Why Christians Should Study Classical Languages

And Language in General

The first time I heard someone say something like the above statement I had a negative reaction to it. I, after all, believe the meaning of our words are very important. Another famous quote, attributed to Confucius, says “When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty.” This rings true. If it doesn’t connect with you then I suggest you take a look at current events and the redefinition of basic concepts like “marriage” or “boy” or “girl” or “racism”. It seems perfectly true that the loss of meaning, historically attached to these words, is directly impacting the liberty (freedom) of others. In fact, while some are seeking after what they would call “freedom”, namely freedom from the restraint of moral norms, this is only coming into being by placing greater restraint on the freedom of others. Particularly restraint upon the freedom of speech. Further, the kind of freedom they are gaining is, in reality, something more akin to bondage than real freedom. Vice always enslaves, virtue always frees.

But the statement, “Words don’t have meaning; they have semantic range” is not an attack on words being meaningful. It actually speaks to something deeper and more permanent than words themselves and addresses ideas or concepts.

If you have spent much time reading works of philosophy, theology, or really any deeper level academic work, then you have probably at some point come across an author who has said something like this: ‘The English language lacks the right word to fully express this idea.’ That is to say, when discussing a concept and trying to come to terms with how to best articulate it, sometimes we fall short of a good word for that idea. This forces scholars to do one of a few things. Either they create a new word and give it a definition, or they rebrand an old word with a new stipulative definition (taking a familiar word but intentionally using it differently than it commonly is used), or they reach out and lay hold of a word from a foreign language which expresses the idea more nearly than any word in their native tongue seems to do.

C. S. Lewis did both of the latter two options when trying to describe a concept which he called “joy.”

“I will only underline the quality common to the three experiences; it is that of a unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.”¹

Lewis also refers to the German word, Sehnsucht, which refers to a kind of deep longing, as approaching something like what he is trying to get at when he talks about “joy” in his stipulated way.

I could spend a long time here talking about what Lewis was getting after, but you should just read the book, Surprised by Joy, yourself. For the purposes of this article it is enough to make the point. Sometimes words fail us, sometimes we have to make new words or point to other languages when trying to explain an idea. Translators wrestle with this difficulty constantly. Whether it is rendering the Holy Scriptures in English or Harry Potter into French, how do we accurately bring one text, written in its original language, and place it faithfully into the care of another language? Sometimes, in fact often, there simply isn’t a perfect equivalency between a word in the source language and any other word in the receiving language.

At this point translators are forced to ask themselves, “What is the author trying to say and how do I accurately convey the meaning even if I must use different words?” It is simply unavoidable that translation involves interpretation. It is for this reason that some have proclaimed “Translation is treason!” It is also why it is advisable to read multiple translations of a text to see how various scholars have made their attempt. Often the synthesis of those differing translations is helpful for getting at the original meaning.

When we pick a word in our language to represent a word in another language we are playing a game of darts.

The idea itself is the bullseye and our words attempting to describe that idea are like the darts. Some words are clearly closer than others to adequately describing the idea itself.

How I feel about pizza is often described in English as love. “I love pizza!” But this is somewhat misleading and there is a lot of ambiguity in how English speakers tend to use this word. In the Greek language there are four words which are all translated into English as “love.”

1. The first is ἀγάπη (agape) which refers to unconditional love. This is the kind of love God has for his children, it cannot be severed by anything.

2. The next kind is ἔρως (eros), sexual love. This is the kind of love that men and women share, ideally, in marriage.

3. Then there is φιλία (philia) which is often described as “brotherly love” because it is the kind of deep affection one might feel for a sibling. Nonetheless it is actually most often used to describe non-sexual love between friends.

4. Finally there is στοργή (storge) and this is used almost exclusively to describe familial affection, particularly parental affection towards children.

If I were to translate the English statement “I love pizza!” into Greek, how would I do so? Well hopefully you have ruled out the first two immediately and without much thought. Also the fourth isn’t a very good fit unless I place pepperoni as equals with my children, perhaps the third option is the best? Maybe, however, the exercise suggests to me that love is a poor choice of wording in the first place. I really mean that I greatly enjoy the taste of pizza, but I don’t love it in any meaningful use of that word.

Hopefully it is starting to make sense what is meant by saying “words don’t have meaning; they have semantic range.” Semantic range refers to all the things a word can be used to mean. The word “ball” is ambiguous. Do I mean a spherical object used in sports or do I mean a really fancy dance party? I definitely don’t mean a gun or a lion. There is no legitimate use of the word ball which indicates a gun or a lion, but the word does have some range in use and meaning. Even when we take the word ball to mean the former, it may not be a perfectly spherical object though sometimes it is. That object may vary in size (baseball, basketball) or in shape and weight (bowling ball, football). We are not (or should not be) free in translations to make words mean whatever we want them to, their range only extends so far, but words rarely have only one meaning exactly.

One thing this teaches us is that ideas are immutable (unchanging) but words are variable. An idea is like a candy bar and words are like its wrapper. You can take the wrapper off of a Snickers bar and wrap it in something else, the candy bar does not change. The only question is whether the wrapper accurately reflects the content it is means to describe. Hence a Snickers bar with a Three Musketeer wrapper would not accurately describe the content but it would be closer than if it had a Butterfinger bar wrapper. No amount of wrapping or unwrapping changes the bar, it only gets closer or further from accurately describing what is inside.

Words are wrappers for ideas. But, perhaps I digress into philosophy (I tend to do that).

