical that he chooses Stott, a man who denies a significant doctrine as support for his point.
~~~
So, now, after having said the same thing for three posts in a row now… I’ll quit.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
Church Ministries Representative, serving in the Midwest, for The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry
… but why use the Annihilationist, Stott, to lament the low state of preaching?Probably because Stott’s “Between Two Worlds” is one of the classic books on preaching.
I think we fundamentalists are discerning enough to “eat the chicken and spit out the bones.” Yes, I have a major problem with Stott’s view on hell. However, I have used arguments about the atonement from Stott to argue against a moral view of the atonement (which Brian Mclaren espouses and many other emergents are embracing). Yes, there are others that I could have quoted, but Stott articulated it better for the situation I was part of……..
I can see the reasoning there. It’s not “This guy has problems so we shouldn’t quote him” but “This guy has the very problem we’re using him to argue against so we shouldn’t quote him in that way.” I don’t think I disagree, though it’s probably not as important to me as it seems to be to you. As Shaffer pointed out, the book is something of a classic, though it isn’t really that old. But if I were looking for sources to bolster my case or simply acknowledge, yes, given his departure from orthodoxy on that point—and how that probably impacts his preaching—I think I’d look for someone else. I’m not sure I’d look all that hard though. He probably still preaches quite well 98% of the time. Since, in his annihilationism, you still have God pouring out wrath on sinners in upholding His holiness, it probably usually shows up in preaching in the absence of references to “eternal” punishment. This is a problem, to be sure, but I have to ask myself how often to I specifically mention the eternal nature of sin’s penalty?
(OK, well it came up quite often in the Romans series! … it probably gets a mention somewhere in like every 4th or 5th sermon I preach. So maybe I just have to join you on that point, Don!)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Ultimately the Holy Spirit leads and guides to truth, and doesn’t necessarily require that a person understand the original languages, but that doesn’t mean we have to fall off either the Anti-Intellectual or the Elitist cliff, as human nature is so prone to do.
[Susan R] There was a time when every serious student had a decent grasp of Greek and Latin before they graduated, at, like age 15, because it was normal part of the educational process. Focusing on quality education from the ground up that includes basic Greek, Latin- and in Christian schools, Hebrew- would result in a more ‘level playing field’, with the laity not so dependent on a few experts, and a congregation that is more adept at searching the Scriptures on their own.how long ago was this? were there ever any christian middle schools teaching greek and hebrew? why do i even want to know rudimentary greek and hebrew? it seems much more efficient to me to teach good researching skills. i would have to spend a lifetime studying to match the expertise i can find by comparing several english translations and studying with a few good commentaries. a rudimentary grasp of the language gets me nowhere and only possibly into trouble if i think i know more than the experts.
As far as the point of the article, I agree with the general thrust. If possible, young men training for the ministry should have Greek and Hebrew, even if they have to struggle through it and aren’t really “language guys”. A familiarity with either or both languages is very helpful in “rightly dividing the word”.
I don’t think Classical education, however, is the answer. When Classical education was in vogue, most young men weren’t getting an education at all, just those gifted for it, either by social class and position or by ability. The average guy was learning to be a tradesman and barely literate.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
[ChrisC]Chris, it wasn’t until the 19th century that Greek and Latin were excised form the curriculum. J. Gresham Machen, for example, deplored the discontinuing of Latin. If you read The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman, you’ll find an example of a university interview. To get into, say, Oxford, students would be examined in one Latin work and one Greek work. The tutor would ask them about grammar and syntax, but even more about theme, plot, critical reasoning points, and such. So, education then was familiarity with a set corpus of literature and a facility in reading, writing, and thinking. In the aftermath of Scottish inductivism, American education has followed the trend toward amassing facts and testing quantity of factual knowledge.[Susan R] There was a time when every serious student had a decent grasp of Greek and Latin before they graduated, at, like age 15, because it was normal part of the educational process. Focusing on quality education from the ground up that includes basic Greek, Latin- and in Christian schools, Hebrew- would result in a more ‘level playing field’, with the laity not so dependent on a few experts, and a congregation that is more adept at searching the Scriptures on their own.how long ago was this? were there ever any christian middle schools teaching greek and hebrew? why do i even want to know rudimentary greek and hebrew? it seems much more efficient to me to teach good researching skills. i would have to spend a lifetime studying to match the expertise i can find by comparing several english translations and studying with a few good commentaries. a rudimentary grasp of the language gets me nowhere and only possibly into trouble if i think i know more than the experts.
