The Bible Unfiltered-Part 2

Getting Serious—and Being Honest—about Interpreting the Bible in Context

Anyone interested in Bible study, from the new believer to the biblical scholar, has heard (and maybe even said) that if you want to correctly interpret the Bible, you have to interpret it in context. I’m certainly not going to disagree. But I have a question: What does that mean? Put another way, just what context are we talking about?

What do we mean by context?

There are many contexts to which an interpreter needs to pay attention.

• Historical context situates a passage in a specific time period against the backdrop of certain events.

• Cultural context concerns the way people lived and how they thought about their lives and their world.

• Literary context focuses on how a given piece of biblical literature conforms (or not) to how the same type of literature was written during biblical times.

All of these are important—but they only flirt with the heart of the matter. There’s a pretty clear element to this “context talk” that we’re missing. It’s time to get a firm grasp on something obvious. Believe it or not, it took years of study before I had it fixed in my head and my heart.

The Bible’s True Context

As Christians, whether consciously or otherwise, we’ve been trained to think that the history of Christianity is the true context for interpreting the Bible. It isn’t. That might be hard to hear, but Christian history and Christian thought is not the context of the biblical writers, and so it cannot be the correct context for interpreting what they wrote.

The proper context for interpreting the Bible is not the church fathers. They lived a thousand years or more after most of the Old Testament was written. Less than a half dozen of them could read Hebrew. The New Testament period was a century or more removed from important early theologians like Irenaeus and Tertullian; Augustine, arguably the most famous early church figure, lived three hundred years after the conversion of Paul. That’s more time than has elapsed since the founding of the United States. Also, many church fathers worked primarily with the Old Testament translated into Greek, Latin, or Syriac versions, so a good bit of their exegesis is translation-driven. Further, they were often responding to the intellectual issues of their own day when they wrote about Scripture, not looking back to the biblical context.

The farther down the timeline of history one moves, the greater the contextual gap becomes. The context for interpreting the biblical text is not the Catholic Church. It is not the rabbinic movements of Late Antiquity or the Middle Ages. It is not the Reformation—the time of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, or the Anabaptists. It is not the time of the Puritans. It is not evangelicalism in any of its flavors. It is not the modern world at all.

So what is the proper context for interpreting the Bible? Here’s the transparently obvious truth I was talking about: the proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers—the context that produced the Bible. Every other context is alien or at least secondary.

Bridging the Context Gap

The biblical text was produced by people living in the ancient Near East and around the Mediterranean between the second millennium bc and the first century ad. To understand how biblical writers thought, we need to tap into that context. We need to get the worldview of the ancient world, shared by the biblical writers, into our heads.

As certain as this observation is, there is a pervasive tendency in the believing Church to filter the Bible through creeds, confessions, and denominational preferences. That’s not a bad thing. It’s a human thing.

What purpose do Creeds and Confessions serve?

Creeds are useful for distilling important points of theology. But they are far from the whole counsel of God, and even farther from the biblical world. This is something to be aware of at all times.

Lest I be misunderstood, I’m not arguing that we should ignore our Christian forefathers. I’m also not saying that we’re smarter. They were prodigious intellects. The problem isn’t their brain power—it’s that they were simply too removed from the world of the biblical writers and had little chance of bridging that gap.

It might sound odd, but we’re actually in a better position than any of our spiritual forefathers in that respect. We live at a time when the languages of the major civilizations that flourished during the lifetimes of the biblical writers have been deciphered. We can tap into the intellectual and cultural output of those civilizations. That output is enormous—millions of words. We can recover the worldview context (their “cognitive framework” in scholar-speak) of the biblical writers as never before. The same is true of the New Testament writers because they inherited what had come before them and were part of a first century world two thousand years removed from us.

Think about it. How would anyone living a thousand years from now understand something you wrote unless they could get inside your head and see the world as you do? They’d need your frame of reference. They’d need to know what was going on in the wider world that potentially concerned, angered, encouraged, or depressed you. They’d need to understand the pop culture of your day to be able to parse why you’re using this word and not that one, or to properly process an expression. There’s no way to do that unless they recover your frame of reference. That is what it means to interpret in context.

This is a hard lesson. It isn’t easy to put the biblical context ahead of our traditions. This is what accounts for that uneasy feeling we get when we are exposed to a context that is different than our traditions. But if we don’t do this, we ought to stop talking about how important it is to interpret the Bible in context lest we be hypocrites. I can honestly say that the day I decided to commit myself to framing my study of Scripture in the context of the biblical world instead of any modern substitute was a day of liberation. It’s what put me on a path to reading the Bible again—for the first time. That is my desire for you!!!

There is one piece of advice that is the best way to put this uneasiness to rest.

Let the Bible be what it is!

What do I mean? I’m suggesting that the path to real biblical understanding requires that we don’t make the Bible conform to our traditions, our prejudices, our personal crises, or our culture’s intellectual battles. Yes, you’ll find material in Scripture that will help you resolve personal difficulties and questions. But you must remember that, while the Bible was written for us, it wasn’t written to us. What they wrote is still vital for our lives today, but we can only accurately discern the message if we let them speak as they spoke.

This advice of course dovetails with my previous article about getting serious and being honest about the oft-repeated mantra “the Bible needs to be interpreted in context.” That article was about recognizing all contexts—including the history of Christianity—that post-date the biblical world are foreign to the Bible. The right contexts for interpreting the Bible are those in which the Bible was written. You can’t let the Bible be what it is if you’re filtering it through a set of experiences and ideas (a “cognitive framework”) that would have been incomprehensible to the biblical writers.

