An Interview with Ray Van Neste On The Biblical Languages

There’s a twenty-three minute interview by Jason Allen (President of MWBTS) with Ray Van Neste of Union University over on Jason Allen’s website. You can listen to it here. I’ve gathered together about eight minutes of the interview and transcribed it below.

I’m always interested in seeing these interviews. What do people think about the languages? What do professors think about them? You folks know that I have a serious interest in biblical language instruction, especially in addressing the elephant in the room—that most people spend a lot of money on language courses in seminary and most end up not doing much more than a simple word study (if even that) after their studies.

Once again, as you’ll see in this interview, people who teach Greek know that most people aren’t using Hebrew and Greek very much, if at all, after seminary. We know it, but most just end up telling students to “suck it up” and start reading a little bit each day. I’ve been wondering for some time now whether we can do something different—something that changes the focus of a language course from reading to doing certain tasks that can immediately transfer into ministry. Reading and translation as aims in a seminary setting may simply not be cutting it for the majority of students.

Recall what James Romm, Professor of Ancient Greek at Bard College, wrote in his New York Times op-ed last year, the day after New Year’s:

“Am I Professor de Breeze? The span of my teaching career is rapidly approaching his. Of the scores of students to whom I have taught Beginning Greek, only a small minority learned to read it with real comprehension, and of those, only a handful still do. What did I contribute to the others, except the most laborious eight credits they ever earned?”

Romm sees it. Biblical language professors at Bible colleges and seminaries around the world see it. Yet most are not seriously addressing the question of pedagogy. Con Campbell, at least, has pointed us in that direction in Advances in the Study of Greek:

“Add to those concerns the real issue of language retention and the alarming number of Greek students who fail to keep their Greek over the long haul, and we see that Greek pedagogy is an incredibly important topic… Greek instructors who do not want to waste their time and the time of their students must pay attention to pedagogy, and their pedagogy must include a strategy for retention.” (p. 210)

And again:

“As fewer students elect to study Greek, as more institutions lessen their emphasis on languages, and as nearly all students struggle to retain what they’ve learned, Greek pedagogy has probably never been more important… This may mean tweaking long-held practices. It may mean completely rethinking one’s pedagogical approach.” (p. 222)

Hopefully we will continue to see a shift—not necessarily toward any one approach (including my own)—but toward pedagogy itself, and toward a discussion aimed at justifying what we do pedagogically on the basis of sound research and data. To get that data, however, we have to start assessing—and I mean really assessing—not simply asking students whether Greek is important or reviewing a capstone project to see if it looks impressive. We have to do more.

What you’re going to read in the interview below is not terrible per se—just typical. Ask someone standard questions, and you generally get standard answers. Still, there are several points worth commenting on. But first, the transcript:

JKA: Why study the languages?

RVN: You really should not study the biblical languages unless the biblical text is important. But if the biblical text is important, then it matters to get as close to it as you can. And the point, you alluded to earlier, is not to shame anybody. And folks can point to this person or that person who was used greatly and didn't have as much access, but I don't know of any who didn't say along the way 'I got as much as I could, I wish I could've gotten more.' And we live in a day of such amazing access that if we value the Word of God, then we need to try and get as close to that text as we can and study it as much as we can, not because we're gonna correct all the translations that are out there. We have good translations, but we want to get just as close as we can. I have also illustrated it by saying, 'If you met a girl, somebody you know decided you're gonna marry this girl, and she wasn't a native English speaker, you'd want to know her heart language. Well, the heart language of the Bible, at least in biblical languages, are Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. And God is sovereign. And he chose to give them to us this way. So there's something to this. I would hope people are drawn to it. We can't really drive folks to it. If we rely on guilt, that isn't going to get us far. But if we see the value, if we see the preciousness of it, then everything we can get is gonna be good. And again, so then we aren't dealing with shame, we're just saying, 'What more can I do? What further steps can I take?

