Quotes about Context

All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not "straight history." There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.

I mean, if we try to explain Jesus's handling of his Bible in terms of how many Christians today feel the Bible "ought" to be read, Jesus will look like one of my college Bible students, playing free association with the Bible. Or worse, we may try to find some way of taking Jesus out of his ancient Jewish world and making him look more like a suburban Protestant, an urban hipster, a tea party spokesman, and so on.

There is no pure "theology" to be contrasted to "feminist theology" or "Black theology," because the supposed pure theology is driven by its own encultured concerns and assumptions.

We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

What could be more normal than for different people, living at different times, in different places, who wrote about the past for different reasons and to different audiences, to produce different versions on the past? Nothing. And that's what we see in the Bible.

Protestant church tradition developed over several centuries when Christians were not yet forced, by virtue of the culminating evidence, to see the Bible in its ancient context.

Wherever biblical writers talk about the past, we should expect them to be shaping the past as well.

adapting the past to speak to changing circumstances in the present.

A God who does not connect to the world around us is a God who cannot speak to us. Believing in a God who demands that we continue to adopt only biblically ancient ways of thinking of God, which are themselves rooted in their own cultural moment, is to diminish God's active presence here and now.

We are all culturally embedded creatures—we can never untangle ourselves from our here and now. We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

but spare for yourselves every girl who has never had relations with a man.

They discussed this among themselves and concluded, “It is because we did not bring any bread.”