Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Greek and Hebrew
Should Master of Divinity programs require Greek and Hebrew competency for completion?
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10 comments:
In my undergrad, I had to take two years of Greek and two years of Hebrew to graduate. I would hope that the requirement in undergrad would be the minimal requirement in graduate school. Maybe seminaries should have the option of testing out of Greek or Hebrew (I'm sure some do already). I think that a basic understanding of Biblical languages are beneficial to a pastor.
who needs greek and hebrew.. teach conversational spanish.
Yes.
My pastor took a class that was something like "greek for lazy pastors" in seminary. It basically taught some general info, how to use the greek lexicons, etc. I took 6 semesters of greek, and no hebrew. i loved greek, and i still use a lot of it today. But i think so much scholarship is available - and easy to use online translation tools, that i'm not sure it's worthy requiring unless you are doing specific further biblical studies. And i'll second gavin. Spanish would be good. Or Korean, especially in the UMC.
Back in the infancy of our country, you were required to read Greek to get into college. Competence in language is essential, whether an engineer, an architect, or a preacher.
I hate to say this, but as a layman, I'd just be happy with pastors who had a clue was the English version of the Bible said, much less the Greek or Hebrew text. It appears to me that many of our pastors don't have a clue what the Bible says about anything..... Probably because they don't sit down and read it. How sad.
Absolutely.
As a classical studies major currently taking my fifth semester of ancient Greek (presently reading Plato), I think pastors who don't actually read Greek often make assertions based on, e.g., Strong's lexicon, or grammar tags in a Bible that read far too much into this stuff. Because the NT especially is very dependent on the language and says things that can't be said very well in English, pastors want (rightly) to go back to the original language. Furthermore, pastors in Evangelical churches, especially non-denominational ones, are often wary of relying too heavily on commentaries (this isn't wrong either, IMO). This can lead in some cases to assertions like, as webeh commented, "the aorist tense always means completed action in the past." They often don't understand things like the fact that Greek doesn't ordinarily care about the time of the action in the same way English does, but is more interested in the "aspect" (simple, completed, or progressive/repeated).
Hebrew I think is somewhat less important because it doesn't have the same capacity for abstraction that Greek does and, as a result, the OT makes heavy use of metaphor. Because of this, knowledge of cultural background is more important to understanding the OT than is actually reading Hebrew. That's not to say that reading Hebrew is unimportant, but I think it's a lower priority. I think learning Greek should be a priority for everyone who is really serious about studying the Bible out for himself, which should be every pastor and, in fact, every Christian. That is not to say, however, that an individual shouldn't be allowed to serve as a pastor until he learns Greek.
Werbeh: I will look into that when I get a chance (learning Hebrew is on my todo list for sometime in the next 5 or so years)... very insteresting. I never disputed that an understanding of Hebrew was helpful, and if Hebrew does have a powerful capacity for abstraction as you suggest, then it may be even more helpful than I had thought. However, Greek may have a greater capacity for precision and abstraction than ANY language (certainly it has a greater capacity than English), and, although understanding of the original language is important for understanding any text in any langauge, this makes it especially important for understanding texts in Greek.
Yes. It would raise the bar for pastors.
If pastors learn Hebrew and Greek, conversational Spanish will be very easy in comparison.
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