In the introduction, I told you that the best piece of advice for understanding the Bible I could give you was let the Bible be what it is. I need to unpack that statement a bit.
Letting the Bible be what it is means interpreting the Bible in its own context. Bible students talk a lot about interpreting the Bible in context. When most readers consider context, they think about the verses preceding and following whatever passage they happen to be looking at. Context involves much more.
There are many different contexts that, even today, dictate how we should understand what we read. For example, the world in which we live provides a context. If I wrote the word “text” on a blackboard (or whiteboard) today in a room full of college students and asked what the word means, I would hear very different answers than I would have heard twenty years ago. Students today would immediately think of a wireless, electronic message. Their worldview is dominated by technology. That wouldn’t have been true a few decades ago. That was a different world.
The type of writing or document dictates how we should understand what’s written. In literary terms, this refers to genre. If I was looking at the word “court” in a legal document, I’d interpret the word much differently than if I was holding a tennis magazine. The word “treat” in a doctor’s note means something different than it would if you found it on a grocery list. Genre is a context that is crucial for interpretation.
There are many other examples. Your culture, religious thinking, political system, family unit, and social structure all influence how you processes the Bible. We might know that intellectually, but we often fail to embrace the fact that the biblical writers wrote for their immediate audience, who had contexts quite different than our own.
Interpreting the Bible in context means interpreting it in light of the worldview in which it was produced. Filtering the Bible through our worldview or any worldview that came after the biblical period means altering how the Bible was originally meant to be read. We need to let the Bible be what it is—an ancient work from another time and place. To apply the Bible to our lives accurately, we need to know what it actually teaches.