This panel discussion explores the crucial role of biblical languages in theological education and ministry. Panelists, including Don Carson, Albert Mohler, and others, discuss historical trends in language study, the impact of biblical languages on preaching and scriptural understanding, and the practical implications for ministers today. They emphasize the need for a robust engagement with the original texts to preserve the integrity of biblical interpretation and to deepen theological insights.
Albert Mohler: Thank you for gathering this afternoon. The topic of this conversation is the gospel in preaching, with a special question about biblical languages. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. Joining me is Tom Schreiner of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Pete Williams of Tyndale House at Cambridge University, and Dr. D.A. Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I’m Albert Mohler.
We’re going to jump right into this by asking the question.… How new and unusual is it that we would even ask the question about the necessity of biblical languages for an evangelical training to preach the Word?
Don Carson: It depends on where in the world and at what period of history. There have been places in the world where there has not been much education, much opportunity, much access, and so on, where there’s a lot of enthusiasm for gospel proclamation without much ability, much capacity, many of the resources necessary.
On the other hand, in the Western world, especially in those denominations and churches that have taken education seriously, commitment to learn the biblical languages has traditionally been held very high amongst those who have a high view of Scripture. Where you don’t have a high view of Scripture, there tends to be a running down of those kinds of things.
A few years ago, I was speaking to a number of students at Yale University, and I was reminded of the fact that of MDiv students at Yale, 30 percent take Greek, about 10 percent take Hebrew. Well, at Trinity, Greek is a prerequisite to get in the place, and everybody has to take Greek and Hebrew while they’re there. I’m not denigrating the quality of education on many, many fronts at Yale, but on this front, I’m sure our commitment to the truthfulness of Scripture is part of what drives us to push students to try to learn the Scripture as God originally gave it.
Albert: I asked the question because looking at a review of seminary curricula over the last, say, 80 years, you’ll notice probably more change in this area than in any other. The first change was more was required than before. Then you look into the question, and it’s because students came with so much knowledge of Greek by the time they arrived at what would now be called seminary education.
Then from the period of about the 1930s to the 1970s, everyone, at least all of the catalogs I was looking at, required between 15 and 18 hours minimally in the biblical languages, and now you have, in some schools, master of divinity degrees in which there is an option to do a language degree or not.
That, I think, tells something of a story. But, Don, I think you’re right. Where you find the greatest affirmation of the Bible as the inerrant and infallible Word of God, where you find the greatest interest in the text of Scripture and in expositional preaching, you find a very strong concentration of concern for the biblical languages.
Don: May I follow up with that just a bit farther? What you said on the way by there was also very important. That is, what people bring into the schools has changed a great deal too. It used to be that an awful lot of people getting ministerial training would have already had Latin, and many of them Greek, before they came. Partly it was because ministers came from an elite stratum of society, so they learned those sorts of languages very early on.
At Cambridge University, until 1971, you had to have Latin to get in if you were studying anything. Obviously, those things have dropped down and dropped down and dropped down. As a result, there are not that many students who come to us with Greek and Latin before they walk in the doors. So it’s a multilevel thing. It’s not just one issue.
Pete Williams: I think following on from that, that issue of where people start is important. In my office where I teach people, I have 100-year-old exam papers, and I show them from 1906 how people were translating the various creeds from Greek, and there was translation from Latin into Hebrew, and so on.
I also have some exam papers for getting into Cambridge University as an 18-year-old from about that period, and there are biblical literacy questions such as, “Draw a map, and sketch the position of the 12 tribes of Israel.” That’s one of the questions for an 18-year-old. Or “Can you cite Jotham’s fable?” So it is interesting. There is this question of starting point. Now there’s no point in beating our brow about that. We are where we are, but it does mean we need to think of training as being sometimes a longer process.
Don: And more remedial on occasion.
Albert: Tom, in terms of your experience in theological education, spanning three decades now in terms of a teacher and then experience as a student, how would you see this issue as being framed and reframed in your experience?
