Anything Else

Religion is one of the great evils of our world: So argued Karl Marx, the nineteenth century German philosopher and revolutionary socialist. Marx dismissed religion as an opiate that numbed the minds of common people to their pitiful social conditions. He maintained that the myth of an afterlife, in which the faithful are rewarded, was fabricated by oppressed people in their desperation to devise means by which to cope with their earthly sufferings.

Under the spell of this myth, the poor secured just enough contentment to weather their oppression at the hands of the wealthy. Marx challenged the lower classes to recognize that God is a fantasy and heavenly reward a fiction. If they would unlock the door on this conceptual prison of their own making, they would pave the way to their liberation from economic oppression and its array of attendant miseries.

But subsequent history revealed a dark hazard in atheism. Former atheist, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) saw this menace up close and exposed it. Milosz studied law, was fluent in five languages, and distinguished himself as a poet, translator, and author of Polish prose. Born in Lithuania, he lived much of his life in Poland under Nazi oppression and embraced atheism and leftist views before defecting to France from communist Poland in 1951. He spent many years teaching literature at the University of California, Berkeley, received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the U.S. National Medal of Arts, and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.

Many Christians are wrongly intimidated by the fact that they do not understand the original languages of the Bible. Those supposedly “in the know” make assertions that imply their superior status in understanding of Scripture because of their linguistic skills.

In reality, proper interpretation is more often about maintaining an open mind and avoiding logical fallacies. A believer who knows how to read and think, but doesn’t know the original languages, will be a superior interpreter to one who knows the ancient language but cannot think logically. Some highly educated folks cannot distinguish between correlation and cause, description and prescription, or the difference between partial truths and the whole truth.

The languages can make a difference, but not to the degree that some would imply. Muslims, for example, claim the only way to understand the Koran is to read it in Arabic. Christians, on the other hand, have traditionally not made such a claim. Snobs, by definition, would not make such an admission. Fortunately, most evangelical scholars are not arrogant; they will freely admit that understanding the original languages is helpful (otherwise why learn them?), but not absolutely crucial for every Christian.