JKA: So many young men who pastor, they go to seminary, the first semester they show up, they have baby Greek. It's intimidating, it's challenging, it keeps them up at night, they struggle, they kinda manage to work their way through it, and they get through it and in hindsight it may have even felt like a seminary hazing experience. And part of them feels like they wish they could stay fresh, they wish they could spend time in the Greek text, but hospital visits happen, urgencies happen, and the wife has a baby, complexities come in. So they find themselves kinda sitting atop a melting iceberg of Greek knowledge. What do you say to that pastor who lives with a sense of guilt, wishing he had more, wishing he was better versed, wishing he was as strong as he was when he was taking exegesis classes in seminary?

RVN: Well, I would say we all deal with this, right? Life comes at us and we're not able to do all the things we want to do. But one thing I've learned along the way, again just life, is there are various things I look at and say, 'Wow, I wish I was better at, I wish I was doing more of.' And then five years later I'm still wishing I was doing more of. But we'll tend to wait until we can make huge strides before we do anything. That means we never do anything. So the thing to do is just start chipping away. Just a little bit. So I really love the UBS Reader's Greek New Testament because it has the standard text, and then it has the more difficult forms translated at the bottom of the page. That's what I have by my bedside just to read. And just start reading. Somebody says––and I know, I've been in pastoral ministry. I've heard professors who say you should study forty hours for every sermon, and we're all looking, going, 'Does he do math?' But whatever it is, do as much as you could with it. And read, I think reading everyday, again just a little bit even, is good and you begin to get the feel of it. And that UBS Reader's thing is great. If people have software things where you can put your cursor over it and read, then that's helpful. And you gotta fight discouragement because it'll come in saying, 'Well, you looked up every word. You didn't do anything.' That's not true. You did a lot. You've looked at it. You're getting a sense of it. And so I said, 'Well, I've been doing this two weeks. I don't feel like I know more than I did.' No, no, no. We're thinking two years, twenty years, forty years. We're trying to look long haul, let this slowly seep into our souls.

JKA: I remember many years ago hearing John Piper say that––I think he had like a January sabbatical or a February sabbatical––and making the comment that that sabbatical every year was his attempt to learn Hebrew. And every year he would spend time trying to learn or relearn Hebrew. I wonder at the seminary level or the Christian college level that you serve at at Union, what stewardship responsibility does the professor have? And here's what I mean by that. I don't think any professor––I never had a professor in Greek or Hebrew that I felt like they were being capricious, or just trying to be difficult because it was fun to be cruel. I never had that. At the same time, what stewardship does the professor have for this not to be shock therapy, where students are just dying to make a passing grade and get out of it? And the shock therapy––again, not the cruelty of the professor perhaps––but the feeling is I gotta cram this all in for the next three months, or this semester then the next semester, and try to cram and force a student, and trying to serve the church, trying to serve the student. All this is honorable and noble, but is there a sense in which if you take that approach and you're so intense that you have students leaving the class every semester thinking, 'I am so glad I got that behind me. I never wanna go through that again in my life,' if you in some way might be hindering the cause instead of helping it?

RVN: That's a good question. And it's tricky, right, because there are some students who are going to feel like they're overwhelmed if you just give them a little bit of work to do. So I think any good professor has to be a pastor. You're shepherding this class, right? So anywhere from Gregory the Great to Baxter or whoever, they'll talk about how do you minister to this soul, how do you minister to that soul? So, I'll have some students who I'll tell, 'Yeah, it's hard. It's time to suck it up and learn to work hard. Because [...] they just haven't had that challenge before. And then you've got the other ones, I think number one, who's pastoring a church, he's had a death in the congregation, and has had health problems himself. That's not the same message. It's a whole different face there. And I think, yeah, the professor has a responsibility, in every class, to help a student see why we're doing this. So I think it's great, so many of the resources we have now are putting us into the biblical text right away instead of doing 'The farmer saw the poet's daughter,' so that when you're doing exercises you can begin to show just a little bit of where we're going and what this is for. I try to give them some readings along the way where people are talking about 'Hey, here are some of the benefits.' Because if we don't know the value––we don't work hard on stuff we don't know what the value is. And it's not fair to just say you should know the value. I see my role as teaching the material. And then I am an enticer. I need to entice them to the value of this. And my prayer, every week when we pray for the quiz, I pray in some way about 'helping us to know you, Lord, through your Word, and help us to be a good steward of this. This integratedness is key.