Tom Schreiner: Well, just in my personal experience, I think I experienced what Don was saying. I was at one school where I saw the languages become less and less important as time passed. I think it was linked with less interest in Scripture, less interest in expositional preaching. I think Luther was right when he said, “If we lose the languages, we lose the gospel.” The two are tied together. I’m not here to advertise Southern, but it was a great joy to come to Southern and see the interest, the paramount importance of the biblical languages stressed.
Albert: Tom, I want to come back and say your quotation of Luther is not surprising to me, but I don’t think that should just be said as if it were axiomatic. I think to say, “If we lose the languages, we lose the gospel” requires some defense of that assertion.
Tom: Well, I don’t think it means, at least the way I would read it, that each person individually has to know the languages, but I do think it means that an institution that begins to de-emphasize the languages will.… Who knows what the cause is ultimately of that, but I think the de-emphasis of the language shows something that’s happening in the heart and mind of those in the institution. I think American history bears this out, perhaps other history as well. Where the languages are de-emphasized it’s because there’s a corresponding lesser interest in Scripture.
Albert: Machen, in defending the study of New Testament Greek, made the argument that without the knowledge of New Testament Greek the preacher is completely dependent upon the skill of a translator and thus is, at the very least, at one remove from the text. I think that’s a very cogent argument.
That’s an argument I have used and have found great success in using in speaking to young entering students asking, “Why do we have to do this?” It’s so that you’re not dependent upon a translator just as one line of argument, because the only check of the translation is the knowledge of the original language.
Tom: I think that’s true. If I could say one other thing about this.… Nevertheless, I think an individual preacher may not know the languages and still be a faithful expositor. I don’t think that’s good as a trend, but I know preachers out there now who don’t know the languages and are still faithful and good expositors. I don’t recommend that as a pattern, but I think there are exceptions.
Don: To play the Devil’s advocate, it’s worth remembering that Augustine, who wrote in Latin, had poor Greek and no Hebrew. So you must weigh these sorts of things in terms of trends and responsibilities in the culture, not on the basis of an individual who is astonishingly gifted. You really want to word this carefully, lest you give a false impression.
Moreover, really to play the Devil’s advocate, I would say that if an institution preserves the languages, that does not necessarily guarantee the preservation of the gospel, because I could introduce you to many, many universities in Europe, which for years and years and years kept the languages and lost the gospel. So it is a complex dynamic.
Albert: I think that’s a very good point, so if you’ll play the Devil’s advocate, I’ll just press the Devil here for a moment and say the point you make, and you made it very carefully.… You said we would not want to hold up Augustine and then say because of his singular genius we would follow him as an example, any more than we would say that Charles Spurgeon be an example of the lack of usefulness of theological education.
If you started out reading Puritans in your grandfather’s attic at age 4, you might very well turn out to be a Charles Spurgeon. I’ve never had an entering student who has had that background. But in terms of Augustine, just to make the point, Augustine, when he deals with the Old Testament, is often dangerous precisely because he does not know the Hebrew.
So if you look at a critical edition of Augustine, you’ll notice there is more correction of Augustine in terms of his actual dealing with the text often, and a lot of it, not all of it, is due to the fact he really doesn’t know Hebrew, which also means he doesn’t have a feel for the Semitic language and the Semitic form of literature.
Don: Agreed. One of the things that knowledge of the languages gives you.… Most of our students are not going to learn languages well enough that they really are masters of either Greek or Hebrew, but if they learn the language to a reasonably comfortable reading level, then they also will have access to better commentaries and better study guides, to better papers and dictionaries and so forth, because the better commentaries do use the languages. So it’s not just about whether they can translate better than the translators of the ESV, but it’s whether they have access to discussions that are upgraded from merely popular-level things.
Albert: Pete, when you think of your vantage point there at Cambridge, how much discussion is there within the university life there of the biblical languages?
Pete: Well, currently for Cambridge University, everyone has to do a language if they’re doing a theology degree. It could be Sanskrit, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, or Latin. They have to do one ancient language. In other words, it’s a lot less than the typical seminary. So I think there are different routes people go, but there is a tendency, then, not to have such a strength in the languages in divinity. Of course, there are a lot of classics that go on, and people can study Aramaic as an undergraduate, as I did.
