Context is Overrated

“It’s important to educate each other:

Things are good in one context, but bad in another.”

Studio C feat. Rogue Wave, ‘Context is Everything’ (2013)

So here you have it: I think that, as far as studying the scriptures is concerned, the importance of context is kind of overrated.

 

Piled up on the side of somebody’s tomb: probably not exactly the context you’d expect to find the Bible in. Best I could come up with. Thanks to Phil_Bird at freedigitalphotos.net.

I envision that your reaction at this point, O Not Unreasonably Suspicious Reader, may range anywhere from a mildly sceptical raised eyebrow in anticipation that the above statement is about to be boxed in by so many caveats as to strip it of any real force at all – leaving it as nothing more than a shamelessly attention-grabbing opening to a largely unremarkable article – to an immediate and potent surge of outrage that I should dare to advance any kind of excuse for that grievous malpractice, as widespread as it is dangerous, of treating pretty-sounding Bible verses as if they were nothing more than ego-stroking ‘inspirational quotations’ directly addressed to any and every individual reader with respect to his or her own peculiar circumstances. Any which way, I’d be grateful if you’d suspend judgement long enough to allow me to attempt an explanation of what I mean by the above assertion.

For a start, ‘context’ can mean at least three different things in the – ahem – context of scriptural study. For one, it can mean internal literary context: at which point in the Bible does any given excerpt occur? What do the surrounding sections of text tell us about how the selected section is to be understood? For another, it can mean external historical context: what was the nature of the society in which this portion of text was composed? What were the events, customs, and circumstances that shaped the lives of its writers and readers? And for yet another, it can mean a thing that sits somewhere between the two: what do we know from elsewhere in scripture about the situation of the writers and readers at their time of producing or receiving the text? What can we infer from that situation about their intentions and needs?

The practice of plucking verses ‘out of context’ and using them to support a point different to the one focussed on by the original passage from which they were lifted, pertains to internal context. With that practice itself, I actually have no problem, basically because the apostle Paul does it all the time; check out how he handles a couple of snippets of Hosea in Romans 9, for instance.¹ What I do have a problem with is when people who have very little clue what they’re doing attempt to do the same. This latter situation is the category that the ‘inspirational quotations’ business I mentioned above comes under, and it really is distressingly widespread, even in sectors of the Church that pride themselves on their high view of scripture. Here’s an example: ever had Zephaniah 3:17 – the bit about ‘he will exult over you with loud singing’ – chucked at you to give you warm fuzzy feelings? Yeah, me too. Ever bothered to look at the passage it occurs in and realise that it’s about a future time when Jesus will be hanging out in Jerusalem ruling the world and will literally rejoice with loud singing over a restored and redeemed Israel?² I hope so, because that jazz makes for really cool reading. In short, using a Bible verse to make a counter-context point is like performing brain surgery: it can have really good and helpful results, but only if you know and understand the material you’re manipulating very well indeed. Otherwise, you’ll almost certainly do more harm than good.

 

I wouldn’t want whoever drew this bizarre diagram to be doing any brain surgery on me, that’s for certain.

So that first kind of context is only kind of overrated; taking Bible verses out of context is, despite what you might have been told, totally fair game for the Christian, but only if she is in fact thoroughly familiar with the original internal context, and the point she’s making is consistent with the whole grand story of scripture – so if in doubt, don’t do it. The second kind of context, on the other hand, I consider to be of far less worth than I’ve sometimes seen ascribed to it. This is arguably rather ironic given that I’m not infrequently prompted by my academic work to consult extrabiblical sources of relevance to the biblical text, and I’m not denying that they can be really helpful for gaining a fuller understanding of it. I was reading some interesting stuff about Hammurabi’s law code earlier this week, for instance,³ and the way that the Torah deals with many of the same scenarios, but unilaterally rejects the principle of vicarious punishment (like, if you kill someone’s daughter, your daughter gets killed in retribution, even though she didn’t do anything, kind of thing) in favour of each person bearing the penalty for his own wrongdoing, proved a striking prompt to contemplation of the perfection of God’s justice. But – and this is the crucial thing – external sources like that will never be necessary for getting to the heart of what any given Bible passage is about. The scriptures are given us for teaching and reproof and so forth that we might be meet for every good work, right?⁴ So then, there’s no aspect of proper Christian practice, or, therefore, of the doctrine that necessarily dictates practice, that must be drawn from sources other than scripture itself. It is never going to be the case that, well, in order to really understand this passage, you’ve got to know about, I don’t know, Ancient Near Eastern vassalship treaties, or something. If nothing else, millions of Christians throughout history and the world have gone about their scriptural study without access to that sort of information, and I can’t imagine God who turns the wisdom of the world to foolishness withholding the true meaning of his revealed words from them because they haven’t enjoyed the same educational privileges as some of us. I’m not saying we should act as if relevant external sources don’t exist; on the contrary, we’re extremely blessed to enjoy free access to so many of them, and they really do help enormously with things like pinning down the fulfilment of prophecy and accounting for slightly strange-seeming details in narrative passages. The point, though, is that we should hold no principle as sacred that vitally depends on sources outside what God has inspired.

