Third semester Greek is a challenging place to be for our seminary students. Many of these folks are doing well just to hang on to what they learned back in Greek 1-2. Learning intermediate grammar finds our students negotiating a sharp turn deep in the tunnel of language acquisition. The proverbial light at the end of this tunnel—where knowledge of Greek pays significant exegetical dividends—gets almost snuffed out for a season by .

So I regularly remind my students that it is all worthwhile, that after another semester or two they’ll possess the kind of top-rate exegetical skills that will bear great fruit in the study and in the pulpit. They occasionally even get a taste of that fruit along the way!

Consider the NIV translation of Romans 8:16: The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children (NIV). The NIV translation (the NRSV is virtually the same) raises several questions:

(1) Just how are God’s Spirit and the human spirit related here? More specifically, in what way does my spirit testify that I am a child of God?

(2) To whom do God’s Spirit and my spirit testify? To me? I’m telling myself? To others? The person/entity that receives the testimony is strangely unspecified.

The alternative interpretation that Wallace proposes during his discussion of the ‘dative of association’ clears all this up in an instant: The Spirit himself testifies to our spirit that we are God’s children. You Greek geeks can read the pros and cons. In short, Wallace interprets spirit as a dative of indirect object, rather than as a dative of association (Wallace, 160-61). I find the arguments quite convincing. The implications? Wallace puts it like this:

In sum, Rom 8:16 seems to be secure as a text in which the believer’s assurance of salvation is based on the inner witness of the Spirit. The implications for one’s soteriology are profound: The objective data, as helpful as they are, cannot by themselves provide assurance of salvation; the believer also needs (and receives) an existential, ongoing encounter with God’s Spirit in order to gain that familial comfort (161).

Whoa! ‘±ð³æ¾±²õ³Ù±ð²Ô³Ù¾±²¹±ô…e²Ô³¦´Ç³Ü²Ô³Ù±ð°ù’? A Dallas guy said that?!

Just what are those ‘objective data’ to which Wallace refers? He doesn’t say. But I suspect he has in mind something like this:

1. It says in John 1:12, ‘As many as received him, to them he gave authority to become children of God.’