When I was growing up, my mother kept telling me that smart boys pretty much had three options professionally. You either studied to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a preacher. She was trying to get me ready for the future, since by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was more interested in making explosives in chemistry class and in playing football than in anything else. (If you weren't obsessed with football in Wisconsin in the 60's there must have been something wrong with you.) So when a victory over a track and field injury through surgery meant that I could continue to compete in football, it seemed like divine intervention to me and the die was cast. A preacher I would be.
In college in those days the place where all preacher wannabes met their Waterloo was in Greek grammar and syntax class, at the beginning of the sophomore year. If you didn't pass the verb exam with 90 percent accuracy, you didn't go on. You'd be steered at that point to a degree in "education," and become a certified teacher in the church, but not a preacher. We were, of course, terrified of this possibility, not because the outcome was so bad, but because it meant that we didn't have "the right stuff."
It was a good system, and weeded out the intellectually less gifted pretty quickly. By the second quarter of Greek you could already tell who was going to make it and who was not, and those over whom a question mark hovered tread their way precariously. Greek is a very difficult language in many respects, not in the least because of the precision of expression it affords through a multiplicity of inflections, both for the noun and the verb. And if you came to it without having learned Latin or French or German in the grades, you were at a distinct disadvantage, especially at the relatively late stage of college when beer and girls represented a far more appealing past time than drilling with flash cards two hours every evening. It's much better to get language under your belt before you get there so that you can actually spend your time reading the ancients in the original languages with smart guys who've spent their whole lives doing the same.
It's true that since this high water mark in the 70's there has been a precipitous decline in standards and expectations in America, but from the perspective of the history of education over the last hundred years, the story is really much much worse. For many years I mistook the high point in my own experience for the veritable Olympian heights, only to realize much later that it was merely a stop at the lowest of the base camps situated far below the summit. Today by comparison most divinity students aren't even mucking about in the grassy foothills far below . . . for them the mountain is not even in sight.
To appreciate my point fully consider some of the books used by a ministerial student during the years 1880-1884, which I acquired a hundred years after the fact through a friend. They are inscribed by one B. Henry Succop, who studied at what is now Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, a scion of a storied and prolific clan of Lutherans of the day. The young Henry was wont to mark his progress in the margins of his books, recording the day, the month, and the year at each point along the way, employing perfect penmanship I might add. His youth is in evidence because just like any school boy he doodles, delightfully, on the pages as he daydreams. There are even some fine figures he created, colored, and cut out for imaginative moments upon his desk, tucked between the pages. This means that Henry was younger than the typical divinity student of today, who matriculates at a seminary only after completing an undergraduate degree somewhere first.
The only volume in evidence for 1880 shows Henry reading Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Roman civil war, in Latin, using a Weidmann edition published just two years prior. In 1881-82, he moves on to Cicero and Livy in Latin, and Plutarch's lives of Themistocles and Pericles in Greek, employing late Teubner editions dating from 1872 to 1877. In 1882 he is also reading Virgil's Aeneid, again in Latin, not in translation. Come 1883 Henry is quite busy, reading Cicero's Against Catiline and the Odes of Horace in Latin, as well as the Ajax of Sophocles and the Philippics of Demosthenes in Greek, again employing the latest Teubner and Weidmann editions as available. Rounding out the list for that year is Justin Martyr's Apologies, in Greek. For the final year, 1884, there is evidence for only one subject, St. John Chrysostom, in Greek. Quite the plate full apart from the rest of the curriculum, about which there are no clues. And, oh yeah, the trots between the pages, they're in German, his native language.
B. Henry Succop came to Concordia prepared to read the ancients in Latin and Greek, and not just the New Testament or the fathers, but the best authors the pagan past had to offer. This means he had learned his Latin and his Greek in the grades. It also means those so-called backward, conservative, fundamentalist Lutherans thought it important for their future leaders like Henry to spend time studying the cultural opposition. In consequence, Henry's library more closely resembles that of a classicist. Poke around in the library of a contemporary preacher if he'll let you. You'll find far lighter reading in it, I assure you.
If it be objected that Henry's experience was peculiar and parochial, it must be remembered that public school students of the day themselves were reading difficult Latin authors such as the historian Tacitus by the time they were in high school. This was the case because most colleges had a foreign language requirement of three semesters of Latin, and high schools were expected to send them students who could complete them successfully. Today, by contrast, the country is crawling with degree mills without such requirements. Majors in classical antiquity themselves often have to wait until the senior year for a seminar in Tacitus. So-called doctorates in less demanding fields stalk the land who have never once studied a foreign language for a week, and masters of divinity litter the landscape who have passed Greek with a rudimentary summer course and presume to rule on matters of eternal significance but can't pronounce the letters of the Greek alphabet arranged carefully to embody those ideas. "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"
No wonder the thoughtful man in the pew is sad. He is alone.
