Back To the Font
This is an excellent section from Ben Witherington’s book Is There a Doctor In the House?
As the old saying goes, something gets lost in translation. Indeed it does. Some of the original meaning often gets lost, and in place of it, we too quickly and anachronistically insert our modern meanings into the text. If languages are not your gift, or a least not something you are prepared to work hard on, then abandon any hope at becoming a good biblical scholar, or a good graduate or post-graduate level teacher of the Bible. You cannot get around the language requirement. If you can’t go “back to the font,” you will never drink from the original spring water and find the refreshment and enlightenment it provides (42).
And also this.
But the goal of training someone to be a scholar pastor or teaching pastor has largely fallen by the wayside in the rush to be more “relevant” to modern concerns, anxieties, and cultural trends. We are paying a steep price for
it—shoddy Bible teaching, superficial sermons that hardly engage the meat of the Word, bad pastoral counseling based on a misunderstanding of biblical texts, and the like. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it does not have to be that way (42).
To add to that, here is a quote from B.B. Warfield instructing students who desired to enter into the ministry.
“No second hand knowledge of the revelation of God for the salvation of a ruined world can suffice the needs of a ministry whose function it is to convey this revelation to men, commend it to their acceptance and apply it in detail to their needs–to all their needs, from the moment they are called into participation in the grace of God, until the moment when they stand perfect in God’s sight, built up by his Spirit into new men. For such a ministry as this the most complete knowledge of the wisdom of the world supplies no equipment; the most fervid enthusiasm of service leaves without furnishing. Nothing will suffice for it but to know; to know the book; to know it at first hand; and to know it through and through. And what is required first of all for training men for such a ministry is that the book should be given them in its very words [Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek] as it has come from God’s hand and in the fullness of its meaning, as that meaning has been ascertained by the labors of generations of men of God who have brought to bear upon it all the resources of sanctified scholarship and consecrated thought.”
—B. B. Warfield
Selected Shorter Writings–I
Our Seminary Curriculum
I didn’t add the paragraph in-between those two I posted, but it deals with the complete opposite of what Warfield writes. From what I can remember Witherington basically critiqued the seminaries and universities for not requiring the languages because its not relevant to today’s society.