For that matter, 300 years or so ago, everyone who went to university learned the same thing. There was only one course, the “Bachelor of Arts.” You learned “the arts,” which are roughly analogous to what we call humanities today. Then, you could get a Master of Arts, an intensive course focusing on logic, philosophy, and research skills. Then you could specialize into law, theology, or medicine, earning, for example, the Bachelor of Divinity. (Of course, I’m generalizing a bit since the exact order of courses varied by century and geography, but this is pretty close to how education went everywhere before the rise of the modern German research university).
I want to point out that our quality of ancient language pedagogy has declined sharply. The average contemporary PhD in Theology has nowhere near the facility in Greek that a post-Reformation scholar would have. If you read Philip Melanchthon’s works on education, you find him recommending teaching Greek to what we would know as middle and high school students. The courses were conducted in Greek to the extent that the students would understand. The more advanced “high school” students could simply be read to straight out of the NT. So, the pre-university students of Melanchthon’s Germany (at least the bright ones) would have a facility in Greek that only a few dozen specialists possess today. Do you know anyone that can speak Koine Greek conversationally? Even in Anne of Green Gables, Anne learns Greek and Latin. If I remember correctly, she likes Latin but not Greek. My point is that we are in a historical wasteland as far as ancient language facility goes. Where Koine is taught at all, it is generally taught as a dead language to be approached through a paradigm-oriented code breaking mentality. Students are taught to perform certain tasks (sentence diagramming, etc.), but not to learn the language as a real language. There are steps in a more positive direction, however. Randall Buth’s Biblical Languages Ulpan offers immersion courses in (spoken!) Koine, and biblicalgreek.org takes a living language approach as well, incorporating classical Greek into the learning process. The ugly truth of the moment, however, is that probably 80%+ of evangelical pastors remember Greek and Hebrew merely as unpleasant educational experiences. That really is a waste of time.
My Blog: http://dearreaderblog.com
Cor meum tibi offero Domine prompte et sincere. ~ John Calvin
[ChrisC]Sources- American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1789 by Lawrence A. Cremin[Susan R] There was a time when every serious student had a decent grasp of Greek and Latin before they graduated, at, like age 15, because it was normal part of the educational process. Focusing on quality education from the ground up that includes basic Greek, Latin- and in Christian schools, Hebrew- would result in a more ‘level playing field’, with the laity not so dependent on a few experts, and a congregation that is more adept at searching the Scriptures on their own.how long ago was this? were there ever any christian middle schools teaching greek and hebrew? why do i even want to know rudimentary greek and hebrew? it seems much more efficient to me to teach good researching skills. i would have to spend a lifetime studying to match the expertise i can find by comparing several english translations and studying with a few good commentaries. a rudimentary grasp of the language gets me nowhere and only possibly into trouble if i think i know more than the experts.
The Intellectual Life of New England by Samuel Eliot Morison
The Cultural Life of the American Colonies by Louis B. Wright - which, by the way, explores the fact that in the mid-1700’s, there were at least one hundred and twenty-five private schools/tutors that advertised their services in Philadelphia newspapers, offering instruction in Latin, Greek, mathematics, surveying, navigation, accounting, bookkeeping, science, English, and foreign languages.
IMO an appreciation and understanding of languages, especially Greek and Latin, is very important to several subjects, such as spelling/vocabulary, classic literature, and science. And why wouldn’t someone want to learn Hebrew? I’m not saying that everyone should aim for expertise.
