 Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Finney Caravella. Did I say your name? Yep. Right? Okay, awesome. We're in Boston, Massachusetts, here at Sattler College, which I believe you're the founder and had a lot to do with that getting started. But something I actually learned yesterday that interests me is you require your students to complete a certain number of classes in biblical languages. Can you just walk us through that? Like, why study biblical languages? And what's your past with studying biblical languages? So we require everyone to do one year of Hebrew and one year of Greek there. So I got started in biblical languages while I was in medical school. And while I was in med school, I read a lot of books in the Christian world. And you know how it is where you'll be reading a book and it'll say in the Greek, it says blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you read that and you think, okay, well I guess I'm just going to trust you. And I remember once being in a library of a local church and opening up this book and it had a section in the book where in the footnotes there was Greek, there were Greek letters on it. And I didn't know a word of Greek and I saw those characters there and I closed the book and I said, you know what, I'm too intimidated by this, I'm just not going to even take a crack at it. You quickly realize that there's a glass ceiling that's there where there's a whole world of deep thought that occurs where if you really want to get into the Bible, you need to use biblical languages. One of the best analogies that I heard years ago was saying, imagine that you're married to a woman who speaks a foreign language, say she speaks Italian or Chinese. Are you going to live your life with an interpreter always having to broker your conversations? Obviously not. You know, somebody's got to learn the other person's language if you're really going to have a close relationship. And I certainly don't want to say that it's impossible to relate to the Bible and have a great relationship with the Bible without the original languages, but there's going to be a barrier in between you and the text and no matter what, you're always going to be reading the Bible through that interpreter. And I just eventually got so frustrated with that glass ceiling and with that sense of barrier that I said, you know what, I want to take a class in Greek and just fell in love with it. And once you get into it and once you realize that, one, it's not as hard as you might think, particularly with Greek where there's so many words in English that come from Greek. And two, once you can actually read the New Testament in the original language, it's a rush like no other. You know, I remember, I'm ethnically Indian. I grew up in Southern California and we would go to India often. And I remember being with my dad and with other people and watching them switch to different languages just on the fly and engage with people. It's like a superpower, right? I mean, it's hard to capture how impressive that is and how, at least in my opinion, how incredibly vital that is to be a person who can move between different areas and different cultures very seamlessly. And that kind of superpower that people have who can speak different languages with great skill. It's a very similar ability with being able to engage in the biblical texts with Hebrew or Greek. So basically, you went to this other school, took a few classes. How in depth did you go? It was actually through a church and it was just once a week. It was every Sunday afternoon. It was like, I think, two hours, two or three hours each afternoon for a whole year. Oh, wow. And by the end of it, the deliverable was the teacher of the Greek class said that we'll be able to read the book of 1 John with decent proficiency. So as it turns out, there's another interesting thing is when you read the Bible in the original language, you will quickly learn that each writer has his own style and difficulty. So John is very easy to read. And so John writes in very simple Greek, say Luke or Paul. It'll take you 10 seconds and you realize these are very learned people and that their Greek is just much more sophisticated. And so you really can't get into Paul meaningfully until you probably had another year of Greek or so to get just that additional level of competency in the language. So that's another fun element, though, is just being able to perceive all the stylistic differences between the authors because the translation is just flattening it all out. You don't really get that texture and that difference in style when you read it in English there. So anyways, that was the delivery that we, the deliverable that we had at the end of it was being able to do the Book of First John. That's really interesting. So now you've already kind of hinted at this, but can you just give us an overview of how this benefited you in your personal Christian walk? Huge. So, you know, one of the things that this that is benefiting me. So first is now when I heard someone in a pulpit or in a book say, well, in the Greek, it says, it means this or it means that. Well, now I have some kind of basis to assess that. And I will tell you that at least half the time when you hear that expression