nder the leadership of the Holy Spirit, with the unanimous support of the Grace Baptist Church of Gaylord, Michigan, and the urging of hundreds of pastors, I and Dr. Russell Anderson founded the Grace Baptist College in the spring of 2003.  The “School for Thinking Fundamentalists” opened its doors officially in the fall of 2003.  Grace Baptist College has from its inception determined to provide for students an ideal, local church, small town, theologically conservative, and hermeneutically literal environment for their training for the ministry. The foundational philosophy that underpins the entire approach to any theological training must be an institution’s approach to the Bible.  Here at Grace Baptist College the firm foundation upon which this training institution is built is an absolute conviction that the King James Bible is God’s perfect, preserved Word for the English speaking world.  With this as both a foundational and a philosophical approach, the question must be asked, “Do theology majors need to take undergraduate training in Greek and Hebrew?”  To answer this question some very important history must be considered.

In 1939, Dr. J. Frank Norris, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, with the help of Dr. Louis Entzminger, announced the formation of a pre-millennial Bible school – the Fundamental Baptist Bible Institute.  This institute was organized to train ministers and missionaries who would teach the Verbal Inerrancy of the King James Bible.  Hundreds of students would eventually come from all over the nation.  The Fundamental Baptist Bible Institute began with sixteen students in the “upper room” at First Baptist Church located at 4th and Throckmorton in downtown Fort Worth.  The first graduates were Oscar Wells, John Birch, and Ralph VanNortwick.  Oscar Wells and John Birch went to China as missionaries.  Bro. Wells, along with his wife and baby daughter, was interned into a Japanese prison.  John Birch was murdered.  He was the first casualty of the “Cold War” and became the namesake of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society.

In 1945 the Fundamental Baptist Bible Institute became the Bible Baptist Seminary.  Dr. Norris and Dr. Entzminger had organized a school which excelled in the training of young preachers in the building of large Sunday schools and churches.  It is generally considered to be the first modern independent Baptist college in the nation.  Many of the graduates of this school went on to build some of the largest churches in America.  On the front of the seminary building on Main Street in Fort Worth, below the three-foot-high letters that spelled out “Bible Baptist Seminary,” was a thirty feet long by two feet high black sign with bold white block letters.  This simple sign read ONLY SEMINARY IN THE WORLD TEACHING WHOLE ENGLISH BIBLE.  It was the conviction of Dr. Norris, who had been taught Greek in his theological training, that it was not only unnecessary but actually harmful to teach Greek if the goal was to train soul-winning, church-building, theologically orthodox, Bible-preaching and teaching pastors and missionaries rather than Bible correctors and textual critics.

I too was the recipient of extensive tutelage in the Greek language during my college education.  After starting a church with God’s help and leading it to become one of the largest rural churches in the nation, I too came to the conclusion that my Greek training did absolutely nothing to enhance or improve my ability to preach and teach God’s perfect, preserved Word.  The more I researched, the more I discovered that most college Greek departments are not the friends of the “Old Time Religion.”

When God gave us His mandate to start Grace Baptist College, it became this institution’s passion to pick up the torch lit by Dr. Norris and Dr. Entzminger over seven decades ago.  It has been, and will continue to be, our goal to once again provide this nation with a school that diligently TEACHES THE WHOLE ENGLISH BIBLE.  This can be done without the compromising of high academic standards.  Here at Grace Baptist College the Bible faculty refuses to bow to the pressure of the protestant, evangelical, post-modern, unorthodox ideology that says we do not have an inspired, preserved copy of the Bible today.  Must we teach our theology students Greek from lexicons and interlinear works that are not even based upon the proper textual lineage?  Contrary to what most colleges, universities, and Greek professors have alleged, we do not have a Holy Lexicon, but praise be to God, we have a Holy Bible.

It is true that the science of textual criticism may be sincerely defined by its adherents as a legitimate method used to determine what the original manuscripts of the Bible said.  However, the original manuscripts of the Bible are lost, hidden, or no longer in existence.  The problem is that if the only “inspired” scriptures are the originals (that we do not have) then no Bible today can claim to be inspired, because it is only a copy.  What did the Apostle mean when he said, “That from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus,” and then in the very next verse states, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God”?  Was the copy of the scriptures that young Timothy had in I Timothy 3:15 a collection of original autographs?  I believe most scholars would argue correctly that it probably was not.  And yet in the very next verse he was assured that his copy or copies were in fact “inspired.”  We realize that some critics would reject this argument as mere internal evidence.  But why cannot a Living Book use its own Living Words as evidence to its life-giving power and authority? Jesus himself – the Living Word – said about the Written Word in John 6:63b, “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”

Critics of our approach would argue that it is unscholarly and inadequate training for a theology major not to be schooled in at least two or four semesters of Greek to be able to preach and teach the Bible.  Remember, however, that nearly every Greek professor in nearly every Bible college in America was taught by a professor, or taught by a professor who was taught by a professor, who did not believe that there is any inspired scripture other than in the so-called original autographs.  As a “School for Thinking Fundamentalists,” we reject the theologically unorthodox school of thought called textual criticism.  The whole foundational premise of the textual critic is that we do not have a perfect Bible.  Why would schools training the next generation of fundamental Baptist preachers who claim to believe that they are “King James Only” be content to continue to advance the false theory that Greek and Hebrew training is not part of the textual criticism school?

Do theology majors need Greek and Hebrew training?  Scholarship is essential, and academic excellence is necessary, but does this demand blind discipleship to such textual critics as B. B. Warfield who, in addition to his leadership in the field of textual criticism, was also a staunch Calvinist and an evolutionary creationist?  It is sometimes forgotten that, although he battled against the modernism of his day, he also strongly criticized religious revivalism, the Keswick and the camp meeting movements.  Simply stated, the view of Biblical inspiration held by many Reformed textual critics such as Warfield, Hodge, Scrivener, Lachmann, Metzger, Ehrman, and others is that the Minority or Alexandrian Text that underlies most modern Bible translations of the New Testament should trump the Majority or Byzantine Text.  This entire school of thought has brought us the unreliable Eclectic, United Bible Society, and Nestle-Aland Greek Texts.  Their acceptance by most of the evangelical and liberal academic communities as the best attempt at reconstructing the original texts of the Greek should neither impress nor be embraced by fundamental Baptist Bible colleges.

Grace Baptist College theology majors are taught a far more orthodox school of thought called “textual evidence.”  This school of thought is an in-depth, scholarly, and historically correct approach that equips the student with a far greater respect for the Received Text of the New Testament and the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament without compromising a simple faith in the “Scriptures.” (II Timothy 3:15-16)  Thus, "textual evidence” places a greater emphasis upon the Bible’s own built-in dictionary than upon a Greek lexicon or Bible dictionary such as Baker, Davis, Easton, Harpers, or a host of others.  While many study aids and published works are introduced to the theology student, the primary text that is taught is the text of the King James Bible itself.  For the undergraduate theology major, almost half of the total credits for a Bachelor’s degree are accumulated Bible credits.  We are not teaching the next generation of preachers about the Bible or how to critique the Bible; we are training them in and with the Bible.  We are passionate in our desire to awaken those who are not aware of the hazards in Greek study.  We believe Greek study has been and will continue to be the downfall of Protestant Fundamentalism.  Therefore, we boldly stand with true Baptist history in providing this generation with a Bible college that TEACHES THE WHOLE ENGLISH BIBLE.

In His Service,

Dr. Jon M. Jenkins
President, Grace Baptist College