The cost of losing Greek

The church is losing the languages that gave us the Reformation, and the loss is fundamental to its capacity for mature, text-driven ministry. We are losing the ability to read the scriptures in the original languages as well as the ability to exegete them.

Pastors who cannot read and exegete the original text will have to work much harder to produce the quality of exposition that the church has depended on for growth throughout redemptive history and particularly since the Reformation. Without the ability to exegete the text, the church’s theology becomes disconnected from scripture and is systematized without the necessary grounding in the word of God.

We see this in Greek. First, many mainline seminaries have now abandoned teaching the languages. More conservative seminaries still teach the languages, but the number of required semesters is being reduced. Second, there is a growing trend to change the way we learn Greek, and the new approach undermines the exegesis and exposition of scripture. If the church is led by pastors who don’t know the languages, or who don’t know them well enough to do exegesis, and if congregations don’t grow beyond their leaders, then the church is at risk of losing its ability to think and argue from the scriptures.

There are several contributing reasons for this abandonment. One is that learning Greek requires hard work and consistency in a world of increasing distraction. Another is that the way Greek has historically been taught has not endeared language learning to students and the professors they become. A third is that we, as the church, constantly allow secular disciplines to influence our methodology. This is not inherently bad, but inevitably, there is a cost to applying non-biblical models to the task of reading, studying, and teaching the word of God.

Why it is still Greek to so many

The way Greek is taught has evolved significantly over the last 50 years. But ironically, it has only become more difficult. The reason is not that the changes have been ineffective; rather, despite the steady flow of change in the process, factors beyond the teacher’s control have affected the process.

How we learned Greek

As English is the primary language today, at the end of the Medieval period, Latin was the primary language. However, with the rise of French, Italian, and English in the sixteenth century, Latin dropped out of everyday use and became an “occasional” language.¹ The use of grammar was adopted to teach students who no longer heard or used Latin and Greek to read the rich heritage of texts written in these languages, which were considered the foundation of Western civilization.

Grammar as a tool for learning Greek dates back to the late classical period. The earliest Greek grammar is considered to be Dionysius Thrax’s Technē Grammatikē from the second century BC. During the 16th through 19th centuries, the use of Grammar in a classical education context provided the foundation for logic and rhetoric, and therefore for a well-rounded education. Its use in learning ancient languages continued to develop over the centuries, until what we now refer to as the Grammar-Translation Method (GTM) was solidified in the 19th century.

The Grammar-Translation Method was not an arbitrary pedagogical invention for learning foreign languages. It was the continuation of a tradition stretching back through the medieval university and into antiquity, rooted in the conviction that to know a civilization you must read its texts in their own language. Grammar was understood to be the language of language. A student who understood grammar was able to leverage this knowledge to learn to read and understand other languages. Further, by understanding grammar, the student would learn “how to construct an argument and detect fallacies in argument.”² This education system was overturned during the 20th century thanks to three contributing factors.

Three 20th Century Shifts

A significant change already well underway at the beginning of the 20th century was the anglicization of the world. Just as Aramaic and Greek had followed the Babylonian and Greek conquests in the 500 years prior to the birth of Christ, so the British exported the English language throughout its empire during the 19th century. The two world wars of the first half of the 20th century further expanded English as a diplomatic and commercial language, thanks to the dominance of English-speaking nations, particularly the United States, from the mid-century. English became so widely used that it became a de facto second language in countries with their own languages. This meant that native English speakers had far less need to learn other languages, and over time, the English-speaking world largely abandoned learning them. Without the need to learn other languages, the need to learn grammar became increasingly irrelevant.

The second shift was also underway at the end of the 19th century with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. The competitiveness of industrialized economies depended on their ability to modernize, improve efficiency, and increase production output. This required a specific set of skills: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The humanities, history, philosophy, literature, and classical languages came to be regarded as luxuries rather than necessities. This only accelerated during the Cold War era after Sputnik was launched in 1957, leading both the UK and the United States to prioritize STEM subjects at the expense of everything else. Grammar was crowded out by subjects with far more political and economic urgency.

But philosophy was not dead, and shares responsibility for the third shift. The progressive education movement of the early 20th century abridged and then re-envisioned education. This movement resulted in the removal of the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the prioritization of “subjects” in education. Subjects were originally part of the second stage of the classical education process, the Quadrivium, and were intended to build upon the Trivium. Instead of being regarded as a foundational skill to learn in order to engage the classical writings in their own language, the languages themselves, and grammar with it, were isolated as “subjects” and separated from the rest of the curriculum.

