The Commons Spring 2019: Graduation Edition | Page 7

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT
“I want Christians to read the New
Testament in the original language.
In their personal lives, I want them to have
different, new, greater insights that are
hard to come by without knowledge of
the Greek language. I think that’s what
happened in the Reformation.”
—Dr. Joseph Tipton
Dr. Tipton leads the conversation during a Greek recitation.
He had to create one. It started when he was studying spoken
Latin at the University of Kentucky for a master’s degree. “I
thought, ‘This is so good.’ It helps me read the Latin text so
much more deeply and quickly. I mean, ten times more quick-
ly. Then I went to Greek classes and we moved through the
text at a snail’s pace. I thought, ‘It doesn’t have to be this way.’”
Since there wasn’t anyone else to practice Greek with, Dr. Tip-
ton practiced on his own. “I started talking to myself a lot,” he
laughs. “I wrote a lot. And I took long walks, speaking what I
saw or heard. Then I moved on to short narrations. Eventually,
I found a couple conversation partners.”
Running parallel to Dr. Tipton, our own Professor Griffith
was making strides in spoken Latin courses at NSA. Having
known Tipton at the University of Kentucky, Griffith invit-
ed him out to New Saint Andrews College to help with a
week-long Latin course. Tipton rapidly realized how much
his vision aligned with the college’s. “Generally speaking, in
classical studies, you don’t have Christians. And if you have
Christians they’re not Reformed. And, a lot of my research
is in Reformation studies. I saw NSA’s passion for the Ref-
ormation and I thought, ‘Wow. We have a lot in common.’”
Soon after, he became Fellow of Classical Languages at NSA.
On a personal level, Dr. Joseph Tipton and his wife just had
their first child, a son named Watts. “When you see your son,
is there a phrase or statement that comes to mind?” we asked
him. It took almost a full minute for Dr. Tipton to answer.
“God’s timing is perfect.”
Dr. Tipton currently teaches ancient Greek language and
literature courses and is the Director of Wenden House, and
he plans on expanding his courses to include New Testament
Greek. Within two years of his Greek courses, he says you will
be reading the New Testament with ease. This brings us to the
hopes he has for his students: “In churches, now you have peo-
ple who aren’t in the pulpit but in the pews with their Greek
New Testament in front of them. The preaching is going to
get a lot better because the pastor is held to a higher standard.
And this gets to my central motivation—I want Christians to
read the New Testament in the original language. In their per-
sonal lives, I want them to have different, new, greater insights
that are hard to come by without knowledge of the Greek
language. I think that’s what happened in the Reformation.
If you have fathers and mothers sitting down in the morning
and reading the Greek New Testament, who knows where our
God will take that?”
SPRING 2019 7