We often hear the mantra “interpret the Bible in context.” But what that means can be easily misunderstood. Positively, there is more than one context that needs consideration for Bible interpretation. But the negative aspect of context is also important. By “negative” I mean interpreting the Bible through the lens of a context alien to the biblical writers.
Biblical theology must derive from the biblical text. That makes getting the whole “context” thing right.
The context for correctly understanding the Bible are not the writings of the early church fathers, men like Augustine, Irenaeus, and Tertullian. It is not the Catholic Church, despite the brilliance of theologians like Aquinas. It is not Reformation thought, the works of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. It is not the Puritans, the Wesley brothers, or the famous Princeton theologians like Warfield, Machen, and Wilson. It is not evangelicalism. The proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context that produced it. Every other context is a foreign context.
While this seems quite obvious, it is a truth frequently not observed in real life—and real Bible interpretation, preaching, and teaching. Filtering the Bible through writers, creeds, and confessions happens every day. It is the biblical text that’s inspired, not these other leaders and their writings. If we fail to observe this truth, we’ll end up in interpretive places that the inspired writers of the Bible never intended.
This is not to say historic Christianity got everything wrong. That would be a silly exaggeration. My point is one of priority and perspective. Bible interpretation that arose after the biblical period must take a back seat to the Bible itself. We must allow the world in which the biblical writers lived—their intellectual and cultural circumstances—to inform us about what the biblical authors wrote, how they wrote it, and why they wrote it. Only then will we be able to see the Bible like the original audience saw it. Only then can we avoid imposing a foreign context on our Bible interpretation.