Understanding Context Pt. 1: Brought and Sought
Her little voice turned higher pitch as she shook her arm at me, “Mom, tickle my sleeves!” The whiney comment doesn’t make sense to most people, but the parent knows she wants her wadded-up sleeves under her coat smoothed.
It’s context that helps us communicate in many interactions. From preschoolers, to date night, to a grocery store exchange, context frames the meaning of our words from one to another.
Since we know Scripture is communication, we have to treat it as such. God spoke through human authors to intended original audiences, and he inspired it for his people of the future as well. We hold both of these in our minds as we pay attention to context.
There are four types of context we can talk about—the reader’s context, historical-cultural context, literary context, and biblical context. We’ll cover the first and second in this training article and save the others for another time.
Reader’s Context
What do you think impacts your perspective when you read the Bible? Do you read it differently because of your church tradition? What about because of your gender? Your life experiences with money, security, suffering, family, or community?
None of us read anything objectively. We interpret based on our experiences and understandings. This doesn’t mean we project the meaning onto a text or cannot understand because of our presuppositions. It does mean that for us to come humbly to the Bible, we must admit that we have some—presuppositions, that is.
Years ago, in a doctoral classroom I read the story of Judah and Tamar differently than the 8 others in the room, who were all men. It wasn’t that our theological convictions were different, nor our interpretational grid. I was reading about a male leader who blamed the woman when God judged evil men, and instead of treating her rightly, the patriarch acted with self-protecting injustice. As a woman, I brought a different lens than my classmates who didn’t notice how Tamar was blamed in the set-up of the story.
This isn’t to say my view was better than theirs that day, but that we needed to notice that we each had a lens through which we saw.
So, for reader’s context we ask a couple questions.
1. First, consider who you are and your experiences. You ask how you are like or unlike the characters, speakers, or audience in your passage?
Consider your ethnicity, sex, education, experiences, social class, family, abilities, fears, sufferings. What are things that have impacted you as a person that could change the way you read this text?
We look back and see how 1 Pet. 3:18 was used in US history, and we understand that reader’s context was ignored for slave owners and their supporters to demonstrate that the Bible endorses the mistreatment of people who were enslaved. “Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust,” it reads. The readers in our country’s history were the powerful who believed in racial superiority and had sanctioned astonishing cruelty to those kidnapped from Africa or their descendants. They ignored the fact that in the time of Peter writing, the church was primarily those without power, many of whom were put into slavery because of economics, not because of racism or kidnapping. Peter is not supporting slavery but saying “No matter where you find yourself, brother and sister, do good. Even when you are harmed unjustly, do good, for Christ suffered for you” (as he says next). The ignored reader’s context (and the rest of the Bible!) meant they twisted a meaning to support the evil of slavery for nine generations.
2. Second, consider your cultural environment. How is your worldview different from the characters, speakers, or audience in your passage?
Consider how politics, power, gender stereotypes, Bible knowledge, and view of how the world works influence you.
How much perceived control you’ve had over the outcomes in your life shapes the way you read the laments of robbery and manipulation in the Old Testament prophets. You’re view of a material/unmaterial world will change your reading. Your expectations of what you think a Bible passage should teach will color your view as you study it.
I have sat in church communities that share a lens overemphasizing right answers from the text rather than right transformation. The memorization of the right truth from the text led to doing more Bible study and regurgitated doctrine, but it left us with anemic spiritual formation. The belief of doctrine as the superior knowledge over ethics impacted our lens.
We want to let go of our preunderstandings as we come to a passage, the things we have formulated, even unconsciously, while we cling to the foundational beliefs of what we know to be true about Christ and the Bible.
Historical-Cultural Context
Now that we’ve paid attention to our experiences and culture, we dig into the context in which God spoke, to real people in history. He didn’t bypass the uniqueness of that time, so we slow ourselves, push against our over-familiarity of the Bible, and ask questions.
Here's some questions to get you started:
1. Who was the author? We often know from tradition; sometimes we don’t. Either way, we also want to pay attention to what the book reveals about him.
2. To whom was it written? Sometimes the book tells us! Or we need to look at another resource and consider who the audience would be after we know when it was written.
3. When was it written? And when did these events take place? This isn’t usually at the same time.
4. Why was it written? The author is doing something through the book—there is an intended response he wants in those who hear.
5. What is the location and are there geographic details? When it says places in the Bible, those terms meant something to the first hearers. While they often don’t mean much to us, the context can help us understand.
A mountain in the Middle East doesn’t look like a Pacific Northwest mountain. And people are walking between cities listed. You and I don’t usually know how far we can walk in a day, but they did.
6. What historical or cultural things need clarification? This one comes last, but it’s often where we need to spend most of our time. We get curious about things happening in a passage.
If we were looking at Luke 10:38-42, we’d ask questions like: Why does Martha take Jesus and his disciples into her home when they’re traveling? What is hospitality like? What would it mean culturally if Mary sits at Jesus’ feet? Why is Martha’s name first?
Where do you find the answers to these questions? Great question. Other Bible passages, study Bibles, commentaries, your church staff, people who have studied the Bible longer than you have. We do this in community, and “phoning a friend” (either in a book or on the phone) is always a great idea.
Choices and Transformation
The historical and cultural context of the Bible is the atmosphere of our passages; like the water in which the fish swims, it is the setting for all that happens. Our culture is vastly different and, of course, impacts the way we see and understand. This isn’t truly news to us; we see miscommunication because of differing micro-cultures and experiences all the time. Have you been on social media recently?
We want to grasp what God is communicating, so here’s three choices that will help pay attention to context, both what we’ve brought and what we’ve sought.
1. Awareness
Pay attention, friends. Ask yourself questions about who you are, your culture, your experiences, your expectations. Humbly admit that you have biases and presuppositions because you are human (like everyone else). And admit when you don’t understand a cultural question in the passage.
2. Community
Humbly read the Bible with people who have different experiences than you do; the church was made to do this. Today we can also read resources written by believers around the world and learn from their perspectives. What a gift! (Taylor recommended one on Instagram recently, Faith in the Wilderness). This helps us both with reader’s context and cultural context.
3. Humility
I’m saying humility again, because we need it. We submit ourselves to the author’s intended response and ask, “How is this passage supposed to transform us?” We are willing to be changed by the Bible, to have our ideas corrected, our categories changed, and our hearts convicted. Sometimes that hurts, but God gives more grace.
Paying attention to context is deciding that we don’t play God with the passage and that God’s word doesn’t revolve around me and my culture. That sounds obvious, yes, but can you think of examples when that’s exactly what you (or others) were doing? Instead, we seek to understand the work God did through historical people writing the Scriptures to another time, and we embrace the work he’s doing today to transform us for his glory.
We are so happy to provide this free resource to you.
For further training, check out our
Courses -short video courses you can do at your own pace.
Cohorts - virtual training with a group of other women over 7 weeks to hone and grow your teaching skills.
Bible Teacher Community - a private, online community to walk along side you and equip you in your ministry.