Just as the Grammar-Translation Method emerged, forces beyond its control were already undermining its use everywhere, while the seminary continued to depend upon it. By the end of the 20th century, seminary students had been shaped by all three of these shifts simultaneously. They had no prior grammar education (progressivism), often no experience learning another language (English dominance, making other languages elective), and a broadly utilitarian view of education that made investing in grammar feel unjustifiable unless it produced immediate practical returns (STEM-era instrumentalism).

Challenges for seminaries

Seminaries continued to require students to learn ancient languages. Greek and Hebrew (and sometimes Aramaic) were regarded as necessary for prospective pastors, so they would have a sound understanding of the source material that formed the Christian faith they were being trained to proclaim.

One of the original goals of seminaries was to promote the ability to read the Greek New Testament in its original language and to evaluate the arguments of the original authors. This reflects the intent of the Trivium: learning grammar and evaluating dialectic (logic) in order to proclaim the text (rhetoric). The mission of the church, and therefore of the pastor in particular, is to convey the author’s original intent and power to an audience far removed from the time, culture, language, and worldview of the original recipients. This is the intended outcome of expositional preaching. The ideal Christian pastor knows his faith first-hand from the scriptures in the original language and can faithfully explain them to someone who has never encountered the gospel before.

However, as the Trivium fell out of general Western education and students entered seminary with little to no knowledge of grammar, the assumed prerequisites of the Grammar-Translation Method were increasingly absent. No longer could grammarians assume the student had learned grammar and simply teach the language. Students no longer understood the use of cases or verb moods, and how the parts of a sentence relate to one another.

Therefore, grammarians also had to teach grammar while teaching Greek. Grammars published in the first half of the 20th century differ markedly from grammars published in the second half. For example, in J. Gresham Machen’s New Testament Greek for Beginners (published 1924), the student is assumed to understand parts of speech, what a tense and mood are, what a declension is, conjugation, and so on. No explanations are given of these terms. By contrast, Mounce’s popular Basics of Biblical Greek explains all these terms using English examples and then explains how this same concept functions in Greek.

Adding grammar to the process of learning Greek and Hebrew is a logical step and has allowed seminaries to continue teaching the languages without placing an additional burden on their curricula to teach what students would previously have been taught as part of their earlier education. However, this also effectively doubled the students’ cognitive load and significantly increased the teacher’s teaching load. The stigma of grammar, its irrelevancy, was not overcome by teaching grammar with the language because grammar was only taught as a tool for learning the language. When students learn exegesis, they haven’t made the connection between grammar and the way nouns, verbs, tenses, moods, and so on are used. They haven’t yet understood the connection between exegesis and exposition (grammar and rhetoric). Indeed, many seminaries no longer teach exposition as the way to preach, preferring more contemporary communicative methods such as storytelling, interactive discussion, and other non-authoritative postmodern approaches. Without exposition and with the student unable to see the connection between exegesis and exposition, grammar continues to appear irrelevant.

This also affected how students felt about themselves as learners. Before a student could learn a concept in Greek, they first had to be shown that they did not understand their own language adequately. This results in frustration for many students. Students who felt well educated up to that point (and who often were) found themselves confronted with questions about their mother tongue they had never needed to ask. If they had managed perfectly well for so long without knowing what a dative case was, why did they need to know now? Only when the student had understood the grammatical concept in their own language could they learn how the concept worked in Greek (or Hebrew). Then, in addition to the grammatical concept, they needed to learn and develop skills in morphological patterns and information structuring in the target language.

Since most English-speaking students are accustomed to learning about things, absorbing information rather than developing skills, they have not developed the ability to learn the patterns that language acquisition requires. When this is combined with the constraints of a semester and additional class load, language learning in seminary becomes a “survival of the fittest,” often resulting in barely passing grades and a sense of failure by most students, even if they do pass.

The problem amplified

Before we turn to how we have responded to these challenges, it might be helpful to briefly lay out the problems as seminarians and grammarians have discussed them, which result from this history. The task of teaching Greek using the Grammar-Translation Method provides challenges on three levels.