used, when they say it means X, Y, Z, it doesn't mean X, Y, Z. They've done really sloppy, poor work and it's probably secondary, tertiary, or a quaternary reference to something. And so I've learned to take all those things with a grain of salt because, like I said, there's just a lot of misinformation and urban myths out there. So it gives you a level of confidence to engage that you just, you can't really have unless you've gone through that. So that's invaluable. And this is not a ministry that I think everyone needs to necessarily have. But for those who want a ministry of being able to engage with Protestants, with people who are professing Christians, who hold to different beliefs, well, they claim the same book, obviously. And they're going to say, well, what about this passage? What about that passage? To the extent that you can be confident and be able to engage with them in the various books and preachers and commentaries and all those things that are there, it's incredibly useful. And I personally feel a calling that one of my ministries is to engage with the Protestant evangelical world and say, hey, let's read the Bible together. Because we do have that shared norm, that shared standard. And that capacity to do that without biblical languages is severely hindered. So I would really encourage people who want that ministry of prophetic exegetical warriors, if you will. One of the ministries, really, of those who want to have that prophetic role is to be those who can challenge people to be faithful to a text. And to be faithful to a text, again, is so much more easily done if you have the ability to directly engage. Honestly, I've never quite thought of it the way you're laying it out. Yeah, so what's also interesting is that the standards have changed a lot over the year. So it used to be the case that every single person who went to the original colleges in America, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, places like that, it was required that to graduate at the end of four years, you showed proficiency in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. And if you didn't, you were just not even really a literate member of society. As a society, as a nation, back then in the 1600s and 1700s, they had such a belief in the value of the scriptures that they said, to, again, be a literate member of society, you need to do the biblical languages. And so we had that, and today, except for Sattler College, zero colleges have that as a requirement. So we went from 100% of colleges requiring proficiency in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. We don't require Hebrew and Greek. We don't require Latin to exactly one Sattler College that requires Hebrew and Greek. And so what I think it reflects is that the general societal belief or value of the word of God engaging in primary sources has just diminished tremendously over the centuries. And I know we're going a little off script here, but is this part of the mindset or the attitude that, oh, I can just pick it up and read it for myself, and I don't have to? Absolutely. I don't have to dive deep. I don't have to go to primary sources. Exactly, exactly. So there's this notion that is called so low scriptora, not so law scriptora, but so low. It really began in the 19th century, but we're now in a period where people believe that they are the adjudicator of truth. And instead of having a pope, there's a pope in every pulpit. There's a dynamic where you have this widespread, distributed belief that everyone can independently access a truth without reference or deference to primary sources, to say what the early church believed, to all those things. And that has led to this explosion in denominations and across the board and all different stripes where you have now so many different people who, frankly, import their own biases and their own prejudices to the text and form their own theologies that are really the product of their own mind as opposed to anything that's well-grounded in scripture or in church history. And a very lazy, undisciplined approach. And when you take that approach, you get poor conclusions, not surprisingly. And here we're right here in the middle of a week of Bible school. And I just had students go through Romans 9 to 11, which is a text that Calvinists love, a very famous text right in the heart of the book of Romans, John 6, John 10, Ephesians 1. And all of those texts are examples where they read them, and I think they would all say that they read them one way coming in. And now that they've gone deeper, they read them totally differently. I certainly read them totally differently. And I see that the Protestant evangelical perspectives on those passages as just ludicrous and so poorly done and shoddy scholarship and a really lazy, undisciplined approach to exegesis. And so again, the biblical languages are a great way to get started in this, right? And again, I don't want to be snotty or say like, oh, you must do this to be a Christian or anything like that. I don't want to say that because it is something that I believe is not for everyone. And it's something that is to be a ministry of those who want to be teachers, engage in this exegetical discussion, engage with parties outside of the four walls