JKA: That is key, and now I want to come back to something you touched on. You touched on the tools that we have. And it is amazing. I mean, I'm a young guy. I graduated from seminary with my MDiv degree in 2004, so not that long ago. But even what's come along in the last twelve years or so is truly staggering. You know, I preach conferences in different public contexts of ministry, and it seems like every month, before I preach at a conference or church setting, I'm sitting through a Logos presentation or something or a language tool presentation. I'm sitting there thinking, 'That is amazing.' You know? And I'm like, 'Where was that?' And I was teasing one of these presenters a couple months ago––I said, 'You guys are like one breakthrough away from putting all seminaries in America out of business.' And I joke because, of course, there's many, many reasons and needs for seminaries, and these tools aren't an end-all. But what do you say to the person who says, "Well, why do I need to sweat Greek for a year or two or the rest of my ministry when I can just click, click, click and––presto––I have the answer that I need?

RVN: I had this conversation the other day. As you might imagine, it's a fairly regular conversation. It's basically, at one level, the same question that gets asked, 'Why should I bother with this since I have an English translation?' The answers to say, 'Well, these are great tools, but part of the point is your own discovery. I think it's related to the idea of preaching other people's sermons. Obviously, learn from other people's sermons, draw from them and everything else, but it is the labor of wrestling with the text that shapes you. I use as an example––it's not the main point of this text, but just as an analogy––when Jacob's wrestling with this shadowy figure (I think, perhaps, the pre-incarnate Christ), it's the wrestling, that engaging with God, where he is changed. And that's us. So just the fact that I can get different answers, it's in the wrestling with it. And those answers, that's my answer that I wrote for somebody, somebody else's answer that they wrote for them. You'll want to be able to engage the conversation, not just take somebody else's answer for these things.

There’s more in the interview. The next question is “How to stay fresh?” But I’ll stop there. You can listen to the rest of the audio if you’re interested.

Let me offer a few observations.

First, what exactly do we want students to be able to do after a series of Greek courses? If the goal is reading the text, do seminaries offer enough coursework for students—working hard, of course—to realistically reach that goal? And how is this assessed? Is translation and parsing an accurate measure of reading comprehension? Do students who demonstrate a certain level of reading competence actually transfer that knowledge into meaningful exposition?

Does being able to “read” by default mean a student can accurately and efficiently perform lexical analysis? Is there any assessment to determine whether students will commit well-known lexical fallacies by the end of their second or third semester? Do students need to know how to analyze textual variants, or is it sufficient simply to skim the transmission history of the New Testament and mention papyri, uncials, א, B, and the Majority Text?

Can a student with two or three semesters of Greek explain the issue of πρῶτος and πρῶτον in John 1:41 in a way that makes sense—identifying how each reading affects interpretation and why one is more likely original than the other? These are the kinds of questions that rarely surface in discussions about biblical language instruction.

Instead, we often get reminders and exhortations for students to return to their “first love,” to pick up their GNTs again and just start reading, or to dust off their grammars and begin anew—usually to little effect. We hear familiar analogies about veils and heart languages, which are rhetorically effective and memorable, but which ultimately don’t address the pedagogical problem itself.

What I’m hoping—and praying—for is a significant shift in how biblical languages are taught. Con Campbell is right: this may mean tweaking long-held practices, or it may mean completely rethinking our pedagogical approach. The real question is whether we are willing to do so.

Are we ready—myself included—to step back and ask: Is this truly best for the Greek student? Is this really the best use of the limited time we have with them? If we are honest, it means applying to biblical language pedagogy the same kind of careful, sustained research we expect our students to apply to Greek and the biblical text itself—digging in, working hard, and being faithful with what we have been given.

If only we would do as much with our Greek courses as we hope our students will do with Greek in their ministries.