Preaching the Greek dictionary.

Back on campus. But in order to get here, I took the 5 a.m. train… which meant I was up at 3:30… which is usually what time I get to sleep… The upshot is that right now I need to sleep. I know, I’m the guy who usually says, “Sleep is for the weak.” Well, right now I’m weak. But first I’ll take advantage of once again having high-speed internet.

So I went to my family’s church yesterday, and the pastor took the time to plug the church’s small groups. Throughout the sermon he was mispronouncing κοινωνία and οἶκος (and if your web browser can’t display Greek, they’re often transliterated “koinonia” and “oikos”). This is typical; most pastors have learned to pronounce Greek in what I call “self-educated preacher Greek,” or what my former Greek teacher, Dr. Richard Israel, once called “ivory tower Greek”—basically, it makes American Christians sound retarded. Proper pronunciation: kEE-no-nEE-a and EE-kohs. But I digress; that’s not what I want to rant about.

Every so often you get a pastor who preaches the dictionary. “In this verse, it says, ‘Jesus wept.’ What does ’wept’ mean? Webster’s states…” which is followed by a mini-lecture on all the things “weep” can mean and Jesus’s state of mind when he wept. (Never mind that the pastor never stated which Webster’s; the name isn’t copyrighted, so just about any American dictionary can, and does, call itself Webster’s.) These days, thanks to computer concordances, we have the Greek version of preaching the dictionary: “In this verse, it says ‘they met in one another’s homes.’ The Greek word is οἶκος. That word can mean house, or family, or regularly-seen group of people…” Yes, it can mean all these things. In what context does this verse use it? In this verse, Acts 2.48, it means “house.”

But this didn’t stop him from preaching a message that—while good and largely valid—used οἶκος out of context to mean “regularly-seen group of people.” He just took that alternate definition and ran with it.

Out of curiosity I checked a Greek dictionary. His definition is the last one listed. You know why they put certain definitions last? It isn’t because pastors can make that last definition—on which they’ll base a whole sermon—the dramatic punch when they preach from the dictionary. It’s because it’s the least likely definition of the word. The first definition is usually the right one. By and large, every time you use οἶκος, you mean “house”—a building for families to live in, just like the English word. When you write poetry, you can stretch that term a bit. If such terms are commonly used, they make it into a dictionary. Thus “house” can—rarely—mean “regularly-seen group of people.” This won’t stop him from using that definition.

As I said, the sermon was good and largely valid. The jist was:

1. Christianity was never meant to be practiced alone;
2. following the first Christians’ example, perhaps we should meet in one another’s homes;
3. how can we build one another up in the faith if we never interact outside our big fat Sunday service? and
4. bear in mind what your regularly-seen group of people (which he called “your οἶκος”) consists of.

He said such things; they all needed saying. But in order to find an easy scripture to attach this message to, he plucked a verse from scripture, and using a Greek dictionary, he warped its true meaning into something he could preach from.

So I watched as my family members were scribbling down his dictionary definitions (“Wow, I never knew it also meant that!”) and groaned inwardly. You know why I’m the only one in my family who knows Greek? Because the others think it’s so esoteric and arcane and hard. Because the freaking pastors portray it that way. Thus every verse in the bible has some hidden, secret, gnostic meaning that only the pastor can peer into. This insures that the pastor keeps his job as the revealer of God’s hidden mysteries (which is the Holy Spirit’s job) because the people don’t feel they can do it for themselves; and insures that everyone is dissatisfied with the translation their bible is in because, supposedly, there’s something wrong with it. (I suspect a lot of pastors like the King James Version because you don’t have to know Greek to preach the dictionary at your congregation and get away with it.)

This is why I took Greek—I wanted to know what the bible really said. In the end, I found out it’s slightly more complex than Spanish, that most translators usually know what they’re doing, that only Greek Americans pronounce it right and everyone else is winging it based on an outdated Latin-based scheme, and that people think you’re a genius—which you aren’t—if you profess any knowledge, no matter how pitiful, of Greek.