Have any of you ACE
homeschool kids ever studied the PACES called "Etymology"? I did.
Etymology deals with the 'roots' of words--where a word originally came from
way back in the foggy mists of time. Etymology is a valuable area to study, and
nothing in the following excerpt is meant to suggest otherwise (i.e. contrary to what you might think, your
Etymology PACES were not a waste of time).
Nevertheless, a
problem arises when people mistakenly think that a word's etymology tells them
"what it really means." We can see the fallacy of this notion clearly
in our native English language. For example, the word "nice" comes
from the Latin root 'nescius,' meaning 'ignorant.' But no one but a fool would
respond to your calling them 'nice' by saying 'Oh, I see what you really mean! You're saying I'm ignorant! I'm onto your veiled Latin
insults!' No one does this in their native language, but many Christians do
this very thing when studying the Bible. They look up Greek words in their
Strong's Concordance, find the original Greek root, and conclude that they have
found the word's 'real' meaning.
Here's the point:
roots and etymology are good. They can sometimes give you an interesting backstory
on why a particular word came to be used to describe a particular thing. They
can even help you win the national spelling bee. But they don't tell you the
'real meaning' of a word. Here’s why: because
a word's meaning
is not determined by its etymology, but by its usage. If you proposed to your girlfriend and she
said "No," and yet you could somehow prove that "No" came
from a Latin root meaning "Yes," it still wouldn't do you any good.
Sadly, meaning is determined by usage, not etymology. “No” means what your
girlfriend (and practically everyone else in our culture) means by it, not what
it might have meant 1,000 years ago in an ancestor language. The reason no one
today would take 'nice' as an insult is that no one today uses 'nice' as an insult. If you want to know what
a word means today, you must find out how it's used today. That's what an
up-to-date dictionary will tell you. Contrary to what is sometimes believed,
dictionary writers do not determine word-meanings; they simply tell you how
words are currently being used. Rather than prescribing they are simply describing.
Incidentally, this is
also why it is counterproductive to be an "1828 Noah
Webster-Onlyist." Webster's 1828 Dictionary (which I, along with many
homeschooling families, own) is a valuable resource for finding out how words
were used in 1828, and as such can be used profitably to discover the meanings
of unfamiliar words you might find in pre-19th century works like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Shakespeare's plays, and the
King James Version of the Bible. In fact, it contains
thousands of definitions that are still accurate. But it can't serve as
your only dictionary, because word usage has changed significantly in the last
200 years. Some words have lost old meanings ('let' no longer means 'hinder'), others have gained new ones ('cell' is now also used to describe a
phone), and others have simply come into existence (babysitter, internet,
etc.). Living, spoken languages are not frozen in time, nor are they constrained
by etymology.
When it comes to Bible
study, many Christians think that knowing Greek is like a magic bullet that
will unlock all the secrets of biblical meaning. This is simply not the case.
Come to find out, Greek scholars have disagreements, too. The truth is, the
main thing I learned in the first couple of weeks of Greek class was that most
of what I thought I knew about Greek was malarky. Turns out that 'agapao' and
'phileo' weren't really different kinds of love after all, and the gospel wasn't
really the 'dynamite' of God. In many ways, Greek was much more mundane than I
had thought.
I'm not trying to
discourage anyone from studying Greek. In fact, I would encourage people to
learn as much as they can. But the hard truth is that most people don't have
time to learn it. The good news, however, is that God never intended all (or
even most) of his people to have to learn Hebrew and Greek in order to
understand his word. There is a happy division of labor in the body of Christ,
just as there is in society in general. God is merciful--some people become
experts in Greek and Hebrew so the rest of us don't have to. As my hermeneutics
prof Rob Plummer has said,
"Never before in
the history of Christianity has there been less need for word studies than
today. With the multiplicity of many excellent English Bible translations,
readers of the Bible have the fruit of scholars' painstaking research."
And
as 19th century Baptist theologian John Dagg put it:
"Translations,
though made with uninspired human skill, are sufficient for those who have not
access to the inspired original. Unlearned men will not be held accountable for
a degree of light beyond what is granted to them; and the benevolence of God in
making revelation has not endowed all with the gift of interpreting
tongues...God has seen it wiser and better to leave the members of Christ
to feel the necessity of mutual sympathy and dependence, than to bestow every
gift on every individual. He has bestowed the knowledge necessary for the translation
of his word on a sufficient number of faithful men to answer the purpose of his
benevolence. And the least accurate of the translations with which the common
people are favored is full of divine truth and able to make wise to
salvation."
If Dagg is right, and
I think he is, then the impulse that says "I don't want to be dependent on
scholars" may be a latent form of pride. It may be the hand saying to the
foot 'I have no need of you.' I'm not trying to turn scholar-translators into
an infallible high priestly class. I'm just saying that unless God expects us
all to become experts in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, then he must have willed
for there to be a division of labor in this area. We are dependent on experts
whether we like it or not. Pride will chafe at this, and paranoia will invent
conspiracy theories. But until we become self-sufficient and omniscient,
nothing will change it. Even the King James Onlyist is dependent on experts
(namely, the King James translators).
But humility will see
this as good news, and will be relieved at God's way of dividing the labor. The
sad news is that many Christians spend too much time looking up Greek words and
coming to misguided conclusions because they don't really understand how the
language works (they often know just enough to be dangerous). But for those who
think they can't understand the Bible unless they can understand Greek, the
good news is that 9 times out of 10 you will gain a better understanding of
what a word means simply by reading it in its context.
Here's what I mean by
'reading it in its context:' don't just zero in on one word, read the entire
sentence. Then read the entire paragraph. As Paul Baker once wisely told us in
one of his parable lessons, "Words shouldn't be read with blinders on."
The reason for this is obvious when you think about it. There is a sense in
which an individual word doesn't even have a meaning at all--rather,
it has a range of possible
meanings (often called a 'semantic range'). That's why a
dictionary will usually list several possible options. It's only when a word is
used in a context that the precise meaning becomes clear. Context usually
narrows the possible meanings to one (an exception would be those wonderful
things called "puns"). So for example, if you want to know what John
means by the word "sin" in 1 John 3:4, instead of zeroing in on the
word "sin" and doing a word study of 'hamartia' and trying to find
out what 'hamarita' 'really' means based on its root, read the entire sentence:
"Sin is lawlessness." Then read the surrounding context: "Everyone
who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. But you know that he
appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin." It's
not as flashy a study method, and it probably won't make you look as smart, but
it'll save you a lot of time and give you much more accurate results. :-)
