Pastors often have a front-row seat for marital breakdown, often with this common motif: while initially a couple communicated with and enjoyed each other, over the years they slowly and even unintentionally became something more like roommates — still contributing toward some joint tasks but no longer really functioning as “one flesh.” They slowly stopped making the many small, daily sacrifices necessary to know and care for each other.
Many pastors do something similar with God and, particularly, his Word. While we are constantly dealing with and around the biblical text—Sunday is always coming!—there are many reasons that we can give the text far less attention than we should: perhaps the suffocating busyness of the pastorate, the hypnotic distraction of our devices, or the (apparent) homiletical pizzazz of focusing on something besides the text itself such as funny illustrations or impressive cultural allusions.
Learning, maintaining, or relearning the biblical languages is an excellent way for us to slow down in order to really attend to the Word and so be transformed by it. While there are many excellent translations available, we can easily become so comfortable with them (or, probably, only one of them) that we function in a kind of exegetical “cruise control” — good enough to get sermons done, or perhaps even good enough to impress our congregations, but we still fail to truly listen, and thereby to be able to truly speak God’s Word across whichever corner of the “valley of dry bones” he has assigned us (Ezek 37:4). To return to my marriage analogy above, lest we become mere “roommates” with the Word, we must be constantly making the small, daily sacrifices necessary to know and enjoy it (Psalm 1:2). The biblical languages are one of the best ways to do this, since in their cross-cultural strangeness they force us to plod rather than to bolt.
However we do it, the important thing here is a prayerful consistency. We should be spending a little bit of time working at Greek and Hebrew on most days—maybe 10 minutes. For some of us that will mean taking a couple months to learn (or relearn) the alphabet. Eventually we might be translating a few words at a time, until we are eventually able to work through a whole paragraph or even chapter per day. After exhorting Timothy to “devote” (!) himself to reading and teaching Scripture, Paul tells him to “practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress” (1 Timothy 4:15 ESV). We must practice so that we can make genuine progress. And, just as with marriage, we must not let our lack of progress in the past became an excuse for a paralyzed apathy in the present.
There are also many tools to help us. Bible apps such as Logos are loaded with shortcuts and aids — you only have to hover over a word to see it parsed and translated (though, as with using commentaries, we need to beware of letting this become merely a crutch). There are other, and free, sites that can give something similar — biblearc.com or ESV.com/GNT. Flashcard apps such as cram.com have many flashcards sorted by biblical frequency (or by chapters in the more common language textbooks). Youtube (of course) has quite a few resources. And, last but certainly not least, the grammar textbooks really can help us learn and relearn. Mounce has a book called Greek for the Rest of Us that goes over the basics, for those who do not have the time or interest for a full dive into all the paradigms, syntax, etc.
However, a couple words of warning. First, like the college freshman in his first philosophy class, we can know just enough to be dangerous, whether because we only learned a bit, or because we forgot a lot. I regularly hear seminary-trained preachers, some only a couple years out of an MDiv, commit the most basic word fallacies. (E.g., “The original Greek says ekstasis; this means that the women at the empty tomb were ecstatic about the resurrection.”) Because we have formally studied the Bible so much, our congregations tend to trust and even be impressed by what we say. (For all they know, ekstasis really does mean “ecstasy.”) But we need to be careful that we don’t abuse this trust by twisting the text (even if unintentionally) in order to prove how smart we are or how hard we work.
Second, we also need to be careful that we don’t highlight the original languages so much that we cause our congregations to doubt the clarity and truthfulness of the Bible and its many good translations (e.g., “This really means…”; “You can’t see this in your Bibles, but…”). Scott Hafemann (I think) once told me that “Greek should be like your underwear; it should be there but no one should see it.” So while nearly all of us should probably be giving the biblical languages and text far more, and far slower, attention than we are, we must beware of becoming pharisees who love to show off their academic bonafides by pedantically blasting their hapax-legomenal trumpets.
Indeed, Jesus repeatedly taught his disciples to do the slow, difficult, and unimpressive work of private prayer to the Father who sees in secret (Matt 6:4, 6, 18). Reading the Bible attentively — especially in the original languages — is also slow, difficult, and unimpressive. And yet the Father says that he really will reward us, and through us, our congregations: “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim 4:16 ESV). Do we believe him?
Timothy Fox is the Senior Pastor of Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX. He also serves as an Assistant Professor of New Testament at Knox Theological Seminary. He holds a PhD in New Testament from the University of St. Andrews. He is a member of the St. Anselm Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
