When I was doing my MDiv, I had a good amount of elective hours: 18 if I remember correctly. Those are a precious 18 hours. For better or for worse, I had different goals in my first two years of my MDiv. I came to seminary probably wanting to pastor, and pretty quickly gained a passion for church planting. I was excited to study hard, prepare for church planting, and pastor a church that was faithful to the biblical picture for the church (whatever that is!). Now here I am, completing my dissertation in a PhD program in hermeneutics and teaching Greek and New Testament courses. That’s quite a distance from planting a church.
Because of my different goals, I chose different elective courses than I would have if, from the beginning, I wanted to go the academic route. So rather than exegesis or language courses, I took courses in leadership mentoring, church planting, and preaching. None of these were bad classes, and they were all helpful to some extent, but I was also taking them with the motive that they would be easy classes to help me along with my degree and my plans after graduation.
I want to suggest that, if you want to keep your Greek, you should take some Greek elective courses.
If you want to keep your Greek, you should take some Greek elective courses Share on XFirst let me hedge myself with what I do not mean. I do not mean that biblical language and exegesis courses are more important than practical theology courses. I do not mean that you should only take Greek electives. And I do not mean that if you do not take them, you will automatically lose your Greek.
What I am suggesting is that, no matter what your ministry goals (pastoring, youth ministry, working for a non-profit, or teaching), Greek exegesis courses can never hurt you. If it’s an exegesis class on a book of the NT in Greek, then you will be studying Scripture closely in the original language. This will help both your Greek and your knowledge of Scripture, which will be eternally beneficial no matter what your career field. If it’s an advanced Greek course (some seminaries have these, but not all), you will focus on the language, which will help you to keep your Greek at a more advanced level and help you to read your English Bible better. The more you can feel the original language of the Bible, the better you can read it in translation as well.
Another warning, however, is that when you take these courses, don’t skip over morphology!
It’s easy to get caught up in syntactical analysis of various phrases and in discourse analysis. But if you use Bible software to parse everything for you, and if you don’t continue to learn principal parts of irregular verbs, then you will be glued to software for reading your Greek New Testament, which will ultimately mean you will read it less often. There’s nothing like being able to sit down in your reading chair with just the Greek New Testament and read Scripture. (You will want to make sure you have the right Bible to do so). And that is why in our Greek Reading Videos, we spend a good amount of time reminding you of verb contractions, which declension the nouns are, how the difficult words are parsed, etc.
One more reason a Greek elective will help you is that you will get more practice interacting with critical commentaries.
Pastors generally use critical commentaries when preparing for sermons, but they often don’t know how to evaluate statements such as “this is a pendant nominative” or “this is an adverbial participial of manner, which means…” Moreover, pastors may not have been trained in textual criticism (I never had a class on it and had to teach myself). But when taking Greek electives, you will have a professor to guide you through evaluating the arguments and conclusions in critical commentaries and you will become proficient in figuring out how to use them, both for improving your Greek and for exegesis.
In the last year of my MDiv and during my ThM, I took a class on the book of Hebrews and on the book of Deuteronomy. Both classes were essential for improving both my Greek and Hebrew, and I now know those two books better than any other in their respective testaments. I spent a good deal of time translating through them on a reading level and doing close exegesis of various passages. The result was that I gained a good amount of exposure to both languages and a better knowledge of advanced grammatical and syntactical issues from the advanced grammars.
So don’t waste your electives. They are precious. You don’t need to use them all for Greek exegesis (there’s Hebrew and Aramaic too!), but we probably wouldn’t scorn you if you did.
Check out our other Keep Your Greek posts.
