Jimmy Akin

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Jimmy, you write that one only needs to learn to read a Biblical language.

I’m inclined to differ, I would have learned Greek far better, had I
learned to -speak- it, likewise with Hebrew, save that far less of it
stuck. Most of my classmates had been engineers, and the learning was
directed toward purely left-brained, list-learning thinkers.

But that isn’t how humans learn and use language. I tend to suspect
– strongly? that we’d understand the Bible better if we could actually
speak it, read it aloud and understand it, and thereby better catch
nuances and emphases that grammatical commentaries – such as the blue
one from the Vatican, as helpful as they can be – can enable us to do.

Treating the text as computer code may, I am inclined to think,
cause us to misinterpret from time to time. Think of Shakespeare, or
Donne.

What think you?

I agree that a person will learn a langauge better if he learns how to speak it (meaning "knows how to generate his own sentences in it") rather than just understand it (meaning "knowing what a person or a text is saying").

I think it’s a very good thing for students to learn to speak a language as well as understand it, and as they progress in their knowledge of the language, they should learn to do so.

In my article, though, I was concerned with encouraging students who are just beginning in a language. When one is at this stage, most people are so intimidated that they simply quit trying to learn the language. It is imperative, therefore, to do everything possible to make the process less intimidating until the student gains the sense that he really does have the ability to master a language.

One way of doing that is not demanding that beginning students immediately learn sentence generation. The ability to generate sentences is not the goal of biblical language studies; the understanding of biblical texts is. The quicker the students get the satisfaction of understanding texts, the more they will be motivated to continue their studies.

Learning sentence generation is of benefit to students, but in my judgment it’s better not to tax beginners with this.

HISTORIAN JOHN LUCAKS ANSWERS THIS QUESTION.

As to why it happened, the nut of his answer is this:

Beneath these political and ideological sentiments there was the sense,

more or less apparent, of a general disappointment with liberal ideals.

There was the inclination, sometimes fatal, of liberals to take the

ideas of the Enlightenment to extremes: to propagate a public morality

devoid of, if not altogether opposed to, religion; to insist more and

more on institutionalizing the promotion of justice, at times even at

the expense of truth; to emphasize freedom of speech, often at the

expense of thought; to make abortion legal; to approve same-sex

marriages and affirmative action.

To an increasing mass of Americans, "liberal" began to mean — rightly

or wrongly — a toleration, if not a promotion, of what many considered

to be immoralities.

That’s why it happened, but the context of when and how it happened is most interesting.

CHECK IT OUT.