A Firm Grasp of the Obvious

I know that, on the surface, what I’m saying amounts to having a firm grasp of the obvious. But if it were easy to do—and if it was the norm—I’d be writing about something else. It isn’t and it hasn’t been. But it certainly needs to be, at least if we don’t want to be pretenders when it comes to respecting God’s decision to produce Scripture when he did and through whom he chose.

Many illustrations could illustrate the importance of letting the Bible be what it is. But the word

sSupernatural

is probably the best place to start. Our word supernatural is about the best word we could use to describe the worldview of the biblical writers. But they would not call it that. They would say in our language that it was completely natural. We think of our world as this!

World picture

What about the pre-scientific cosmology of the Bible?

For the biblical writers, the earth was flat and round, supported by pillars (2 Sam 22:8) and surrounded by water (Gen 1:10); the water was held in place by the edges of the solid dome (“expanse”; “firmament”) that covered the earth (Gen 1:6; Prov 8:27–28). The people God chose to write about the fact that he created everything were not writing science because they couldn’t—and God, of course, knew that. Instead of pressing Genesis into a debate with Darwin or making it cryptically convey the truths of quantum physics, we should let it be what it is so it can accomplish the goals for which God inspired it—to assert the fact of a Creator and our accountability to him. Rather than fight the critics on grounds they choose, we ought to insist that they explain why it makes any sense to criticize the Bible for not being what it wasn’t intended to be. Following such absurd logic, perhaps we should expect them to criticize their dog for not being a cat or their son for not being a daughter. Their attack is patently absurd. But we endorse it when we make the Bible a modern science book instead of letting it be what it is—what God intended.

Truth That Transcends Culture

The same problem persists when we try to deny that the Old Testament is patriarchal, or that parts of the Mosaic Law are biased against women. Some are because that was their culture. God didn’t hand down a new culture for particular use in Scripture. He didn’t demand that the writers he chose change their worldview before he’d use them. The biblical material simply reflects the cultural attitudes of the people who wrote it.

Again, all this is obvious—but so many students of Scripture seem to approach such issues with the assumption that the Bible endorses a culture. God wasn’t trying to endorse a culture from the first millennium bc or the first century ad for all time and in all places among all peoples. The reason ought to be apparent: God knew that the truths he wanted to get across through the biblical writers would transcend all cultures. Endorsing the prejudices the writers grew up with wasn’t what God had in mind. Some parts of Scripture reveal culture simply as part of Israel’s history. Others focus on behavior. With respect to the latter, God let the writers be who they were (i.e., he knew what he was getting when he chose them for their task), knowing they were capable of communicating timeless principles of conduct by means of their culture.

The point is that letting the Bible be what it is not only helps us interpret Scripture accurately, but it has unexpected apologetic value. Taking Scripture on its own terms helps our focus and fends off distractions. When Scripture is rightly understood, its relevance will also be clear.

CHECK TIME HERE!!!

Bad Bible Interpretation Really Can Hurt People

Anyone who teaches the word of God wants people excited about exploring Scripture. Ultimately, you want to turn listeners into competent students so that they can teach others. Along the way you have to deal with a lot of mistaken methods and conclusions. A part of me thinks......Hey—having folks engaged in studying the Bible is more important than what they actually think they see in it. It’s no big deal that what most Christians think is “digging deep” is barely scratching the surface of a passage or a topic. I’ll take one misguided Bible student over a hundred straight-laced, passive, ecclesiastically-correct “believers” who never open a Bible anywhere else but church. At least those are the sorts of things I’ve told myself for a long time. If I’m honest, though, I’ve had doubts about the wisdom of my position. I still do.

I’ve run across a lot of bad Bible interpretation over the years. The problem isn’t just the Internet. Granted, most of what passes for Bible teaching online could be tabled under the banner of the “P.T. Barnum School of the Bible.” Unfortunately, a lot of poor thinking about Scripture has been published for popular consumption in the Church—and consumed it is.

But is it really harmful? Most of it isn’t destructive.

Truly Destructive Bible Interpretation

But some Bible interpretation is truly damaging—and on a wide scale. For that sort of harm you needed professionals—people who are supposed to know better because they have degrees or are in positions of spiritual leadership.

Perhaps the most egregious example is racism. Since the Age of Exploration (16th century) on through the eras of European empire and colonization, the racism that was an inextricable part of those centuries can be laid at the feet of the Church. Though it may make you flinch, it’s true—and I’m not launching into some ludicrous left-wing propagandistic screed. It’s pretty simple and, on its own terms, very understandable, though the coherence of how it all came about is no excuse.

It’s no accident that the era that produced theories about how all races that were not European (especially blacks and Semitic peoples) were inferior to the “more pure” Europeans. Defenders of the Bible couldn’t argue there; instead they did their best to make the Bible support those things. The era produced “scholarly” defenses of how the sin of Ham produced the black peoples, or how Cain’s wife proved there were co-Adamic races in antiquity, inferior to Adam, who wasn’t Jewish by the way, or that Jesus wasn’t really a Jew but an Aryan, a Sanskrit term for the high born. Other interpretive leaps were used to justify older suspicions of Jews as Christ killers whose disinheritance by God had subordinated them to the civilization that had embraced Christianity—the Europeans. But at least the Bible wasn’t left behind in its “accurate” understanding of history. It still deserved its high status. And so the Bible was “saved” through horrific Bible interpretation. And we’re still living with the results since this was all brought to American shores.

So yes, sometimes bad Bible interpretation is truly destructive—with effects lasting generations. This is yet another illustration why we need to get serious about interpreting the Bible in its own context, not against the backdrop of our own modern questions. The tragic baptism of racism was completely unnecessary. But there it is.