I came of age in the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church movement of the 1970s. After high school, I enrolled for classes at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan — a strident IFB institution. While attending Midwestern, I met a beautiful, darkhaired IFB pastor’s daughter. We married and embarked on a ministerial career that took us to churches in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. One constant in our lives was the Bible. We believed the Bible was a supernatural book; written by God, the Bible was inerrant and infallible. For most of our adult lives, we were King James Only, believing the KJV was God’s word for English-speaking people. Further, we believed God “preserved” his Word throughout history, guaranteeing humanity that they would always have the perfect Word of God.
Midwestern offered rudimentary one year classes in Biblical Greek. Taught from the perspective of King James Onlyism, the focus was on the underlying Greek texts that gave us the King James Bible. I planned to take Greek my senior year of college, but we withdrew before I could take the class. Whatever I learned about Biblical Greek I learned on my own. The same can be said for Hebrew. I was able to cobble together a plethora of books and software that helped in my study of Greek and Hebrew, but I never considered myself proficient in either language.
I determined early on that I would know the English Bible well. I spent 20,000 hours reading and studying the Bible. This seemed like a good approach to take, but I now know that not being proficient in the original languages hurt my ability to understand exactly what the Bible said. Contrary to what many IFB preachers will tell you, competency in Greek and Hebrew are essential to understanding the Bible. At the very least, pastors need to have books and software that will help them dig out the actual meaning of the text. Never consulting the original languages, make no mistake about it, will bite a preacher in the ass, especially if he has educated congregants who can spot his ignorance.
Christians wrongly assume that pastors are properly educated in the Bible. Go look at the average curriculum at an Evangelical Bible college, and you will quickly learn that pastors-in-training take a lot of classes that have nothing to do with preaching and teaching the Bible. Church marketing, anyone? Most Evangelical preachers graduate without receiving instruction on all of the Bible’s books. Imagine “preaching the whole counsel of God” without taking classes on all the books of the Bible. Talk about being ill-prepared for the work of a pastor. Colleges cover up this lack of comprehensive training by offering Bible survey classes. Anyone who has ever taken a survey class knows how shallow they are, offering very little knowledge of the text.
Is knowing Greek and Hebrew essential to preaching and teaching the Bible? Yes. And a hundred years ago sects and churches understood this. Pastors took several years of Greek and Hebrew to adequately prepare for the ministry. Those days, for the most part, are long gone.
The good news is that the Internet gives people access to tools that can help them understand the English Bible and its underlying original texts. Church members can verify the truthfulness of their pastors’ sermons by using these tools, but I suspect more than a few preachers won’t like congregants checking up on them. Many pastors believe their sermons come straight from God, so you can imagine how challenging something they preached might be viewed as a challenge to their pastoral authority. This is especially the case in the IFB church movement.
Are you a former Evangelical pastor? Were you conversant in Biblical Greek and Hebrew? Are you a former Evangelical church member? Did your pastor know and understand Greek and Hebrew? Did he regularly mention the original languages in his sermons? Please share your experiences in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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