[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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