Recently, I started a series on the question, “how do you read the Bible?” You can read the first post here. In this post, I want to cover the topic of reading the Bible contextually.
What is Context?
In simplified terms, context is just the words around the words. It is the setting in which the characters of a story find themselves. Reading any literature with its context in mind Is absolutely necessary in order to understand what its meaning.
Seriously, what’s that in your grill?
Say I were to ask the question, “what is that thing hanging out of your grill?” If I were speaking to my father, or any other man who only cooks if it involves a propane and a giant metal spatula, he would probably walk out to his deck to check to make sure the squirrels had not gotten into his altar to manhood.
Now, if I were to ask that same question to a teenager during a Wednesday night youth service, I would probably get a combined response of confusion and teeth-checking. And if I had ever asked that question when I was in high school, he would have started looking for road kill on his truck.
Do you see the differences? I can ask the same question, but depending on the intended audience and environment, the meaning changes completely.
Asking the Right Questions
When you’re trying to determine the context of a particular passage, there are several questions that can help you figure it out.
- Who is the speaker? In other words, who’s asking about the grill?
- Who is the audience? Who’s the speaker addressing?
- What is the historical setting?
- What is happening chronologically before and after the passage?
- What type of literature is this? Narratives, poems, and epistles are all written differently and require a different set of rules of interpretation.
Although this is not an exhaustive list, asking these questions can help a lot to figure out the context of a particular passage. Once you have answered these questions, you can begin to grasp the meaning of the text with more depth and accuracy.
Context is one component of the study of hermeneutics or the study of how to rightly interpret the text. For a better introduction into good hermeneutics, check out How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart. It’s well worth the $12.