So there are opportunities, but I think there is a general correlation in many settings between lack of concern for Scripture and lack of desire to get really into the languages. Perhaps one of the reasons we see in evangelicalism a lack of concern for the languages is if you have a more pragmatic form of evangelicalism that is based in a very business mindset and running how … you know, just seeking to run great meetings … the languages don’t really seem to matter very much for doing church that way, so why would you bother?
Albert: Very interesting discussion on this issue. Going back to the immediate post-Revolutionary era in this country, at Brown University the president was a Baptist preacher, as was so often the case. His name was Francis Wayland. Wayland was an ardent defender of the classical mode of education as the president of Brown University. However, he also was a Baptist.
There was a need to get preachers into the frontier, so he rather straightforwardly said, “The church, if it’s going to be faithful, is going to have two classes of pastors: those who are immediately ready to go …” It’s kind of like the “Just add water and stir.” Here is a boy behind a plow, to use the example he used, already known then in church history.
God may call him and equip him to go and preach, but as Wayland understood, he said, “But Christianity and a lasting influence will require on that man being followed by a man who does have the classical training and can build deeper foundations and minister in a more comprehensive way.”
Don: We saw that in French Canada as recently as 1972. In a population of six and a half million French speakers, there were only 35 evangelical churches of any description. Then between ‘72 and ‘80, we grew from 35 churches to almost 500. The growth was fantastic, and none of those people had any languages. You have young baby churches, and you do what Paul did. You start appointing elders in every place. “This church actually has some people who are 18 months old in Christ. Make an elder of them.”
Now that’s not really good policy, but on the other hand, when that’s all you have, that’s where you start. Nowadays, they’re producing people who go for their PhDs and are beginning to train a new generation. Otherwise, the excitement of the rapid growth pretty soon settles down into the danger of heresy and the uncertainty of sloppy exposition, and pretty soon you really are clamoring for really good Bible teaching that is filling in the deficit of all of this. It’s not just class one and class two either, but a whole stream of things.
When we have students beyond baby Greek, which is a prerequisite of Trinity, we test them all. Then we stream them into four or five or six streams, depending on how many students we have. We fully realize that at the bottom stream they’re going to get another year or two of Greek, and they’ll be able to handle lexica and look up words and fumble their way through a genitive absolute or whatever, and there will be others who will be absolutely first class and could be writing commentaries, and there are several groups between them.
You just have to recognize that there are different gifts and graces. Again, it’s not an insistence that every single minister achieve a certain ideal standard. The idea, rather, is that there be such veneration for the Word of God that you take God seriously, his Word seriously, and the languages in which he gave it, such that there is a cultural, denominational, Christian, ecclesiastical commitment to getting as much as you can for the upbuilding of the whole church, and then recognize that people have different gifts and graces.
Albert: Tom, as I said, you’ve been at this a long time, and you’ve been at it long enough that some of your graduates are now situated in ministry, and you’ve even visited with them in their churches. So when you are teaching New Testament exegesis and you’re teaching Greek and you have the preacher who’s going to be out there in the church in mind, how do you actually expect he will use that Greek knowledge week by week in the preparation of his sermons?
Tom: Well, I agree with Don. Preachers are different. They have different levels of skill, different abilities. What I say to my students.… Perhaps I’m not answering your question, but what I say to the students is, “If you’ve taken a sufficient amount of Greek or Hebrew, practically try to …” I don’t think this is a huge requirement. “See if you can spend five minutes a day, five days a week, keeping up your languages. If you do, it will be amazing how much you will know.”
That doesn’t sound like a very big requirement. It actually is a big requirement. It takes a lot of discipline to do five minutes a day, five days a week. I actually started this in my own life in Hebrew, just spending a few minutes a day. I’ve done this for 20 to 30 years, and my Hebrew (I don’t teach Hebrew) has improved remarkably.