First, the student needs to learn grammar, understand the structure of language itself, and develop skills in recognizing language patterns. This is not merely a new subject, but a new kind of learning. Since, in almost every case, the student has never been exposed to these demands and is already behind when they start, it is easy for them to feel despair as they realize how much there is to learn, and that their old approaches to learning simply won’t work. This is compounded in our psychologically conditioned society, which regards “feeling bad” as something to be avoided rather than an indication of a challenge to be overcome. Thanks to this conditioning, a sense of shame and guilt sets in early in the process of learning Greek and Hebrew. The student feels like they “suck” at languages, when the problem is often that they are trying to acquire several years of learning they were not adequately exposed to previously in one or two semesters.

This introduces the second problem: the sheer volume of new learning required. Learning this much requires considerable effort from the student. In a seminary environment, the student must pack all this information into one or two sixteen-week semesters, during which Greek competes for time with other demanding subjects. At the end of that period, they must demonstrate that they meet the requirements for the syllabus (often driven via accreditation standards), which generally means being able to translate basic texts from their Greek New Testament into English, parse some verb forms, and explain a handful of grammatical principles. With so much information to learn in such a short time, and with skills so poorly developed in the rush to complete the syllabus requirements, it is little wonder students don’t really have a grasp of the language. Since students don’t sufficiently understand what they’ve learned and generally can’t apply it, they won’t use it and, as a result, won’t retain it.

Third, seminaries primarily teach students to do exegesis. There is a direct connection between preaching the word of God expositionally and deriving the exposition faithfully from the text. Without the ability to analyze the text’s grammar, the student will struggle to understand the author’s logic and, therefore, argument. After all, the purpose of grammar in the Trivium is to lay the foundation for logic and dialectic. The original intent of language learning was to give the student the ability to a) read the text in the original language and b) analyze the text in the original language. Seminaries and the modern Grammar-Translation Method have generally abandoned the former as a goal, settling for the latter as the syllabus goal. In other words, the goal of learning the language has been significantly truncated, even from the original intent of learning Grammar.

This raises the question of whether the student is actually learning the language or simply learning exegesis. Some seminaries have collapsed the two-course sequence of beginning Greek and Greek exegesis into a single exegesis course. Other seminaries have abandoned learning the language and replaced Greek courses with how-to-use-software-to-work-with-the-language classes. Yet the inability to read the language is itself a danger, as without the ability to read the text, the student is unable to gain an organic grasp of the author’s flow of argument and how the author moves from one strophe to another, drawing on metaphors and figures of speech to build the argument.

In short, the ability to do exegesis without being able to read atomizes the text into individual words and occasionally phrases. Not to mention that many graduates don’t understand the difference between a clause and a phrase, or how clauses build on one another. Without the ability to follow the argument, the student easily misses the point of the text, getting caught up in trivia related to the words themselves. When they come to preach or teach, the big-picture argument is lost in the minutiae that spark the multiplication of sermon points, many of which are not inherently germane to the author’s argument. As a result, the author’s message risks being lost on the audience, and the audience doesn’t appreciate their Bible. The fault lies not with the audience or even the preacher, but with the process that produced the sermon.

Responding to the challenge

Seminaries and seminarians have been aware of the growing difficulty of learning Greek and have responded in several ways. As already indicated, many mainline seminaries simply dropped the original languages from their required programs of study. Others have tried to reduce the student pain by packing the information (and pain) into a single semester; a kind of rip-off-the-band-aid approach. Others have replaced the study of languages with courses on how to use software to work with them. In these cases, Bible software tools are taught primarily, and the language is somewhat incidental to the tools.

More recently, with the development of linguistics as a discipline, there has been considerable adoption of linguistic methods by biblical language scholars. The study of linguistics by biblical scholars has led to numerous books and new considerations in exegesis, particularly the development of discourse analysis. One of the most significant applications of linguistic thinking in biblical language education has been the growing use of communicative methods for learning the original languages.

The argument for communicative language acquisition (CLA) resonates with anyone who has struggled to learn Greek in seminary: if I learned English as a child by listening and using the language through trial and error, surely I can learn Greek or Hebrew in the same way? The argument is that there is a natural way to learn languages, and that if we learn Greek and Hebrew using the same methods, we can achieve the same level of fluency in the original languages as we do in our first language.

The appeal of this argument is understandable, but it rests on several assumptions that deserve consideration.

