Quotes about Context

These principles are deeply relational because the gospel is. Remember that the gospel of God's grace teaches us that lasting change of heart and hands always takes place in the context of relationship, first with God and then with the people of God.

Expressed otherwise in terms of the principle of context—a principle essential for sound understanding of any text but preeminently and uniquely so for Scripture—every unit of biblical material, however quantified, is qualified by a pattern of contexts relative to itself.

So, interpretation must proceed wholly by fitting those authors into their social and historical environments. Anything else is alleged to be a denial of history or a denial of humanity.

Reading the Bible responsibly and respectfully today means learning what it meant for ancient Israelites to talk about God the way they did, and not pushing alien expectations onto texts written long ago and far away.

Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.

When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn't behave itself like a holy rulebook should.

The first question we should ask about what we are reading is not "How does this apply to me?" Rather, it is "What is this passage saying in the context of the book I am reading, and how would it have been heard in the ancient world?

As Jesus, the Word, is of divine origin as well as a thoroughly human figure of first-century Palestine, so is the Bible of ultimately divine origin yet also thoroughly a product of its time.

The Bible—from back to front—is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.

It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance.

getting the Bible right and getting Jesus right are not the same thing.

The Adam story, then, is not simply about the past. It's about Israel's present brought into the past—even as far past as the beginning of the human drama itself.