You Need Context When Reading the Bible
Context Is Necessary for Interpretation
Have you ever said something that was taken out of context? If so, you know how frustrating that can be. Perhaps someone overheard you say something about a friend, and that someone caught only one phrase of the conversation—a phrase that made it sound as if you were saying something quite terrible about your friend. Perhaps when you were confronted about this, you said, “No! You are taking that phrase completely out of context. That’s not what I meant at all!”
When you said that your words were taken out of context, you meant that although you did speak the actual words that were overheard, you spoke them in the context of a conversation—and if that conversation had been heard in its entirety, it would have been clear that you did not mean those words in the way the other person thought you meant them. If that person could only have heard the broader context, he would have understood and interpreted your words more accurately and truthfully.
Unfortunately, when we come to the Bible, we all too often do something very similar to what your friend did with your words: we take verses and passages from Scripture and rip them out of their proper context. Sadly, I believe that people tend to do this with the Bible even more than with other books that they read. Many times, people do this with good intentions. They are seeking to find a word of encouragement for their day, an inspiring quote for a friend, or a devotional thought to share with a small group, sports team, or business gathering. They read quickly, find a verse or verses that seem to work, and grab them and go, only to discover later that they wrongly interpreted verses by missing their broader context. Despite their good intentions, such disregard for context can often result in the abuse—and misuse—of the word of God.
Understanding God's Word
Jon Nielson
In this accessible guide to biblical interpretation, pastor Jon Nielson presents 6 hermeneutical tools and demonstrates how to use them effectively to improve personal or small-group Bible studies.
Finding the right context of a Bible verse or passage is vitally important in order to make correct interpretation and application. When you apply the “context tool,” you will begin to see the way that it can guard and protect you against false interpretations of the Bible and lead you in both interpreting and applying God’s word in the way that he intends.
Faithful Application
Here is the principle behind the context tool:
In our interpretation and application of any part of the Bible, we must make sure that we fully evaluate and comprehend every part of the context of the passage so that we can understand why the passage was written by the author and how it was understood by the original recipients. We will then be able to apply the text fully and faithfully to our lives.
To express this principle in a slightly different way, this tool reminds us that we must make the journey to the ancient world of the Bible in order to see every text in its context. Remember, when we study the Bible, we are digging into the living and inspired word of God, but it’s an ancient text, written to people who lived and followed God thousands of years ago in contexts very different than ours. The Bible does have something to say to Christians today, of course—but we need to discover what the text meant then before we can rightly discern what it means for us now.
If we are studying the book of 1 Corinthians, for example, we must make the journey in our Bible study to the ancient city of first-century Corinth in order to see the issues and situation there. If we are studying the book of Genesis, then we need to travel to ancient Mesopotamia to see the situation of the early patriarchs of the faith. We should note the life situation of Paul as he writes his final letter to Timothy, and the situation of the persecuted church as Peter and John write their letters. Context matters! We need to take these kinds of journeys in order to get the meaning of the text right.
Here’s a key point as we get ready to apply this tool: God’s word can never mean something that it never meant!
This is a wonderful way to summarize the context tool. We always need to work hard to see what God’s word meant when it was written. Only then will we be able to see what it means for us as God’s people today.
3 Kinds of Conext
But what kinds of context do we need to be ready to evaluate as we apply this tool? As you’ll see, reading and studying a biblical text in context means considering several factors.
Historical context. For every passage we study, we need to be aware of the historical context—both of the biblical author and of the original readers of the book. No biblical author wrote in a vacuum—all of them lived real lives in real places, and God used their experiences to help them communicate his word in the way that he intended. To get a feel for the historical context of a biblical passage, we have to ask some basic questions: When was this book written? Who was the original audience of this text? What was the political and cultural situation at the time of the writing? What was different for God’s people then—and what is still the same for us today? It’s not difficult to discover some basic details about the historical context of passages of Scripture—a good study Bible is a great place to start.
We always need to work hard to see what God’s word meant when it was written.
Literary context. Every word in the Bible is part of a sentence; every sentence is part of a wider paragraph or unit; and every paragraph or unit is part of an entire book. We must keep this in mind as we read and study the Bible, thinking about how verses and passages fit into books. To pay attention to the literary context means that we don’t read the Bible like a collection of great quotations, from which we can pick and choose random inspirational sayings that mean whatever we want them to mean. The Bible is a literary work, coming to us in entire books within distinct literary genres: poetic writings, prophetic words, narratives (stories), epistles (letters), apocalyptic literature, and more. To pay attention to the literary context of every verse and passage in Scripture is to take seriously and respectfully the way God, in his perfect wisdom, has chosen to reveal his word to us.
Canonical context. Along with the verses, passages, and books of the Bible, we must think about the whole canon (the entire collection of books) of Scripture. Every book of the Bible is part of the one big story of God’s saving work in the world, a story that is shown to us through all of Scripture. Faithful biblical scholars have agreed on a rule of thumb for studying difficult passages: Scripture interprets Scripture. That means that we always read any given part of the Bible in light of the rest of the Bible. We consider the entire scope of Scripture when we study any individual text—and we can do this because the entire Bible has one divine author. So when we think about the context of a passage in the Bible, we should ask ourselves, “Where does this passage fit in the overall arc of the biblical story? Where is it in God’s plan for redemption?” If the Bible truly is one great unified story of his saving work in the world, these are important and legitimate questions for Bible study.
This article is adapted from Understanding God’s Word: An Introduction to Interpreting the Bible by Jon Nielson.
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