The first assumption embedded in the CLA approach is that the kind of language knowledge needed for biblical exegesis can be acquired through the same process that produces reading fluency. CLA is attractive because it reasons well from a pure language-learning perspective: if comprehensible input and pattern recognition build the competency needed to read a living language, why not a biblical one? But this assumption conflates two different kinds of skills: the skill of reading a text with comprehension and the skill of analyzing an argument through its grammar. The pastor or student of scripture seeks to understand what Paul wrote, why he wrote it the way he did, and what hangs on the specific words and constructions he chose. That requires not fluency in the communicative sense, but analytical skill, the ability to slow down, identify what is happening grammatically, and reason from it. A student trained through communicative methods may learn to read Greek with a degree of fluency, but they will not have learned to think analytically about the text. When they encounter a text that is the subject of debate, such as how a genitive should be understood or an ambiguous subjunctive, they lack the tools to draw their own conclusions. They can recognize the pattern, read it, and reproduce it, but they cannot discuss it, explain it, or form an argument from it.³

The second assumption is more subtle and more serious. Learning a language through communicative immersion teaches the student to bring their existing habits of mind to the new language. That is, it merely encourages them to read Greek as they read English, following sense and flow rather than analyzing its structure. For reading a simple narrative, this may be adequate. But it normalizes a way of engaging the text that is actually the problem GTM and exegesis were designed to solve. The English-speaking reader already brings to scripture the assumptions, categories, and grammatical blind spots of their mother tongue. The purpose of learning Greek analytically is precisely to interrupt those habits; to force the student to confront the fact that Greek does not work the way English works, that Paul’s argument is built on structures that English obscures, and that what appears on the surface in translation is not always what the Greek says. Communicative acquisition does not disrupt these habits; it reinforces them under a Greek surface.

Some approaches to CLA use immersion to help the student learn the language. However, immersive approaches to ancient languages face a structural problem that does not apply to living languages: there are no native speakers. The feedback loop that drives genuine language acquisition is absent. What immersion produces in this context is familiarity with reconstructed patterns rather than the internalized competency a child develops in their mother tongue. For exegesis, which requires not fluency but analytical precision, this is at best a partial solution and at worst a more expensive route to the same destination. Without immersion, the result is that the student learns to read Greek as if it were English with different words, and, since they do not have native speakers with whom to communicate, they learn to produce Greek sentences in the same way they produce English sentences.

Just as the modern education system has failed to prepare the seminary student to learn Greek through grammar by not teaching it, so too the CLA student is let down by an inability to understand language structure, resulting in an inability to analyze the text’s argument. What the student lacked before they began, knowledge of how language works and how to analyze it, they still lack. The new language simply inherits the old blindness.

Two kinds of outcome

There is a danger of getting into methodological debates at this point. Some argue that the Grammar-Translation Method (GTM) cannot produce fluent readers. My argument has been that, indeed, GTM, with the constraints explored in the last section, does not readily produce fluent readers, and certainly not by the end of the course of study. However, the GTM has enabled analysis of the text. What it lacks, the ability to read, can be taught, but generally is not.

CLA presents itself as the solution to GTM’s failures. But once a language has been learned through CLA, introducing formal grammar can feel to the student like starting over, as they discover that the fluency they developed did not rest on the analytical foundations they had assumed. This hampers their ability to analyze constructions and, therefore, to practice exegesis. I would argue that students who can do exegesis after using the CLA approach were first taught using the Grammar-Translation Method and, in a second pass, were given the ability to read through CLA.

The ability to read a text is not the same as the ability to argue from it. A student who reads through a passage fluently may not notice that a phrase or construction may be understood in more than one sense. A student who can parse the construction knows that it can be understood in other ways and why. The church needs both of these skills, not one or the other, and the more urgent of the two is the analytical skill that supports exegesis and exposition.

Gains and losses

David Miller argues, “How a language is taught is often a reflection of its intended use.”⁴ As the church, we have a responsibility to carefully consider where we are going and whether the methodologies we use support or undermine those goals. The Grammar-Translation Method was originally not intended to be used to learn to speak a language, but to learn to read languages that are no longer spoken.⁵ It rests on the assumption that the student already knows grammar and can apply this knowledge to the language in order to perform the analytical tasks demanded by careful reading. Since our education system no longer teaches the grammatical foundations necessary for the GTM, I would argue that the usefulness of the Grammar-Translation Method, as currently constrained, has run its course. However, I would also caution against adopting methodologies based on assumptions that are isolated from the exegetical and expository nature of church ministry. The church needs to know its own texts in the original languages and demand that they be faithfully exposited based on careful exegesis.

Since, as Miller argues, the way a language is taught reflects its intended use, the church stands to gain from adopting communicative approaches to learning the language, but should expect to lose something too.