or whatever group you might be a part of for that. As I said, it's a very valuable tool. So you've laid out a pretty clear case why someone should study biblical languages. So now let's say someone in our audience wants to do that. What's the next step? Where do you even begin a process like this? Yeah, it's hard to do on your own. And the reason it's hard to do on your own is it's difficult to do. There's a couple of different ways of doing biblical languages. There's one way of doing languages, which is it's called the grammar translation way of doing it, where basically it's a highly intense approach where you learn and memorize tables. They're called paradigms of endings. A lot of people have been Spanish and languages like that and know what I'm talking about, where you'll learn a verb, lego, is a Greek word. That means I speak, and you'll memorize, you speak legis. He speaks legi. We speak legomen. You plural speak legate. They speak legacy. And so you kind of learn these tables. You memorize them, and then you go word by word through a sentence or a verse, and you parse it. It's called where you figure out, OK, this is the second person, singular, and then, OK, now I'm in a noun. That's in the nominative case. That's the way that most people learn Greek. Now, there's value in that, and I learned that way myself. The problem is that it's quite dry to do it that way, and to have someone who can help you through that process and give you that accountability and help you through that is invaluable. So very, very few people that I've ever met have been able to do it purely self-study. It's just difficult. There's another way, which we do at Sattler College, which I like even more, where you say, OK, how do children learn languages? Because as it turns out, God has made humans to be very good at speaking languages if you learn it in the ways that children learn languages. So when we learn as when we're young, we don't learn to read or write until many years later. We learn first by hearing and by responding to commands. Sit up, move over, drink this, sit down. We learn in a very deep, visceral way how to connect sounds to kinesthetic patterns of actions and colors and objects. And you don't learn by memorizing tables, for sure. And even right now, when we're talking, I'm not saying, OK, I'm talking to Reagan, so I've got to use second person singular. I'm talking about Dean Taylor. I'm going to use third person. We don't do that. It just comes out very naturally. And so there, what you want to do in class is you want to have the class be primarily in the target language from day one. So what we do here is day one, you'll hear, I'll go to you and say, Anastasi. And so that means stand up. And I'll make a motion, like, stand up. And you'll figure it out, and you'll stand up. And I'll go to someone else, Anastasi, and they'll stand up. And then kathison, and I'll make this motion. I mean, sit down. Without knowing how anything is spelled, without knowing the Greek alphabet, you'll get an association, Anastasi, stand up. And you'll feel that, because your muscles are doing that. And hopefully, you do that 100 times. And you get this association, Anastasi means stand up, kathison means sit down. And then you'll learn the word for table and the word for pen and all these things. And you feel it, and you use it, and you engage it. And then, when you come into the New Testament text, or the Old Testament Septuagint, your experience of reading is much closer to our experience of reading English. Or when we read, we're not parsing. I'm not asking, you know, is this a preposition, and is this a participle? I'm just reading it, and somehow we figure it out, right? And so that approach is called the communicative approach of languages. So there's grammar translation, and then there's communicative. Communicative is way better if you have a teacher who knows how to do it. It's harder to do because you need someone who's got a level of confidence where they're basically doing the vast majority of the class in Greek or in Hebrew. But we've recruited faculty and teachers who can do this, whose level of proficiency. It's amazing. That's amazing, yeah. I sat in the last class of our Hebrew program here that we had for our freshmen. And the last class was, I think it was all in Hebrew, or 90% of it was in Hebrew. And it was a discussion of Jonah and the structure of Jonah in Hebrew. And I thought, hey, that's great. That was a really good example of how that can happen. And so if you go down that track, this is another reason why it's better to learn a language in a community of people. You know, you don't learn English on your own, right? If you tried to learn English, reading a textbook or something like that, it just wouldn't go very well. The best way to learn a language, whether it's English or Spanish or Chinese or Hebrew or Greek, is to do it in a group setting where you're hearing the language spoken to you, you're experiencing it. And again, it's replicating much more of that experience that all of us have as children. And the thesis that I have is that a lot of people are language phobic. They say like, oh, I just can't learn a language. It's too hard. Because they've had bad pedagogical principles applied where it's