As one of his former students, I talked with Jack Collins about how his time serving at Covenant Seminary. In this part of the interview, we talk about other efforts he’s been involved with in and outside of the PCA. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

As a professor, you really passed on your love for working in the original languages. But it’s well known many seminaries are cutting out languages or cutting them back severely. What do you think future pastors are missing if biblical languages are not part of their training? 

Well, we have excellent translations available to us, and they serve an extraordinarily valuable role. At the same time, people in pastoral ministry are supposed to be devoted to the faithful study of the scriptures. And the scriptures were not written to you and me. They were written for us, but they were written to an earlier audience. And so it’s important for us to position ourselves as heirs of the original audience. And we want to get what the original audience got as best we can. 

We want to make sure that we’re also taking advantage of everything that the people of God, faithful or not faithful, have wrestled with through the ages, which means using commentaries, theology textbooks, and so forth. They’ll make assertions about what a particular biblical passage means. And if we don’t know the original languages we’re entirely at their mercy. 

You were involved with the translation of the ESV. That wasn’t directly related to your teaching at Covenant, but I’m sure that it had an influence on your teaching. I would love to hear some about your experience of being a part of that translation work and what impact it had on your teaching. 

Part of my rationale for working on the ESV was feeling like I didn’t have a translation that I could just use in the pulpit. If a lot of your sermon time is spent arguing with the translation that people are using, or the translation that people are using doesn’t read well orally, you have challenges there. In the classroom, I didn’t like conveying a kind of negativity or arrogance towards translations and translators. At the same time, I felt like it could have been done better. The opportunity was one that I couldn’t really turn down. 

I was working on the ESV at the same time as I was on the Creation Study Committee, back in the late 1990s. And both of them turned out to be team efforts in a way that I had not anticipated. The team camaraderie was very valuable.

The product of Ph.D. education is often somebody who thinks that he is the expert and also works alone. But to work on these committees and to listen to other people’s point of view, to risk changing your mind, even to change your mind, was actually one of the most beneficial things for me in both settings. And I think that is the shaping thing, just to realize, to use the Pauline image, each part of the body does the thing that it does, but each one is not the only thing there is in the body. I wouldn’t have learned that lesson as well without those experiences. 

Are there particular people that come to mind that you got to work with that were not on the Covenant faculty that you especially benefitted from and would not have been able to work with otherwise? 

I’m very grateful for Dr. Lane Dennis, the head of Crossway, for putting together the committee. And then to work with J. I. Packer, who was the theological head of our committee, that was the greatest experience of my life. I love Dr. Packer, loved working with him, and felt the greatest honor was interacting with him about how we would translate or interpret a passage. Sometimes we would just listen to him as he said, “Well, this is why we should translate it…” and then he would give you the whole flow of thought from the beginning to the end of a particular book. With a classical education, he was mostly confident about New Testament books, and what was a great honor was the way in which he would defer to my opinion on anything in the Old Testament. 

It gave me a fresh appreciation for the things that he’s written. I’ve always loved his books like “Knowing God.” But you know, when you read his books, you’re hearing the voice of the real person. The same guy who wrote the books is the same guy you meet in person, which doesn’t always happen. 

I want to close by asking you to think about the future, both personally and at Covenant. We can start with Covenant: what are some things going on recently or coming in the future at Covenant that make you hopeful about what’s to come at the seminary?

I’m very confident in the team that is leading Covenant right now. The president is one of our former students, so I feel good about that. But also my colleagues. I have had the opportunity to team teach with several of them, and I feel very, very confident and blessed by them, really. The future of Covenant doesn’t depend on me, which I’m very thankful for. And I think the whole PCA would be thankful for that too.

What are some of the concerns you have for the future? This may be more about the broader trends in theological education that would obviously pertain to Covenant. What are some things you believe Covenant and other seminaries need to be prepared for in the future? 

I think that it’s always a challenge to adhere to the message that’s passed on to us from the prophets and apostles, and never to compromise on that message, and at the same time to find ways to communicate that message effectively to the current setting. 

The current setting here is different from the current setting in Malawi. Missionaries have to do this all the time. Well, we’re in the same position. And since we’re trying to do that, we run a couple of risks. One is that in order to communicate, we start thinking of what things we can jettison. And we mustn’t ever do that. On the other hand, we can be so concerned with maintaining the truth that we’re maintaining not what’s the truth, but the way we’ve always done it. 

My basic position is that every committee and agency in the PCA ought to have “beer and barbecue” in their budget. When you have people who are at odds, they really ought to get together in somebody’s backyard with some good food and some good beverages, just to sit and actually have it out, rather than the ways in which we have conducted a lot of our controversies by basically erecting walls against each other and throwing stones at each other. 

It’s not simply the ministry challenge that each of us faces in our own setting, but also the communal challenge of a church body, to find ways to work together. I think we should be able to really challenge each other, to hold each other accountable both for our confessional fidelity and for our concern for our contemporary culture. 

As I look over my own over 40 years of experience with the PCA, that’s the thing that I’m concerned about in the PCA and the American church in general. “Polarization” is the buzzword now. But our polarization is not a healthy thing, and there are ways to address that if we were willing to try the “beer and barbecue approach.” 

Looking into the future for you personally, what are the things you’re looking forward to doing beyond June? 

Well, I have a handful of very nerdy research and writing projects to do. Things that I’ve been thinking about for many years, and they’re combining several aspects of my own training and aspirations. I came here to Covenant to teach both Hebrew and Greek and so that has led to my very strong interest in Judaism in the Hellenistic era. That, of course, is the birthplace of the Christian message. So I have a number of studies coming out related to that. 

Are there particular ways that former students like myself and other people who have benefited from your ministry can be praying for you in this next season of study, writing and ministry? 

Obvious things are things like self-discipline and prayerfulness and churchmanship and so forth. But I had a head injury about six years ago and that introduces some concerns as far as “how long am I going to have my marbles?”. So I’m concerned about the retention of my abilities. 

Also, I think, to keep my eyes on the wellbeing of the church. That it’s not about me. It’s about me serving the church –  the church in the years to come, not the church 30 years ago. I’d certainly be grateful for prayers along those lines. 

Hace Cargo is assistant pastor of Ponce Church in Atlanta.