[B-Greek] ? - please respond

bgreek at ntresources.com bgreek at ntresources.com
Fri Dec 5 22:44:43 EST 2003


Dear Matthew,

Without being able to sit down and talk with you, I'm not sure if I can say 
exactly what you need to hear to not. But let me try to help you attempt to 
gain some perspective on your frustration. If I miss the mark because I 
make some assumptions that don't fit your situation, then you may have to 
make some adjustments. But let me try. (You've already received some good 
responses, including a good one from a fellow traveler. Good words, Terry. 
This reply will be a fair bit longer.)

First, so that you know where I'm coming from, let me tell you that I began 
my study of Greek in college about 30 years ago. I continued with Greek in 
seminary, and then spent a dozen years in the pastorate. I've now been 
teaching Greek for another dozen years, earning a doctorate in NT along the 
way. I tell you that so that you know that I've not only been on the 
academic side of the fence, but I've also spent considerable time where you 
want to be (or perhaps already are)--in pastoral ministry. And I endeavored 
to use my Greek as a tool in that context.

Learning Greek is not a simple task and it is not one that you achieve 
overnight. It takes a lot of effort on your part (& a fair bit on your 
prof's part, too!). It *is* a task that is worth the effort that you 
expend. The goal toward which you are striving is a worth one--to better 
understand the NT so that you might be able the better to expound it to the 
people to whom you minister.

Some (both students and schools) these days think that technology will 
solve these problems. All that's needed is to learn how to use one of the 
Bible study programs and it will tell you everything you need to know--all 
the vocabulary, parsing, etc. And it is true that we have some tools that 
no other generation has had. But what good is it to know, e.g., that a 
particular form is a dative if one doesn't know what that means or how it 
relates to the rest of the statement? One must know what to do with data, 
understand how it relates to other data, etc.

Let me use an analogy. From time to time you will need to visit a medical 
doctor. Some day you are likely to need surgery. (Remember that your goal 
of ministry to people's spiritual needs is no less important than the 
surgeon's goal of correcting physical problems. It is likewise no less 
demanding!) Would you submit to the knife of a surgeon who had to check his 
computer to identify each of those "thingeys" in your abdomen? I suggest 
that you would want a doctor who knew his anatomy quite well!

My point? How much surgery did that physician learn in his first semester 
of medical school? I suspect not very much! He (or she) had to take a lot 
of rigorous courses which said nothing about how to hold a scalpel, where 
to start the incision, how to tie and clamp and suture, etc. Those skills 
came later after the aspiring doctor had learned a fairly broad and deep 
range of foundational medicine.

Your first semester of Greek is the equivalent of Anatomy 101. I wouldn't 
expect your prof to be teaching you Surgical Procedures 900 (i.e., 
exegesis) at this point. Morphology, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary aren't 
glamorous subjects. But neither is memorizing the names of all those 
"things" that comprise the human body. The young medical student needs to 
know a whole lot of facts before he begins to see how it all fits together 
and how he will actually use this information in the operating room.

So I'm somewhat encouraged that your prof is expecting you to learn 
vocabulary and some paradigms! That means that he isn't trying to sell you 
a shortcut system that only provides a superficial understanding of Greek. 
Perhaps he hasn't been as focused on telling you *why* these things are 
important (or perhaps you just missed the significance of those comments), 
but hw is teaching you what you need to know.

How much of that do you need? There's no easy way to quantify that. The 
answer is, in one sense, always a little bit more. You can never learn too 
much about the language. (That's a life-long process that even our esteemed 
"list dean," Carl Conrad, is still working on--I think he'll agree with 
that!). On the other hand, how much of these "elements" before you can 
begin to see some benefit--before you can begin to actually *use* it as a 
tool? You'll certainly gain some benefit almost from the beginning, but 
most of my students over the years have told me that it's the third 
semester where it starts to "come together" for them. That will depend on a 
lot of factors including the student's aptitude, diligence, and 
determination, the prof's teaching style, the school's curriculum, etc.

I've no idea what sort of Greek program your school has in place, but let 
me tell you how our seminary structures its program and what the 
assumptions are here. You can adapt them to you own situation. We start 
with one year of "elements"--first year grammar. That's two, 
four-credit-hour courses in which we work though the entire textbook an 
read a fair bit of NT in the workbook (albeit a verse or two at a time). 
Then our third semester is called Greek Reading (a 2-credit hour course). 
Here we work on several things: reading large chunks of the NT (about 20 
verses a week, a different NT book each week) to help the student gain 
proficiency in reading/translation, expose them to the full range of Greek 
in the NT (& one week in the LXX for good measure), and also talk 
extensively about such things as how to use BDAG, a philosophy of language 
use, semantics, translation philosophy, etc. Then the fourth semester I 
hand them over to another of my colleagues for Greek Exegetical Method 
where the goal is to teach them a method of studying the Greek NT that 
leads to a sermon. They work though a short epistle (usually Titus) and a 
section of the Gospels. After that we offer a series of exegesis electives 
in various NT books, as well as supplemental elective courses in NT textual 
criticism and reading outside the NT (LXX, etc.). Of the 14 required hours 
(not counting the electives), we view the first 10 as foundation courses. 
It takes most students about that long to be ready to do legitimate exegesis.

You need not become a "scholar" to make profitable use of Greek. A standard 
seminar program (i.e., an M.Div.) isn't designed to produce scholars. But a 
program similar to what I've described above can lay the foundation for a 
lifetime of productive use in ministry *if* the student is faithful to use 
the tools he's given. Those who set it aside after the last required course 
will soon lose their hard-won skills. I often tell my students that I 
learned as much Greek while I was in the pastorate as I did in the 
classroom before that (though I would never have done so without that 
foundation!)--not because I'm so smart, but because I was convinced of the 
value of the biblical languages and was just stubborn enough to persist in 
their use until they became a permanent part of my toolbox.

If you stay with the stuff and are diligent and patient in learning the 
fundamentals, you'll find that you *will* have an efficient and productive 
tool at your disposal. You'll be able to do far more work (and do it far 
more accurately) in the text than any of your Greek-less fellows. If you're 
just in a hurry and want immediate results (as do most of our American 
contemporaries), you'll be disappointed. To use a hackneyed expression, God 
can make a squash in a few months; to make an oak takes many years.

If you want some reading for the semester break, check out David Black's 
*Using NT Greek in Ministry.* It's a small book, but it may give you 
sufficient perspective to tackle your 2d semester of study with greater profit.

And here are a few URLs that might be of help:
http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/luther.htm
http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/piper.htm
http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/roberts1.htm



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Rodney J. Decker, Th.D., Assoc. Prof./NT
Baptist Bible Seminary, Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, USA
www.NTResources.com
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