To borrow Aaron’s cooking analogy- I can open a box and follow the directions- which is IMO how most people treat Bible study and church. Or- I can learn the basic how’s and why’s of cooking, and not only follow directions but understand why the directions work. Or, if I wish to become a gourmet chef, I can go to cooking school and acquire the desired expertise. No matter which method I use, I can still provide a nutritious meal for my family- but the balance of nutrients and the overall quality is going to be better the more I know about what I am doing.
[ChrisC] how long ago was this? were there ever any christian middle schools teaching greek and hebrew?I attended a Lutheran high school in the mid-80’s where anyone intending to study for the Lutheran ministry needed to take four years of Latin and two years of German in high school. If you were not on that track by your sophomore or junior year, it was almost too late to be “called” to the ministry. The same is still true today in their system, as far as I know.
In the Lutheran school system, the major recruiting for the ministry preparation schools was really done in middle school.
I am not necessarily recommending that as a model, just saying what is — or at least what I witnessed in my experience.
I can say without hesitation that if you had a Biblical languages contest between a group of fundamental baptist pastors and a group of orthodox Lutheran pastors, the baptists would get embarrassed pretty badly.
FWIW — I taught part-time in a Christian school for three years and gave the kids in grades 1-6 a dab of Hebrew each week. They absolutely ate it up…
Church Ministries Representative, serving in the Midwest, for The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry
I might teach there a little this fall.
But it’s still not quite “old school,” because you learn Latin in Jr High and Greek in High School (rather than both in elementary).
I never got Latin, so I’m hoping for a good excuse to study it a bit down the road.
It’s really not about being able to “read Greek” in ministry as much as it’s about acquiring the tools of thought and thoroughly grasping grammar in general.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Aaron Blumer]I would argue that it really is about being able to read Greek. Leaving the isolated and rather idiosyncratic world of “biblical” exegesis for a moment, any foreign language teacher will say that the goal is to internalize the language, to be comfortable thinking and communicating using the language as a medium. What we want to eliminate is the double mediation, in which I look at a French sentence, convert it through the use of memorized rules and paradigms into English, and then understand it in that English equivalent. The goal is to understand the French in French as French without having to process it through an English byway. Classics professors such as Carl Conrad the longtime moderator of the B-Greek email list, insist that internalization is the goal for ancient languages as well. The truth is that advanced analysis techniques derived from literary theory only work if you already know the language. They are not substitutes for learning it. People only moderately comfortable in the language who use these tools such as arcing are destined to overestimate the significance of isolated text factors (individual words or tenses) and to underestimate the impact of genre, discourse, and pragmatics. An illuminating example of this is Charles Ryrie’s theology of crisis sanctification built upon the “once-for-all” aorist tense of παραστησαι in Rom. 12:1. The issue is not just that Ryrie totally misunderstands the aspective significance of the aorist, but that anyone would attempt to do theology in such an atomistic fashion. The same sort of mistakes occur when pastors try to prove complex theological points from the lexical definition of or even the proposed etymological derivation of a particular word. Another example would be the proof-texting approach in which I make a theology of justification by looking up all the verses containing a δικαι· root and try to add them together.
It’s really not about being able to “read Greek” in ministry as much as it’s about acquiring the tools of thought and thoroughly grasping grammar in general.
If you can’t flop open your GNT and read it pretty decently, no technique or method of analysis is going to make you a skilled exegete. As one excellent BJU professor said, “Exegesis is just reading on a higher level.”
My Blog: http://dearreaderblog.com
Cor meum tibi offero Domine prompte et sincere. ~ John Calvin
That being said, it’s been ten years since Greek (already?), so I have to understand that I won’t retain it all. Because of that, I’ve been actively looking for something like “Mastering New Testament Greek on CD-ROM: An Interactive Guide for Beginners” or “Greek Tutor” to help me brush up. If anyone has a suggestion, please let me know.
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
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