A recent email raised a great question about a claim I make in the discourse grammar that my approach is complementary to traditional approaches to Greek. One might argue that my disuse of many traditional exegetical categories would argue instead for supplanting traditional approaches instead of complementing it. Here is a snippet from the message:

As I continue to read your work and Levinsohn’s, I get the impression that this approach to the language rarely makes use of the traditional categories. As you’ve claimed in your grammar and elsewhere, the insights that grammarians have gleaned from the text owe more to the context than they do the forms. This explains the majority of my frustration in trying to append the right label to a certain genitive, for instance. In one sense, this is freeing. My exegesis can focus more on the text as a whole rather than wasting time hunting down the right category (and God knows I have spent countless hours doing that!). But it leaves me wondering how exactly these two approaches are complementary. Second year Greek students are taught to think in categories and even if a broader approach is taken, the residual effect is largely the same: parse the word and find the right category. At the end of the day, I feel less than confident about my exegesis due to the subjective nature of the task. And brother, that won’t preach. (snip) But when it comes down to marking up my Greek text, making an observation worksheet, etc., (and this is really the big question here) what do I need to discard from the traditional approach? In what way should these syntactical categories be used, if at all? What exactly is obsolete here? How does your exegetical method employ the traditional approach and which areas are eclipsed by DA?

Ah, grasshopper, you ask good question!! Grammar and exegesis, at least in my view, are fundamentally descriptive in nature. Metaphorically, they are something like a picture, a representation of what I see in the text. Ideally this picture should be as exact a representation as possible, not impressionistic (i.e., eisegetical). Preservation of the original is of the utmost importance, contrary to what Claude Monet may have argued.

Grammatical categories, whether derived from traditional or discourse approaches, both serve the same purpose: communicating what you see. There is a statement that “Second year Greek students are taught to think in categories…parse the word and find the right category.” I think it might be more accurate to say that the categories are the terminology you use to describe what you see. The goal is not to assign a category, believe it or not, even if this is what you are graded on. The goal is to understand what is going on in the text, and then to be able to interact with others (including commentaries) about that. The labels are to facilitate communication of what you see. The categories are a descriptive tool for communication, nothing more. I think Wallace would agree with me on this point.

First and foremost, the exegete needs to personally understand the text, or metaphorically see what is going on; otherwise there is nothing to communicate, you have no idea what label to assign. I personally found that Brooks and Winberry’s categories were only of value after I knew what was going on. Otherwise their lists were little more than a multiple choice menu of exegetical options. This was my main motivation to pursue discourse studies in the first place. I felt  that I had been trained to do little more than assign a category. If I did this successfully, then I must understand what is going on, right?

There is a rather stark difference in what each of the approaches uses as their basis of description. The traditional divisions of the genitive into source, means, partitive, etc., have a lot to do with the variety of options available in English to uniquely specify one relation versus another. In Greek, there are not such sub-distinctions in many cases. The semantics of the context narrow things down. In any case, note that the goal is to narrow down the semantic range of meaning from something general to something more specific. You can do this without assigning a label, but you have a pretty hard time communicating what you see or think to someone else. How about translation? The same kinds of problems arise, as there may not be an acceptable literal equivalent in English, and the dynamic translation may obscure the exegetical detail you are interested in.

Has discourse grammar eclipsed traditional approaches? I don’t think so. But there are some features that the former is better suited to describe than the latter. Discourse grammar is most helpful when the focus is on function, on what something is doing. Most of these features are operating above the clause level. This might be clause-clause relationships like connectives, interclausal relationships like forward-pointing references or information structure. These tasks are nearly impossible to nail down in terms of what they mean, even having a nice label for the function. And let’s be sure not to make discourse approaches a straw Superman that rights all wrongs and rids the world of evil. One could just as easily assign discourse labels and not understand the text as assigning traditional ones. It cuts both ways, so let’s not lose sight of that.

Each approach to grammar has its strengths and weaknesses. If you have read my work, you have not seen me try to change many of the traditional categories, like the case roles. I think there is much that can be learned from linguistics about how cases operate that would help streamline the descriptive process, but the basic traditional categories work well for communication purposes.

The main thing to remember is that exegetical categories serve primarily as metalanguage to describe what you see in the passage. Assigning them will not necessarily help you understand the passage better.

At times, atomizing into sub-categories can be more of a hindrance than a help, because it obscures a larger pattern. My biggest complaint about use of these categories is the failure to help students synthesize the specifics into a unified whole. The more specific and numerous the categories, the more difficult (or impossible) the synthesis process. I think we could get by with far fewer categories 80-90% of the time. Save the more obscure ones for reference purposes in the rare instances they are needed.

For my part, I am not as big a fan of detail as those who love the categories. Therefore, I will never be able (nor do I want) to offer them some turn-key equivalent, couched in the language of discourse. I spent two days last week crashing an SIL linguistics workshop on syntax and semantics. What did I find? Tons of little semantic categories that I found difficult to synthesize. They serve an important purpose, but are only of use after you understand what is going on in the passage. They serve only as a means of communication, nothing more. So lest you think I am anti-traditional, know that I am just as anti-linguistics when it comes to bifurcation and atomization.

Our predilection for atomization (combined with the lack of attention to synthesis) is a leading cause in the slow death of biblical languages. However, the importance of the attention to detail for doctrinal and theological reasons will always make detailed categories needed. But if they are not needed for your present purposes of writing a sermon, I do not see the value in using them just for the sake of labeling. If you understand what is going on and can communicate what you see, then move along. If you have a question about the exact sense or what to call it, commentaries or databases like the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament offer help.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on these matters. What would you say are the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches? I stand by my claim that they are complementary in nature. The overlap is less extensive than one might think.