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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You guys made my night! I enjoyed reading your posts. I want to go upstairs and pick up my GNT!!
If we could get Dr. Decker back, as a PhD-wanna-be, I would ask him the real importance of learning Latin, French, German, Coptic, etc. to be considered a Biblical “scholar.”
It is my understanding that BBS requires only the Biblical languages for the PhD — but places a real stress on those to the exclusion of any others. That sounds both logical and attractive…
Church Ministries Representative, serving in the Midwest, for The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry
To clarify, somewhere around 30% (some estimates will be higher or lower - this is a number I’ve heard) ) of the important scholarship in NT and OT is in German. I think the material in French is a fair bit smaller. But the point is that, if you want to enter the conversation at a certain level, you need those languages.
Look at Paul Hartog’s book, based on his dissertation. A huge percentage of the scholarship he interacts with is in German. Whatever one thinks of them, the Germans practically invented modern OT and OT scholarship.
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But I confess I don’t even know what “Ressourcement” is. I’m not down on scholars at all. We certainly need more good ones, but much of the business of scholarship is talking to other scholars. So the scholar-pastor concept has some limitations. I think of it as a continuum. At the far end of the scholarship scale, you have folks who have a wide base but are specialists in one thing or another and interact a great deal with other specialists via monographs, journal articles, books, lectures, etc.
At the opposite end, you have seminary grads who can probably tell the difference between an aleph and an alpha if you give them some time to work it out. They preach to non scholars. In between you have a sweet spot somewhere where you pave pastors that are well versed in the languages and capable of doing their own thinking, but are not serving primarily in the world of academia. They do not use scholar-speak much in writing or in the pulpit because they have not been called to minister to other scholars, but more average folks.
Even within that sweet spot, I believe God calls different men to different degrees of emphasis on language/exegetical/theology skills vs. ministry and people skills. Some of the scholar types could not counsel a man who’s wife has just left him if their lives depended on it. This does not make them less important, just different.
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, Ressourcement (if you haven’t looked it up already) means “back to the roots.” I didn’t know what it meant either, until I took my Ph.D. exam - demonstrating, no doubt, my lack of French knowledge. Ressourcement is one of the key concepts in the Catholic school of thought, of which Dr. Ratzinger has been a part.
Paul, from a Ph.D. “is-be”, but not on the ranking of Dr. Decker, if you are wanting a Ph.D. in an area of theology, learn your Hebrew and Greek very, very well. Secondly, learn Latin. These are the languages of the Scriptures, the contemporary literature and inscriptions of the time and enviornment of the Scriptures (and the latter two) of the Church fathers. Then learn German, then French. I cannot at all comment on Coptic. I have no knowledge of it. Most Ph.D. programs require two cognate languages. For any area of theology, Latin and German are far and away the most valuable for study. Also, be realistic. Unless you are a whiz, you probably are not going to become fluent in reading more than one of those languages, and that only after a few years lots of reading in that language. There is a program for becoming fluent in Latin, on the internet, done by some British scholars. It requries 20 hours of reading, writing, and speaking Latin per week, for a whole year. That would mean one year of Ph.D. studies devoted almost wholly to Latin.
Joseph, I am sure you are right about the requirements of the theology programs of many of the universities in Great Britain. Oxford, for instance, has such a heritage in classical studies - a heritage it has been keen to maintain - I doubt that it will be superceded any time in the forseeable future (one day in the Classical section of the Oxford library will tell you all). The requirements for German theology students, on the other hand, are quite different. They have to have five years of Latin before entering. However, they are taught one year of Greek and one of Hebrew. After that they learn the methods of source-criticism, redaction-criticism, etc. The knowledge of German university-trained theology students in Greek, Hebrew, syntax and text analysis, is probably inferior to that of the average theology student of an evangelical seminary (incl. “fundamental”) in the US. When it comes to Bible exposition, German evangelical presses are constantly translating American and British authors.
Jeff Brown
Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=gTMTO_9li4cC&printsec=frontcover&sourc…
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Greg Long, Ed.D. (SBTS)
Pastor of Adult Ministries
Grace Church, Des Moines, IA
Adjunct Instructor
School of Divinity
Liberty University
Thanks, Jeff, for the further information about German students. My knowledge of the requirements comes from the Germany exchange students I know, but I obviously don’t know the detail of their knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. I’ll actually be in Germany for a year, starting this summer, so perhaps we can get in contact at some point. My wife and I will be looking for a good church.
[Joseph] Paul,I’d agree with Joseph here. A lot of the higher critical / textual work that has been done - either rightly or wrongly - has come out of Germany. Some prominent German (Swiss?) theologians are Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Hans Urs Von Balthusar, Martin Niemoller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others. That’s just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head, and there are quite a few German philosophers (not theologians, but their worldviews are just as important to us) that could be added to the list as well. If I remember right, at BJU you have to have some German if you want a Ph. D. in theology.
To clarify, somewhere around 30% (some estimates will be higher or lower - this is a number I’ve heard) ) of the important scholarship in NT and OT is in German. I think the material in French is a fair bit smaller. But the point is that, if you want to enter the conversation at a certain level, you need those languages.