So I think that’s one practical thing to say to preachers. Preachers have different abilities. Some can translate the text and deal with it well. Some can just use the tools and the commentaries. One of the advantages of knowing the languages, to pick up on what Don said, is being able to evaluate the commentaries, being able to evaluate what is out there technically, so you’re not at the mercy of an expert.
Albert: Pete, similarly, in terms of the work that is done there at Tyndale House and your observation of the entire field, and also from a different geographical context, does this conversation fit the churches you know there in Great Britain?
Pete: Yes, I think everyone needs to get really deeply into the Word, and the pastor, the shepherd, needs to feed the sheep. I think in an increasingly education-dominated world.… I mean, more and more people have education to a higher level in terms of qualification … it’s very hard for that person to feed people insights from the Word that they couldn’t have otherwise or to be able to control and say, “This is a good way of looking at things; this isn’t,” if they don’t have some further resource in terms of their ability to look at it in a deeper way.
So I do think the shepherd needs to be able to do that, partly in order to be able to shoot down wrong ideas. I mean, if one of your congregants comes along and says, “I heard that such-and-such is what it really says,” to be able to say, “No, that isn’t right.” To be able to use the commentaries, to be able to follow theme words through.
Some people won’t get to the point where they’re reading the Greek on its own. They’ll be using an interlinear or a Bible program. That’s fine, but just that they do want to follow things as closely as they can, so they’ll be looking at several English translations. They’ll be looking at the original. I think that’s all part of a good preparation.
Albert: Just to throw a little red meat out here in front of Professor Carson, who has identified so many exegetical fallacies everyone in the world is afraid to move to exegesis in front of him …
Don: It’s called a gift of intimidation.
Albert: But to go at one of your central concerns concerning exegetical fallacies, I’ll tell you where I see the danger of an extremely superficial knowledge of biblical languages is that all preachers have are word studies.
Don: Oh, I agree with that 100 percent. I’ll go further. I tell my students …
Albert: That’s called red meat.
Don: Yes, yes. Well, you succeeded. You held up a flag and I bit. But I tell my students, even my best students, that if in the first five years of their ministry after leaving Trinity I hear them in any sermon say, “The Greek says,” I will personally throttle them, because the aim of studying the Greek is not to become a kind of priestly class that shuts you off from other people or talking down or whatever. You do your study and explain what words mean, but even the little phrase “The Greek says” sounds slightly pompous and condescending.
Moreover, if a person does only Greek studies and they don’t understand syntax, they don’t understand how sentences are put together, they don’t understand how a paragraph is put together, and all they do is work through a text and look up this word and then look up this word, and then in their sermon they say, “The literal meaning here is …” Good grief. They’re doing more damage than good. Alexander Pope was right. A little learning is a dangerous thing.
So part of getting a decent Greek or Hebrew education is learning what you don’t know. The best pastors who use the languages are careful about parading that knowledge. Then after you’ve been in the ministry for 40 years, like John Piper.… If he wants to make a big concern out of asphaleian in the introduction of Luke, God bless him. I won’t throttle him. On the other hand, in the first five years they deserve throttling.
Tom: Consider yourselves warned.
Albert: Lest thou likewise be throttled. In terms of what we’re talking about here, though, there’s a different point that I think is evident in many of those who founded the theological institutions we know today and were a part of the discussion in which the Greek language especially, along with Latin, was prerequisite.
James Petigru Boyce, when Southern Seminary was established, gave an address in 1856 entitled “Three Changes in Theological Institutions,” and one of the ones he mentioned was that in order to get into one of the theological seminaries, such as Princeton or a similar school, one had to have 12 years of Latin and 10 years of classical Greek. He made the point, “Thus not one of the 12 disciples could have been admitted to one of the theological seminaries in the United States.”
But later in John A. Broadus, there’s another very interesting argument that I think is really helpful in which he said, “Remember you’re not actually studying a language to study a language. You’re studying a language to study a text. The text is the issue.” I think that’s one of the dangers in this discussion. People hear us talking about languages as if linguistics is our main concern. It is the knowledge of the text that is our main concern. Do you want to elaborate on that?