Gain: Ability to read

The CLA can produce readers who can read the text well. But it generally is not intended to teach the student exegesis. This leaves the seminary in a compromised position. How do you teach exegesis after students have learned using the communicative approach? I asked a senior professor at a Bible College this question with genuine interest after he informed me that it had begun teaching its students using communicative language acquisition methods. He shrugged and said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Which is to say, they didn’t have a plan. This is actually a more alarming concern because it suggests that this particular institution has lost sight of what it is trying to produce in its students. In this example, exegesis, and therefore careful exposition of the word of God, has been lost to solving the challenge of teaching Greek, and likely replaced with alternative non-authoritative communicative methods in the pulpit. Non-authoritative approaches to preaching, teaching, and counseling have become popular thanks to our post-modern cultural mindset.

Gain: Confusion?

New Testament scholar Constantine Campbell has noted that, throughout debates in biblical Greek studies, “not a little confusion” has arisen from the merging of three distinct disciplines: general linguistics, Greek philology, and biblical research.⁶ As someone who has extensively studied Biblical and secular counseling modalities, I find this very similar to the schools of psychology. Which is correct? Should we follow what we learn from behavioral psychology or cognitive psychology? Humanistic or psycho-dynamic? The number of schools of linguistics is equally myriad, and equally lacking in authority. For the Christian, there is only one authority, the word of God.⁷

This is significant when evaluating biblical texts. We must go where the text takes us. There is a danger that linguistic methodology becomes authoritative in biblical interpretation. That is, we determine how language works not based on what we see in the text, but on what a school of linguistics says about it. When a biblical scholar draws conclusions about how the language is used, we should engage with the scholar’s arguments through careful reading and exegesis rather than say, “No linguist holds that view,” and discard them. Throughout its history, the church has interacted on matters of theology and methodology, arguing, refuting points, teasing out implications, and so on. This has increased over the last few hundred years since the printing press has provided us with abundant commentaries that outline exegetical options, evaluate them, and draw conclusions. This has historically also been how academia has worked more broadly.

This is not to say that linguistic scholarship has nothing to offer; it does, and where it illuminates the text, it should be welcomed. But when linguistic schools become the standard by which biblical arguments are evaluated, interpretation shifts into the hands of those with specialist linguistic training, placing much of the church at a disadvantage in evaluating exegetical claims. While the church should rightly draw on secular scholarship, it would be wrong for the church to yield to secularly influenced specialists its authority to do the one thing the world cannot: carefully and faithfully interpret and proclaim the text. If a philosophical or linguistic position is defensible from scripture, it deserves engagement on its own terms, not dismissal because no linguist holds it. It is possible, even desirable, for biblical thinkers to make meaningful contributions to secular fields even when those secular fields preclude the conclusions on the basis of their own ill-founded assumptions.

Loss: Ability to exegete the text

Christian theology is a multi-tiered concept. At the foundation is exegetical theology. That is to say, understanding the author’s original intent and exactly what the author is and is not saying about God, man, soteriology, ecclesiology, and so on. The ability to exegete the text is the foundation of exegetical theology. Upon this exegetical foundation rests biblical theology, systematic theology, practical theology, and sound exposition. Without the ability to consider an author’s argument, logic, word choice, moods, cases, and verbal aspect, we cannot build our theology directly from the Word.

Losing the ability to do exegesis for ourselves doesn’t mean we lose the ability to reason through the text. It means we become, once again, dependent on others to do the hard work for us and to write and publish their views so we can wrestle with them. The Christian who reads Greek but cannot exegete it is still, in many practical respects, a second-hand Christian. Certainly, he has removed one intermediate layer, translation, but he is not necessarily better equipped to evaluate the arguments that past exegetes and commentators have made or to verify them. He does not know whether Cranfield, Moo, or Schreiner is right about Romans 5:12; he can only choose the view he finds most plausible and hope the grammar supports it. This is not exegesis. It is curated second-handedness. We are still second-hand Christians, but now the second-hand Christian is in the pulpit, and they believe they are educated enough to handle the text well because they can read Greek.

Loss: Exposition

This brings us to the trajectory we are on. Charles Spurgeon was, by all accounts, a gifted preacher. But he was no exegete. He relied heavily on the work of many others, and his own education included the Trivium, which fostered careful consideration of arguments. He was blessed, as we are, by the rich tradition of commentators, exegetes, and translators that preceded him. In his preaching, he had a unique way of turning a phrase, creating memorable illustrations on the fly, and teaching his congregation well. But he did not expound the text as an expositor.

