A Ministry Major in Greek 6

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18. I returned to Central in the fall of 1985 a Religion major. I would triple major in Religion, Bible, and Greek.

I was excited to take Greek and had Herb Dongell, whom I had previously had for OT Survey. He was old school and used J. Gresham Machen, the classic Greek textbook from of old. I liked Machen because it was bare bones and numbered. I would use it when I taught Greek at Asbury Seminary as a teaching fellow. Machen brought the facts. I brought the flavor. [1]

Dongell was a classic. When I got my first Greek New Testament my second year (a red Aland), I copied a quote from Melanchthon in the front that I got from Dongell. It went something like "Theology is nothing more than the application of the rules of grammar to the text of Scripture."

19. Of course that's rubbish. In seminary I would put another quote underneath it from Bob Lyon: "Context is everything." The meaning of words at a particular time and place is a function of the way those words are being used. Wittgenstein spoke of "language games" that evolve with collections of words in a particular "form of life." These are constantly developing, and the meanings of words and collections of words change over time.

So words don't have some constant or core meaning inside them. You must know the context in which words are used if you want to know what they mean at a particular time and place.

My understanding of how words work developed as I was exposed to Wittgenstein in England and as I continued to learn even in my early years teaching. While I was in college, one of the Christmas presents I asked for was Kittel's ten volume Theological Dictionary. This desire was under the influence of Dongell.

But of course Kittel is rife with the etymological and lexical fallacies. The etymological fallacy is the idea that the meaning of a word depends on the history and derivation of the word. The lexical fallacy is the idea that there is some core meaning of a word passed around every time the word is used. I only realized later that a section of my doctoral dissertation on the Greek word for perfection was riddled with the lexical fallacy.

Kittel is still helpful in that it helps you know some ancient secular usage of Greek words. That is, it is helpful as a tool to know the broader use of Greek words. But this magisterial piece of German work, unfortunately involving some Germans who were Nazi sympathizers, is basically full of fallacy. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless it was a gift or super-cheap.

20. And of course Christian theology has a much more complex basis than the mere meaning of individual Greek sentences. Once one knows how to read the books of the Bible in context, one will realize that they were written in individual historical situations. Following the principle that all language and human understanding is incarnated, each book of the Bible--in its original meaning--had a meaning at a time and place, in a context.

The idea of universal meaning is largely rooted in either ignorance or imprecision. There are some experiences that are somewhat omni-contextual. All humans die, so all humans to varying degrees understand death. We are all born. Many of us experience love. We all eat and poop. These experiences are common to all human contexts and provide some basis for "universal" meaning.

However, the connotations of these common experience often vary even still, and there is much more variation than most people would imagine in the way cultures process these common experiences. The "referents" might be in common, but the "sense" of our language has variations even in these most common of experiences.

This is why many colleges require some sort of intercultural experience. Left alone, we will simply assume that the meanings, paradigms, and thought patterns of our lives are the right ones for everyone and are universal. We thus will critique the way the fish swim in other currents and waters because we are ignorant of the water and current around us.

The bottom line is that the words of the Bible had original meanings, and they were ancient ones. Even a practice like lectio divina, which I support, is about God meeting you here and now where you are in your own understanding. Lectio divina holds no promise whatsoever of leading you to what the Bible actually meant, which was a function of the way words were being used within ancient paradigms and worldviews two to three thousand years ago.

Biblical theology first identifies the theologies of the biblical texts on their own terms. Then one can also speak of a biblical theology that systematizes these ideologies and ethics (many biblical theologians are not even willing to go this far, because in doing so one must move beyond what the individual texts meant. I believe it is quite allowed, especially if done reflectively). Then systematic theology brings this biblical theology into conversation with the Church, especially the debates of the 300s and 400s when the Trinity, the canon, and dual nature of Christ were finalized.

Melanchthon, for all his advances over earlier interpreters, was still somewhat unreflective (or "pre-modern") in his hermeneutic. It is my opinion that the 1800s saw a qualitative advance in historical consciousness within human history. The history of thought is not simply a cycle of many returns. There have been advances in understanding in the last two hundred years that surpass all of those before, in the same way that the science of today surpasses all of that before.

21. I should be clear that I loved Dongell. He was rigorous. He was demanding. I loved the challenge. He even made us learn the rules for accents. I would never ask of my Greek students what he asked of us because I became pragmatic. But I wanted to know everything myself.

I remember trying to tutor a dyslexic friend in the accents. "If the penultimate syllable is long and the ultimate syllable is short, and if the accent is on the penultimate syllable, it will take a circumflex accent." We both busted out laughing! What crazy rules! I never required students to know these rules. They didn't affect interpretation in the vast majority of cases.

Dongell passed on some of the older Greek grammar of A. T. Robertson, as well as some old "holiness grammar." For example, some of the older holiness writers argued that entire sanctification was instantaneous because 1 Thessalonians 5:23 used the aorist tense. The aorist tense, Robertson tells us, is a punctiliar kind of action (Aktionsart). Thus, argued the old timers, sanctification takes place in an instant.

This is mistaken. David Thompson's workbook on Machen (retired Wesleyan at Asbury) rightly tells that the aorist indicates an undefined kind of action. I went through his workbook in the summer of 87 so that I could pass the Greek entrance exam at Asbury. The aorist does look at action simply, so you might say it is punctilinear or punctiliar. It is a natural tense to use for instantaneous action but it does not in itself imply it... for that you need a context. :-)

As a quick example I pulled up Acts 28:30, which says that Paul remained (aorist tense) for two years under house arrest in Rome. Obviously this is not an instantaneous event.

Of course another potential blind spot in the older interpretation is that the "you" of 1 Thessalonians 5:23 is plural. Paul seems to be speaking of the sanctification of the entire congregation at Thessalonica. Western culture, because of the water in which we are swimming, assumes the "you" is a singular, and it finds evidence in the fact that body, soul, and spirit are singular. However, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio."

22. What I gained from Dongell was grammar. The old school way. I was, once again, skipping a generation or two back to the late eighteen hundreds when the study of Greek grammar was really just getting going. Grammar is one of the starting points for interpretation. It is nowhere close to the ending point, but it is the beginning.

I would take Greek 2 and 1 Peter in Greek with Dr. Dongell. I can't remember what else. I remember 1 Peter being hard Greek (I still think a little surprising for an unlettered fisherman without significant help). I remember cramming for the first test by trying to memorize the interlinear of 1 Peter 1. I hate to say that I would not become really good at Greek until I started teaching it at Asbury.

The Christmas, probably of 86, my brother-in-law Denny asked if I wanted to read the Christmas story from Matthew in Greek. Let's just say it didn't go very well. As I would learn, the New Testament itself is a whole different animal than the canned Greek sentences of Machen.

23. Most of my upper Greek classes, I think, were taken from Dr. Marling Elliott. He was of quite a different temperament than Dongell. He was quiet. His classes seemed unstructured at times. He would stop periodically and ask, "Are we doing any good here?" He often seemed to have a sly grin on his face.

Dongell was more of a classic school teacher. You didn't want to fall asleep in his class. I think I only struggled once in one of his classes, and as I recall he was merciful.

I don't remember all the classes I had with Elliott. I remember taking Synoptics in Greek with him in a May term. I went home, it seems, and then was going to drive back probably in the summer of 86. As I sat down groggily to eat breakfast the morning of my return trip, I bent over just right as I was sitting down and hit my eye on an unwrapped candle. Story of my life.

I scratched my eye and would need to cover it for a bit. My mother ended up driving me back up...

[1] This is one complaint I have about the now standard Mounce text. He "talks" too much. Of course I do too, but Machen didn't.