Tom: I simply want to say that’s why the languages are important: because pastors want to focus on Scripture. There’s so much to read today, and there’s so much out there that is helpful and illuminating, but the focus, the foundation, the emphasis, must be on Scripture, studying Scripture, meditating on Scripture, and I think that includes the languages, having a discipline to focus on the languages. There are exceptions, certainly, but I think it’s the focus of an evangelical pastoral ministry.
Don: My dad had the equivalent of a BTh but at a time when a BTh gave you three years of Greek and two years of Hebrew. He was a church planter in French Canada, and he kept sporadic diaries all his life. I used them when I wrote the little book Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor. As I read through his diaries, what’s so interesting is that he quotes the Bible constantly, usually from memory.
When he was writing in English (he wrote his diary partly in English, partly in French), he’d quote the King James Version. That’s what was used then. When he was quoting in French, he’d use the Louis Segond, which was what was used then, but often when he was quoting Scripture, he might use those languages, but he might quote in Greek and sometimes in Hebrew.
I have a lovely passage from when he was about 78. My mother had died, and he was on his own again, and he was preaching again. He has this long passage that he has quoted from memory (I can tell because he has a few errors in it) from 1 John in Greek. His mind is so full of Scripture. He was from a pretty humble background, but he was so much committed to the Word that it stamped him. That’s what you want to get. You want to get this lifelong commitment to the Word. He would never become a linguistic expert, but he loved the Bible.
Albert: Let me tell you what life is like as a seminary president.
Don: Is this relevant?
Albert: Yeah, it is. Fairly asked, but yes, I think in this case. When I meet with the New Testament faculty, they tell me there’s not nearly enough New Testament in the curriculum.
Tom: Amen.
Albert: I meet with the church history faculty, there’s not nearly enough. How can you expect anyone can understand anything with just X number of hours of church history? I go department by department, and we have a 635-hour master of divinity degree. I could justify that in a world in which I could have people for 12 years, but nonetheless …
This is a dangerous question, but all three of you teach in this area. For someone to receive a standard theology degree, such as the master of divinity degree, how many hours in the biblical languages should be minimally expected?
Pete: I would go at it a very different way. In Britain we don’t count hours. I don’t even know what your hours mean. I really don’t. I would want to know how much of the text has someone read. I would have thought that if someone is going to go out and be using this later, I would want them to have read several books of the New Testament in Greek and several books of the Old Testament in Hebrew. So I like to look at the quantity of text read. To me that’s the major index, because if they spent a lot of time memorizing vocabulary, that may be not very useful.
Tom: I think there are a lot of things that could be said in this regard, but in my mind it depends what the student wants to do. If we’re talking about the pastor.… We have different students doing different things. If we’re talking about the pastor, our requirement is at least two exegesis courses, beginning Greek and then the course thereafter.
I think that’s the minimum, although it wouldn’t meet the requirement you just stated. I mean, they wouldn’t have read through several books at that point. I think even after they’ve had those two courses, if they keep at it, they could begin to read through books of the New Testament. I think that’s going to be more difficult.… The more courses you’ve had in seminary, the more you’ll be able to use it thereafter.
Don: I lived for nine years in Britain, so it’s really amusing to hear this. When you start counting hours, you have to decide semester hours versus quarter hours, which is what they have over there, only they don’t call them quarters; they call them terms. In any case, if you start counting years, then there’s a different philosophy in education.
By and large, British education teaching Greek works you through texts pretty hard, pretty fast, but it does not teach rigorous exegesis. Over here we tend to teach pretty rigorous exegesis but without working through enough texts. At some point you want to say, “A plague on both your houses. Add some more hours, Mr. President.”
Albert: That’s where this conversation always ends.
Don: The buck stops there. But one of the ways of getting around it, at least we try to get around it at Trinity.… Besides the minimum MDiv courses that are needed, we push as many students as possible to taking more courses. That is, not only advanced Greek grammar courses and things like that, but we have rapid-reading courses, where students are set to work through certain biblical texts.