books and memorizing tables and things like that. And they're scarred and they write themselves off as I'm just bad with languages. Whereas in fact, if you can speak any language, then you know that you have an active language center in your brain and you probably can do very, very well if you can simply get the right pedagogy applied to your learning situation. So that's one of the reasons why we're very excited about our language program at Sadler College. That's a very interesting approach to learning, yeah. It is. And there's only a couple of places in the country that do this. And in fact, the leading place that does it is actually in Israel. And so that's obviously a big hassle to move home. Which university? It's called Polis. So that's right in Jerusalem. And we actually had the founder of Polis come speak at Sadler earlier this year. His name is Christoph Rico. So that's probably the top place in the world for this type approach. And we're trying to bring that to America and have a place that from the ground up, we're building out the communicative approach towards languages. So let's narrow it in a little. You're discussing how Sadler is going about this, the how it's going to be done. But walk me through the why. What is the desired outcome for your students when they take these classes? We're hoping that Sadler College becomes a place where people come to learn discipleship. So our main ambition is to have this be a place where people are trained and then sent out to other cities in America and then ultimately globally. And so the real vision here is to, as we say, light the world with relational discipleship and academic excellence. And then the main tagline we use is equipping Jesus's peaceful revolution. Jesus's peaceful revolution is obviously right at the heart of what I know you care about with non-resistance and I know what your church has been doing an excellent job at advocating. And we're trying to do that systematically across a wide range of kingdom teachings, whether that includes non-resistance, separation from the world. Evangelism, you know, that's something that is so often neglected here. And one of our goals for our students is that they're going to be very involved and they already are involved in doing primary evangelism. In a great city like Boston, where we're surrounded by about five million people here, there's just a lot of open people. And so we want this to be a training ground where people can come and be equipped, not to stay here, but ultimately to get launched back either, like I said, into their home communities or go back or go out rather to new places in the world, be at Sattler. We have a lot of different facets that feed into that where we're hoping that we get and communicate not just the head knowledge, but a whole way of life, which is really what discipleship is supposed to be about. And one of my burdens, especially, is evangelism and outreach starting in the US. You know, most people, they have these ambitions to go abroad and do great things here, but before you do that, hey, make disciples here where you live, right? Learn how to do that effectively before you think about going to some foreign country. And it's something that many people struggle with, but I think there's a great path for discipleship to be effective there. And we just had a baptism a couple of weeks ago. I was one who did the baptism, very excited about a young man from China who came here and didn't know anything about Christianity, didn't know what the Bible was, didn't know anything. And to watch him go all the way from total novice, kind of an atheist Buddhist background to now being a young, fledgling, but very excited disciple of Jesus is amazing. And I think that that should be a major part of a young person's experience. When I was in college, back then I was still the Protestant evangelical world, but I was very involved in evangelism and I got to lead a number of people to the Lord when I was in my late teens, early 20s. And people don't realize that that's some of the most precious time of your life or your effectiveness is incredible because people there are, at that age, are very moldable, they're highly relational, and you can be very, very effective at evangelism and discipleship at that time period. And it's much more difficult when you're later, in your 50s and 60s, and people just tend to ossify and they lose some of that dynamic moldability that they have. And so, again, to be here from, say, 18 to, you know, say early 30s, that time bracket that we're aiming for here, and to say, hey, come learn how to do this. Get yourself equipped, but in the context of that equipping, learn how to equip others, right? And then once you've learned how to do that well, then go off and make big ambitions to go to other places, but walk before you run. And it grieves me that I just don't think generally we're doing well in any setting to really do effective discipleship, which should be marked by fruit, by making more disciples. Yeah, build a solid foundation to launch from. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing, and the vision you're casting here just is really awesome. I've never thought about it like that, so. Yeah, you're very welcome. Yeah, excited about it as well.