We are here to discuss why Christians ought to study languages (and classical ones in particular)? The reasons are manifold.

To begin with, studying a second language of any sort is a good thing because it helps you to better understand the ideas I have just been discussing. Learning a second language is eye-opening. Language is not exactly what we all thought it was when we only knew one of them. While learning any second language is useful in this way, the Classical languages of Latin and Greek are great in particular because they are inflected languages.

An inflected language is a language in which the role or function a word plays in a given sentence is determined by the various possible endings of the word. Here is a simple example: Amo, Amas, Amat. In Latin, this is the same verb in three different conjugations. Amo is first person singular and translates into English as “I love.” Amas is second person singular and becomes “you love.” Amat is third person singular and translates as either “he loves” or “she loves” or “it loves” depending on the subject of the sentence. The root of the word is the same in each instance but the ending affects its meaning. In these examples the ending tells us who is doing the loving.

How about an example of a noun in Greek? In Greek θεός is the word for God, so is θεοῦ and θεόν. In the first example, θεός, God is in the Nominative case which means the word will play the role of the subject in the sentence, such as, “God loves us.” In the second example, θεοῦ, God is in the Genitive case. This generally indicates possession, such as when we speak about “the love of God.” In the final example, θεόν, God is now in the accusative case, which makes the word the direct object of the statement, meaning that the word is receiving the action of the statement such as, “We love God.”

In both Latin and Greek (as well as other inflected languages) the meaning of the words in the sentence are not strictly dependent upon their order of appearance in the sentence. Rather, the words are sometimes rearranged for emphasis sake or just because you can. There is a typical word order in both languages but it need not be strictly held to as is the case in English or German, for instance. In those languages, and others like it, word order order to determines the meaning of the statement. In English we always state the subject before the verb, but in Latin and Greek this is by no means essential.

Enough about grammar for now. I only say all of this to show you that learning another language of any sort is great for expanding your understanding of the way language itself works. Latin and Greek, being inflected languages, will do even more for you in understanding the conception of language, as language itself, because it is notably different from our word-order-dependent language.

Why else should Christians learn classical languages of Greek and Latin?

One very obvious reason, at least it seems so to me, is because Greek and then Latin were the two languages which Christians have historically used the most to write about things which Christians care about. The New Testament was written in Greek and the Old Testament was translated into Greek (The Septuagint) and used widely by early Christians (including some of the New Testament authors). Not only were the NT Scriptures written in Greek but many of the early church fathers wrote in Greek. Athanasius of Alexandria (whom the creed is named after) being just one prominent example. Gradually, as Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, Latin became more and more the language the church used to write its theological treatises. This remained the case well into the 1800’s.

These were the main two languages used by the Christian thinkers all throughout history. Just to name a few, Augustine wrote in both Latin and Greek, Aquinas wrote in Latin, Luther wrote in Latin, Greek, and German, and John Calvin wrote in Latin, Greek, and French. Basically every Christian thinker from the time of Christ until the 1800’s wrote in one or both of these languages, often eschewing their own native tongue for academic writing. Why would they ditch their native tongue? In part because it was the language that scholars used, pure and simple, but in part because these languages are recognized for their ability to articulate difficult concepts (such as in theology and philosophy) for which other languages struggle to find words (which is partly why scholars continued to use them). I’d hate to think where we would be after the Christological debates of the 4th century without the specificity of the Greek language to explicate the relationship of the eternal Godhead.

By learning Latin and Greek you will not only understand the meta-grammar of language itself better, you will gain access to centuries of literature and scholarship that is not available to others or only available through translation (which is treason!). You will join the ranks of countless thinkers before you who found the versatility of these languages better suited to the task of thinking about and discussing the highest things of importance (particularly God).

But wait, there’s more…

You should learn Latin and Greek for one very practical reason and one more (very impractical) reason.

Latin and Greek underlie pretty much every other language in the Western world. French, Spanish, Italian, and English are all deeply indebted to these languages for their formation. The more you know Latin and Greek the more you know your own language and the more you know something about these other languages too. I don’t know a lot of Spanish, but I often can figure out the gist of a Spanish sentence because of the Latin I know. Learning the classical languages will make learning other contemporary languages, especially the aforementioned, so much easier.

Impractically, you should learn them for one more reason. They…are…beautiful! They are such beautiful languages and they will enrich your soul and do good things to your mind and there is so much pleasure in getting to know these languages and the cultures they came out of. Greek and Roman civilization explains pretty much every other Western civilization since. If you don’t understand them at all then you will never understand where we came from as a people.

I think many who have experienced a bit of Latin and Greek instruction are jaded by the notoriously dry approaches to language acquisition which focus upon the “grammar-translation” method. This method treats languages like a code to be cracked rather than a language to be read, spoken, composed in, and loved. You memorize lots and lots of charts of word endings and you just kind of want to die by the end. Such being the case, I recommend to you a more excellent way. You should check out Lingua Latina by Hans Orberg and Moss Method Greek. With these you may start engaging these languages in a much more natural and enjoyable way. My friend, Dr. David Noe, has a great site wherein he has the resources to start you down the road on both of these languages (using those resources). Check out Latin Per Diem. I am just a novice, myself, who continues to tinker and grow in my understanding of these languages, but Dr. Noe is the real deal. Make sure you also check out his interesting (and quite amusing) podcast Ad Navseum.

Enjoy the journey!

1. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Harper Collins) 36, Kindle Ed.