They then come in one-on-one with you and for half an hour just sit down and read through three chapters of Romans, and I throw questions at them. “What does this mean? What does that mean?” Without detailed exegesis.… Thus, you gradually build up a quantity of biblical text that begins to meet the kinds of demands the British style gives, but they’ve already had a year or two of exegesis. That’s the ideal in my view.
I don’t think ministers do a good job of keeping up their languages unless they get to a certain level of enjoyable reading competence. I don’t think they will, at least not many of them. If every use of the language is a real pain, a real strain, and you’re fumbling your way through using the basic tools, it’s hard to be disciplined in doing it. If, on the other hand, you follow what Tom said, rightly, you devote yourself just to reading a few minutes a day, you can work through the whole Greek New Testament …
I had a couple of years of classical Greek before I started reading the New Testament, and when I finished seminary, in the first two years of my ministry I worked through the entire Greek New Testament on my own, with a wide margin with endless notes in the margin. The old BHBS versions, you know. That has stood me in huge stead just from having worked through the text. You have to become comfortable in order to enjoy it, and once you enjoy it you’ll never lose it.
Albert: The perfect, as we know, is the enemy of the good in many of these decisions, and the master of divinity, though hardly perfect, is at least a basic degree that says, “This much at least has been learned, or at least taught,” and that’s the expectation.
But you mentioned what you do at Trinity, kind of streamlining people into different tracks. We do the same thing with the biblical and theological studies track. But that means that student, who is going to give himself to so much more in terms of exegetical and theological work, is basically going to have no electives in a 90-something-hour degree. So I think that’s the reason why I would encourage students when they enter to go for what you can’t get anywhere else. That’s kind of my honest assessment. I want to tell students, “Look, there are certain things taught here you’re going to have a great deal of difficulty learning on your own.” I would say the languages are at the top of that list.
So if I’m thinking of the stewardship of a seminary education, I will tell you, “We can’t teach you everything you’re going to need to know, and you will die without knowing everything you need to know, but there are things you can teach yourself and be taught by others by means of things other than classroom experience with a far greater facility than is true of the languages.” So my strong endorsement is to take as much as you can, and if you have to leave some other things off as electives, take those later.
Don: Amen and amen.
Pete: I think I’d also like to just add, don’t look down on interlinears and the various Bible software that help you just read. I started reading Greek New Testament using an interlinear. I was privileged to be able to do Greek in high school, but the point is when I started reading.… You just work through, and then you realize what’s the most common, what’s the most frequent.
You get to know that fairly soon and I’d say with Greek and Hebrew reading courses, get reading the text straight away. I think that’s one of the things BibleMesh does very well, getting you reading text straightaway, but not to start doing 10 chapters of grammar before you read the text. When I teach Hebrew at Cambridge, they do Genesis 1:1 in the first lesson.
Albert: I think one of the other things we need to recognize that you just pointed out is that there’s really no excuse for not having the tools. On various platforms, you now have access to what would previously take rooms in a library. Not only that, when I’m working through these things …
I’ll be honest. I like books. I like to be surrounded by codices. I like hands on paper, but I find that I get so much more done just in terms of utility in a lot of the language work simply by using lexica and other things online. Even just the physicality of not having to move things around on my desk. All of a sudden it’s right there. So I think there’s a privileged position we’re in we need to recognize in terms of access to so many of these tools.
I still want to argue for books. I still think long-term the books will be your friends and companions for a lifetime of ministry, but I do think we need to be thankful for these other things that are giving us enormous tools. Quite honestly, I can’t take that library on a plane, but if I have a question and I’m reading the text, I can pull out and quickly check something in terms of the languages in a way that I couldn’t when I started in this role 20 years ago.
Don: Moreover, people who are younger than you and I just have a natural gravity toward the electronic media, even if we use the electronic media constantly, and I do. Nevertheless, they just gravitate there. Books are secondary. That’s the way it’s going. For better and for worse, but that’s the way it’s going. So we need to teach people how to use those things too.
