Previous posts insist that learning Greek by itself won’t help. Here follows a discussion I had with a visitor, a clear example of why Greek can be absolutely useless. The discussion may be also useful to those who are interested in the matter of baptism. It can be also useful as an example of how Protestants essentially keep the Catholic mentality!<\/p>\n
Comment:<\/p>\n
I’m a bit puzzled. Are you teaching Ancient Greek or New Testament Greek, or both? You have texts for both, but Ancient Greek is to New Testament Greek what King James English is to modern English – for example Baptism in Ancient Greek meant immersion, but by the time the New Testament was written, the definition of the word had expanded to include sprinkling. Forgive me if you already know this, but surprisingly, many experienced church Pastors, even those fluent in Greek, do not, mistakenly insisting on Baptism by Immersion. I want to learn both Ancient and New Testament Greek, but I want to be sure which one I am studying at a given time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Reply:<\/p>\n
Since you mention the example of “Baptism”, I must say that this is the first time I hear such a definition. Baptism means immersion. This is not only the ancient, but also the New Testament meaning. This is also explained by Luther: “Luther urged, in opposition to the standard practice of pouring, that baptism should be by immersion. He pointed out that the word in the Greek language means ‘To plunge something entirely into the water, so that the water closes over it,’ and urged that immersion should be the mode of baptism. Today, however, the general practice of the Lutheran Church is to administer baptism by pouring, although immersion is also permitted” (A Compend of Luther’s Theology)<\/p>\n
Please don’t let yourself be misguided by your current religious practices and affiliations. Not only as regards the learning of Greek, but also your overall thinking. To stay to the present example, of Baptism. You are in a wrong way if you try to justify this or that religious practice, immersion or sprinkling or whatever, by just finding out the definition of a Greek word. If you are going to study the New Testament your thinking should be theological and not only linguistic. In such a case you would first ask yourself, what is the purpose of Baptism (beyond the way it is performed), what is its meaning for our life? Baptism is the turning of the whole<\/strong> of man away from sin and close to God. This “whole” of man symbolically fits to a complete immersion in the water, as you can guess, so that, even if Baptism could mean “sprinkling”, a church should rather interpret it as a complete immersion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
2nd letter:<\/p>\n
Thank you very much for your clarification. I felt a little presumptuous as a beginner in bringing up the subject to an expert. Consequently, I’m afraid I came off sounding a little combative, which was not my intention. But it is precisely because I am looking at this from a theological standpoint that I was concerned.<\/p>\n
I will still have to disagree with you on the subject of Baptism, however. The following passage, taken from the Q&A section of WELS.net (Wisconsin Evengelical Lutheran Synod), illustrates why, better than I can. Please note that the Seminarians answering the questions have had years of Greek themselves, as, unlike most churches nowadays, (I’ve heard there are even Roman Catholic Priests who don’t know any Latin!!!), our Pastors are still required to have a thorough gounding in the Biblical\/theological languages. The second paragraph speaks particularly to your Luther reference, but in any case, we only follow Luther when he follows the Bible.<\/p>\n
“In the places where baptizo is used with the meaning wash, the washing is not an immersion. One example of baptizo meaning “wash” is Luke 11:37 where Jesus is invited to eat with a Pharisee. Jesus goes in and reclines at the table without “baptizing” himself. The Pharisee obviously wasn’t objecting to Jesus not immersing himself in water, but apparently to Jesus not doing the ceremonial washing of hands that was the Pharisees custom (Mark 7:3). Jesus apparently did this as a chance to address this Pharisee about his hypocrisy (vv39-44).<\/p>\n
Luther would have preferred immersion as the means of baptism because of the words in Romans 6:4. But since there were some teachers also in his day who insisted that the only valid baptism was immersion, Luther said that Christians should also use washing or pouring or sprinkling water to stand apart from the binding of consciences that was being imposed on people by those who insisted on immersion. Since Scripture does not indicate that water is to be used in only one way in baptism, for anyone to say that one way of using water is the only right way is adding to Scripture. Such additions to Scripture must always be opposed by Christians in order to maintain the freedom we have in Christ.<\/p>\n
Some Greek Orthodox teachers say that baptizo means immerse. They are only partly right, since the meaning of baptizo at the time when the NT was written was not limited to this one meaning.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Reply:<\/p>\n
Baptism is to be found in the New Testament more than 100 times. The vast majority of them does not<\/strong> refer to simple wash. If we are to use the NT in order to understand the word baptism, I think we should rely rather on the times that Baptism does not have the meaning of simple wash. Why should we transfer the meaning of simple wash to the rite of baptism? I’m tending to believe that the seminarians try to justify their practices by violating the New Testament, using a few and irrelevant occasions in a different context.<\/p>\n
This attempt, which I call violation without wanting to offend you, of course (we now just think as better as we can, we don’t offend or defend, just learn), even this attempt is really desperate, because in the case of a simple wash too baptism may mean immersion, the immersion into the water of the body members we want to wash. This then is what the seminarians do: they use a doubtful<\/em><\/strong> (at least) meaning of a very <\/em><\/strong>few<\/em> occasions of wash<\/em><\/strong>, in order to define religious <\/strong>baptism! Does this still seem a solid way to you? Not to mention that in any case they shouldn’t use a purely linguistic approach in a case where the most important thing is the theological dimensions, that religious baptism corresponds with the total<\/strong> death of the old man and his rebirth in a new life, which is better described symbolically with the immersion, the total disappearance of man into the water as a complete vanishing of the old man of sins.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I received no answer after that. Perhaps my direct ‘attack’ to the seminarians offended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Previous posts insist that learning Greek by itself won’t help. Here follows a discussion I had with a visitor, a clear example of why Greek can be absolutely useless. The discussion may be also useful to those who are interested in the matter of baptism. It can be also useful as an example of how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[9,317,10],"tags":[319,742,26,95,5695,228,1775,94,1116,1533,227,219,1630],"class_list":["post-883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greek-language","category-orthodox-christianity","tag-ancient-greek","tag-christians","tag-freedom","tag-greek","tag-greek-language","tag-learning","tag-learning-greek","tag-new-testament","tag-protestants","tag-seminarians","tag-teaching","tag-theology","tag-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}