J. Gresham Machen was an influential Presbyterian minister in the early 20th century. He was a defender of biblical orthodoxy, as well as a proponent of Christian education.

Machen’s education writings are numerous, but he has a great short article from 1918 entitled, "The Minister and His Greek Testament" (which can be accessed here). Machen himself taught Greek at the seminary level, so he was certainly equipped to speak on this issue.

This essay shows that Machen was concerned with pastors of his day not caring about the Greek New Testament—meaning they did not care about the Bible written in its original language (along with Hebrew and Aramaic). Of course, this lack of interest by clergy has not improved since 1918, but it has gotten even worse with the continued decline in liberal arts education.

Machen begins with the modern minister’s objection to the Greek Testament:

The modern minister objects to his Greek New Testament or is indifferent to it, first, because he is becoming less interested in his Greek, and second, because he is becoming less interested in his New Testament.

So really there were two related problems here, one having to do with interest in Greek and the other with interest in Scripture itself. Machen explains the indifference to Greek:

The former objection is merely one manifestation of the well-known tendency in modern education to reject the 'humanities' in favor of studies that are more obviously useful, a tendency which is fully as pronounced in the universities as it is in the theological seminaries . . . The modern conception of the purpose of education is that education is merely intended to enable a man to live, but not give him those things that make life worth living.

Thus, Machen laments the decline in the humanities in general. This is true also in our own day. History, Greek, and Latin are no longer valued. Rather, K–12 schools and universities are focused on “preparing students for jobs.” Everything is geared towards utility, as if life only consists of survival. But Machen says this ignores the purpose of true education, which to give students the things that “make life worth living.”

As this applies to pastors today, Machen says pastors have traded their specialist training in order to become “merely” general managers of a church:

The minister is thus no longer a specialist in the Bible, but has become merely a sort of general manager of the affairs of a congregation. The bearing of this modern attitude toward the study of the Bible upon the study of the Greek Testament is sufficiently obvious. If the time allotted to strictly biblical studies must be diminished, obviously the most laborious part of those studies, the part least productive of immediate results, will be the first to go. And that part, for students insufficiently prepared, is the study of Greek and Hebrew.

If, on the other hand, the minister is a specialist—if the one thing that he owes his congregation above all others is a thorough acquaintance, scientific as well as experimental, with the Bible—then the importance of Greek requires no elaborate argument.

Machen gives reasons why it is so important for pastors to know Greek:

In the first place, almost all the most important books about the New Testament presuppose a knowledge of Greek: the student who is without at least a smattering of Greek is obliged to use for the most part works that are written, figuratively speaking, in words of one syllable. In the second place, such a student cannot deal with all the problems at first hand, but in a thousand important questions is at the mercy of the judgment of others. In the third place, our student without Greek cannot acquaint himself with the form as well as the content of the New Testament books. The New Testament, as well as all other literature, loses something in translation.

The minister is a herald of the message of the Bible, and that means he must specialize in its contents, including Hebrew and Greek. Machen provides some practical tips for pastors maintaining their Greek, concluding that “The Greek Testament is a sacred book, and should be treated as such. If it is treated so, the reading of it will soon become a source of joy and power.”

I want to close by making this application to classical education in general—the study of Greek and other humanities should not be relegated to the seminary and for the minister. Everyone who receives an education should be focusing on the humanities from a young age, meaning these things should be a substantial part of Christian school and homeschool curricula. Pastors and scholars can then extend these studies beyond high school and college. The Bible—along with our history and the great texts passed down to us—these are the things that truly make life worth living.

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