Look at Paul Hartog’s book, based on his dissertation. A huge percentage of the scholarship he interacts with is in German. Whatever one thinks of them, the Germans practically invented modern OT and OT scholarship.
"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
[Jay C.] If I remember right, at BJU you have to have some German if you want a Ph. D. in theology.Back in my days there, you had an option of either French or German. Those who wanted to read Calvin took French.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
This is why scholars are important.
It’s also why I will probably never be one. But I appreciate true believers who are at the deep end of the scholarship spectrum as well as the more accessible folks who are less deep into it but (usually) better able to explain salient points to guys like me who are even less into it. I’m in their debt.
That, said, during the Millennium I expect to catch up on German, French, Latin and probably even Portuguese (just because I like how it works) and also truly get a grip on Hebrew and Greek. But in those days I suspect scholars will be a dime a dozen… when the knowledge of God covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.
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.
[Paul J. Scharf] Matthew and Joseph,In the *MDiv* at BBS we require 2.5 yrs. of Greek and 2 of Hebrew. For the PhD, there are written entrance exams for *all* majors in both Greek and Hebrew and again in the comp exams after course work is completed prior to candidacy. The comp exams expect a higher level of proficiency than the entrance exams. No, we do not have written exams in German and/or French at the PhD level, but we will expect that the dissertation will demonstrate that the candidate has interacted critically with any recent work on the topic regardless of the language. A key question I ask at some stage in the dissertation process is, how have you demonstrated that you have avoided a parochial outlook in your research? i.e., interacted with both conservative and non-conserv. views and in both English and in other languages. If it turns out that the key work has been done in Japanese or Italian or Swedish rather than German or French, then I want to know how you have interacted with it. If your diss is in historical theology, then Latin and or French could be more important. German is perhaps the best-guess for finding relatively recent work relevant to your topic and one that I think any PhD should have enough acquaintance with to at least track the literature—and more if it turns out to be important for the topic.
If we could get Dr. Decker back, as a PhD-wanna-be, I would ask him the real importance of learning Latin, French, German, Coptic, etc. to be considered a Biblical “scholar.”
It is my understanding that BBS requires only the Biblical languages for the PhD — but places a real stress on those to the exclusion of any others. That sounds both logical and attractive…
I am located in Nuremberg. Erlangen is the closest university. I am honored that you would consider ours to be a good church. If you are studying somewhere else, we will be too far away to be a regular church for you. But we would be more than happy to get to know you and your wife when you are here.
Jeff Brown
The theologians who formed, and continue to form the German school of textual study are a whole host of other guys (including Keil and Delitzsch). I do not expect their leadership to persist, since nearly all of them now adhere to “The Critical Theology,” which kills faith. Good minds here have turned themselves to other pursuits than theology.
Jeff Brown
From that perspective, here’s my take. A preacher of the Gospel should have a many tools in his tool box as possible. I view the learning of the Biblical languages as important to him as the learning of English is to the business men of the world. If they are to do business outside their language group, English is all but a requirement. If nothing else, they need a sufficient level of knowledge to read the various business publications. At the moment, I preach infrequently enough that my Biblical language skills are up to the task. If I were to prech more often, I feel I would need to work on at least my NT Greek. As a Californian, I understand that you can only get so much gold from panning. You need different tools to mine out a vein of gold.
Hoping to shed more light than heat..
[Rob Fall]That’s a great analogy for illustrating the value of the languages rather than depending on good, but secondhand tools. Thanks. (I’m going to quote that on [URL=http://ntresources.com/blog/?p=892] my blog[/URL].)
As a Californian, I understand that you can only get so much gold from panning. You need different tools to mine out a vein of gold.
[Jeff Brown] Of the theologians you mention, only Luther made significant contributions to textual studies (he wrote commentaries on the whole Bible). He died almost 300 years before the development of “Higher Criticism,” and so had no involvement with it (except that it has had him continually turning over in his grave since it began). The others were all theologians, who accepted the conclusions of Higher Criticism, but did not participate in its development. After his conversion, Bonhoeffer had little use at all for the critical methods of text study, but simply took the Scripture as it was and applied it. Barth wrote a commentary on Romans, which was epoc-making, but not on account of text-study. It was a demonstration of thorough dialectic thinking, and challenged standard Liberal Theology. Martin Niemöller was a courageous man, and was one of the leading clergymen in Germany who stood up to Hitler. He did not, however, write any significant theological works.Jeff,
The theologians who formed, and continue to form the German school of textual study are a whole host of other guys (including Keil and Delitzsch). I do not expect their leadership to persist, since nearly all of them now adhere to “The Critical Theology,” which kills faith. Good minds here have turned themselves to other pursuits than theology.
This is correct. I was trying to present some of the more well known German theologians/pastors, but the insertion of the comment on textual criticism made it confusing; while I know that Bonhoeffer’s [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer#Works_by_Bonhoeffer] works[/URL] aren’t “theology proper”, I do think that it would be good to read some and hope to read his work on discipleship sometime in the next year. So, thanks for clearing that up.
BTW, are Balthusar and Barth German or Swiss? For some reason, I had it in my head that they were German, but Wikipedia (not always the most reliable source of info) said that they were Swiss, not German.
"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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