Throughout redemptive history, the exposition of scripture has been critical to a right understanding of our redeemer and his purposes. Faithful handling of the word has always been mandatory to the proclamation of God’s word, from Moses to Ezra to Christ. In the post-apostolic era, men who learned and mastered the original languages modeled exposition through exegesis, including Jerome, John Calvin, John Owen, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, John MacArthur, and John Piper. Today, faithful exposition is founded on faithful exegesis. If exegesis is lost, exposition goes with it. Either we will lose the point of the text in the details of grammar, or we’ll trust others to do the work for us and content ourselves with being second-handers.

The problem isn’t just in our preaching. The problem is also with commentators and scholars. Many respected NT scholars recognize that we don’t have the level of knowledge of the languages that we ought to have at these high levels. Scholars trained using the GTM often finish seminary, earn a PhD, and begin an academic career with skills below what they should have. But they are left to develop those skills on their own, without guidance, and sometimes without even a first-hand example of the level of skill they should aspire to. But at least GTM scholars are writing about the text. The CLA camp has not produced many technical commentaries (if any). The scholarly output of the CLA movement tends toward linguistics, pedagogy, and language acquisition theory rather than verse-by-verse exegetical engagement with the text. It seems more interested in learning the original languages than in understanding what the text says. It may be too early, and the method has not yet borne fruit, but it is also possible that CLA lacks the capacity to produce technical commentaries that treat the text with exegetical detail.

The risk extends beyond scholarship to expositional preaching itself, which has implications for the long-term well-being of the church. If exposition goes, then the church will depend on the likes of Spurgeon again. Spurgeon was an exception, not the norm. The risk today is that we produce a generation that is not taught exegesis and exposition. Instead, they are taught to preach like Spurgeon, but without his gifts and without the educational tradition that supported his analysis and thought. Spurgeon could afford not to know Greek. His successors, trained neither in grammar nor in the tradition of careful scholarship that compensated for its absence, cannot.

The way forward

Despite institutional drift, methodological confusion, and a failure to align methods with the goals of pastoral ministry, nothing is irretrievably lost. Yet, it is the church that must drive the recovery, not the seminaries. Seminaries exist to serve the church, not vice versa. The church must demand that seminaries teach the languages for the purpose of exegesis and exposition, and prefer to hire those trained for this core ministry task. It also means that while the recovery of language learning must take place in the seminaries, it is the responsibility of all of us, as members of the body of Christ, to encourage those who are responsible to teach and preach, at a minimum, to learn the languages and to do the exegetical work that results in faithful expositional preaching. Which brings us to the matter of exactly who should learn Greek.

Footnotes

1. Jack C. Richards and Theodore S. Rogers, Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 3rd Ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4. ↩

2. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” in The Lost Tools of Learning and The Mind of the Maker (Manchester: Sophia Institute Press, 1990), 10. ↩

3. It should be noted that some CLA/NLA approaches do include grammar instruction as a supplementary component. However, the methodology itself trains the student to engage the language through pattern recognition and immersion rather than analytical grammar. A student can progress successfully through such a program without engaging the grammar layer, and many do. The analytical capability grammar produces is therefore available in principle, but is not structurally required by the method, which is precisely the problem. ↩

4. Miller, David R.; Black, David Alan, Greek Pedagogy in Crisis: A Pedagogical Analysis and Assessment of New Testament Greek in Twenty-First-Century Theological Education (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock), 25, Kindle. ↩

5. Richards and Rogers, Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 4. Despite this original goal, it was regularly used to teach living languages until World War II. ↩

6. Constantine R. Campbell, Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek, 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2024), 17. ↩

7. The connection between linguistics and psychology is not merely illustrative. It reflects a deeper epistemological problem. Linguistics rests on a model of the human person, of what we are and how we process meaning, which places it squarely in the domain of anthropological knowledge. Stephen Moroney has argued that the noetic effects of sin corrupt human knowledge in proportion to the moral proximity of its object to God. Under this model, knowledge of the human person ranks among the most epistemically vulnerable domains, surpassed in susceptibility to corruption only by knowledge of God himself. The fragmentation of linguistics into competing schools flows from the competing views of man upon which they are based. A biblically grounded linguistic framework cannot follow a secular vision of man, but must find its roots in the text of scripture itself. ↩