Ah yes, gotta love the educational bully pulpit.
Back in the early 90s a few years after I became a Christian, a co-worker in our Christian fellowship suggested we start studying Koine Greek so we could read the New Testament in the original. She had heard that the Department of Agriculture had an evening adult education program that was teaching "Biblical Greek" so three of us ended up signing up for the class.
We found out on the first night that the class was being taught by a militant homosexual from a local Unitarian Universalist congregation. His teaching methodology consisted of taking a sentence, making one or two translational notes, then launching into 10 minutes of eisegesis on the passage the sentence was from, and if it was a narrative, why it couldn't have happened, and how it was inevitably offensive to women, minorities, and homosexuals, followed by suggestions as to what would have been a "better teaching" than the biblical original.
After 4 nights (2 hours each) of this, we approached him and literally begged him to just teach us Greek pointing out that we hadn't paid for an intro to Homosexual hermeneutics, biblical deconstruction, and political theory, we had paid to learn Greek. Our request was treated with utter contempt, and he suggested that if we stuck around and shut-up we just might learn something about the way things really were. We stayed for one more class, during which he launched into a tirade on how the apostle Paul was obviously a self-loathing homosexual himself, at which point I closed my book and walked out.
Four years later I started studying Koine Greek at Westminster Seminary as part of my M.Div degree. It was only at that point that I realized that the teacher at the D. Ag. night course didn't actually speak or read Greek well at all, which in itself was a lesson. Often the "agenda" your teachers press, serves dual duty, first it allows them to harangue a captive audience with their opinions and second they are either consciously or sub-consciously hoping it will cover up their mediocre or simply lousy grasp of the subject they are teaching and their poor teaching ability. Sadly this occasionally happens in the real pulpit as well, a lot of "political preaching" occurs simply because the minister in question doesn't really have a good understanding of the passages he is supposed to be expositing, so he merely uses them as a springboard into the subjective realm of his own political opinions.
- SEAGOON