To summarise so far then, I’d encourage you to be inclined to trust arguments about the fundamental significance of a given scriptural extract that rely on internal context, but to be resolutely suspicious of such arguments that rely on external context. What, then, about the third kind of context? It has in common with the first approach that it doesn’t make its appeal to extrabiblical sources; it has in common with the second that it centres not on the actual substance of the biblical text, but on the circumstances of those who originally wrote and read it. It also, by the way, seems to me to be the favoured approach for looking at basically any Bible passage in the, shall we say, conservative-evangelical-Anglican circles that have been so formative for me as a Christian. You know the kind of thing: well, you see, the Thessalonian church was experiencing severe persecution when Paul wrote his letters to them – so they would have been weakening in their resolve and in need of a call to stand firm. Or, well, you see, the books of Kings were written for the Jews in exile – so they would have been wondering whether God had totally rejected them and his promises had failed, and this was written to reassure them that that wasn’t the case.

Although actually, on that last one, I’d like to counter that if the original audience of Kings had been reading their Leviticus and Deuteronomy, they’d have known that their being removed from the land, far from calling God’s promises into question, was actually a component part of them;⁵ and if they’d been paying any attention to Jeremiah at all, they’d have known that only seventy years would elapse before their return and restoration.⁶ Undoubtedly exile would have been traumatic, but it hardly seems justified to suppose that, just because we know something of the life situation of those for whom the book was composed, we automatically know what it was intended to do for them. This is my problem with the third kind of context. It makes an assumption about how the first readers were feeling, and then another about the kind of scriptural input they consequently needed; this second layer of assumption then dictates the main point to be made in any teaching on the text in question. Because if you’ve already decided that the point of 1 and 2 Kings was to reassure the exiles of the persistence of God’s promises, then you’re inevitably going to find that point in whichever bit of the narrative you’ve got in front of you, aren’t you?

In other words, I think the third kind of context puts the exegetical process backwards. The question as to how such-and-such a passage would have been of particular help to its first readers in their own situation is a valid one, but it ought to be addressed after you’ve got a good idea of what the passage is getting at, not in order to find that out. And here we hit the real nub of why I think context is overrated: what we’re really interested in is the content of the text. At the end of the day, what does the passage actually say? Content without context may not be quite as easy to understand rightly as it possibly could be, but it still carries all its power as God’s chosen means of making his character and plans known to us; context without content, on the other hand, is of no value at all for gaining knowledge of God. It’s worth pointing out here that internal context is, of course, simply content by another name, which is why it’s the only kind of context worth leaning an argument on.

Context is overrated. Content too often goes underappreciated at its expense. God has blessed us with the full extent of his self-relevation in words, and there is so much treasure to be mined from it without dragging a parade of external circumstances into the matter. We have the scriptures in our hands; we have God’s Spirit within us to open our eyes to what he would have us know from them; we have our brothers and sisters around us to teach and admonish us in accordance with them. Don’t let the question of context distract you from the question of what the passage actually says and means. Rather, keep asking the latter question, and, insofar as the former is relevant, it’ll be answered along the way.⁷

Footnotes

¹ Like, I don’t see how you can possibly argue that the couple of quotations he lifts out originally pertained to Gentile believers: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rom+9&version=ESVUK.

² No, really; check it out: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=zeph+3&version=ESVUK.

³ A short intro if you’re not familiar with the document: https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/hammurabi; and the article I was actually reading: https://thetorah.com/how-exodus-revises-the-laws-of-hammurabi/. As with all scholarship, take what’s useful there and discard what’s inconsistent with scriptural truth.

⁴ Hint: they are.  End of 2 Timothy 3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+tim+3&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Like, try Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20, and Deuteronomy 28-30. As early as that, exile is laid out not only as possible but as inevitable.

⁶ For that one, you can have a peer at the internal literary context of one of the most frequently amateurishly decontextualised verses in the whole Bible: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+29&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Oh, and before we go, I’d better let you have a link to the rather entertaining music video from which I purloined my opening quotation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjnasl1Kyuo.