Albert: Andrew Delbanco at Columbia in the New Republic this week said that when you take the digital natives and separate them from their digital media, it is as if you have imprisoned them in solitary confinement. They’re just as restive.
Don: There was a check made of grade-12 high school students at Libertyville High School, the town where I live, recently, and it was discovered that none of them knew how to address an envelope. When you stop to think about it, they’re all in the social media or they send emails. They don’t write letters. What’s a letter? Or if they might know what a letter is, they don’t know what an envelope is. This is a strange world we’re entering here. What kind of remedial work one has to do about that sort of thing I’ll leave for others to judge.
Albert: That’s the right word to think of here as we come to a conclusion. You used the word remedial. So let’s assume we need to speak to the pastor who is actually in the field, is actually involved week by week in teaching and preaching at least one message a week, maybe multiple messages, and he now says, “I really wish I’d taken more Greek and Hebrew.” What do you say to him now? Go down the line. Tom, you first.
Tom: Well, I think he could use some of the tools. I think something like BibleWorks and Accordance, depending on what computer they have, would be helpful. Again, you just have to start small. Start where you are. Work at it bit by bit. Thank God for what you know. Do your best. You’re not going to get to the place where someone knows it very well, but I think just start where you are and do your best.
Pete: I would say very similar things. I think there are questions about Greek and Hebrew that could, I’m sure, flummox the panel here. You could focus on one of those languages and be a real expert in Greek and still be out of your depth on certain questions. So you can never know everything, but that doesn’t mean you can’t know anything.
I think there are two disciplines any pastor should have in terms of regular reading of the Bible and regular preparation of sermons. Why not build in a little bit of language into those? Don’t set yourself too high a target, but a realistic target. Just use a little bit more, using some of the electronic tools or interlinears that there are to look more things up.
Gradually, as you read more, and the other thing is as you memorize.… David Clines, who I wouldn’t agree with on everything, when he was teaching Hebrew would often get people to begin by memorizing Psalm 23 in Hebrew. That was the first thing he did, which I think is not a bad start, actually, to get some of Scripture in your head. So start with some small portions of Scripture in Greek and Hebrew and just commit them to memory.
Don: Total agreement with what has been said so far. There are other things that can be done depending on where you are, who you are, and what kind of personality you have. I know a pastor in Virginia, for example, who wanted to improve his Hebrew and also wanted to do evangelism, so he went to a new Orthodox rabbi who had just moved into town and asked him to work through Hebrew texts with him.
They became bosom friends, with wonderful evangelism opportunities, while this other chap was teaching him Hebrew, improving his Hebrew. Or if you live nearby another pastor who, likewise, has concerns to improve his Greek you can form a little club, coffee at Starbucks once a week, where you spend an hour working through texts you’ve been studying together in the week. That way there’s a sort of accountability thing built into it.
There are a lot of things you can do if you have a little imagination. The most important factor is this: nothing gets done unless you prioritize time for it, even if it’s only a little time. The minister’s job is so open-ended you never, ever come to an end of it. Therefore, whether or not you improve in any of these areas, it always boils down, without exception, to priorities, choices. Without exception.
Albert: Paul’s exhortation to Timothy was that Timothy must study to show himself approved, a workman who needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of Truth. That is not only Paul to Timothy; that is the Holy Spirit to every one of us who would teach and preach the Word of God. I think you can look at that very quickly and understand that there are few things in life that could compare in terms of sheer dangerous nature with the preaching of the Word of God. To get this wrong is so deadly. To treat this and study this superficially is so malignant.
So at the very least, perhaps one way we could end this discussion is by saying that a knowledge of the biblical languages that will bear so much positive fruit perhaps might best be considered as one very important way to be less dangerous as a preacher of the Word of God. I think we need preachers who are dangerous in all the right ways and in none of the wrong ways. Thanks to BibleMesh and to all for hosting this, and thanks to you for coming. God bless you.
