Hermeneutics 2

This was originally posted on July 1, but I've moved it up to get the sequence.

2. Context is Everything
Words are incredibly flexible things. What I mean is that they can mean so many different things in so many different situations. What makes being fired different from getting fired up or firing a gun or lighting a fire? The context! To know what the word "fire" means, you have to know whether you are talking about your job, enthusiasm, a gun range, or camping.

The words of the Bible are no different in this regard. Why are there over 20,000 different Protestant denominations that disagree with each other yet claim to get their core beliefs from the Bible? It is this incredible flexibility that words have. If we are not aware of it, then we are bound to assume that the way we see the words is the only way to see the words.

An important distinction to make in this regard is the different between the original meaning of the words of the Bible and any other meanings we might find. The original meaning is the meaning these words had to the original authors and audiences of the books of the Bible.

What did Paul mean when he said a non-Christian might think people speaking in tongues were "out of their mind" (1 Cor. 14:23)? The word Paul used may have referred to the kind of things people were said to experience in a type of religion called a mystery religion. This example draws our attention to certain aspects of the Bible's original meaning. The original meaning of the Bible has to do with ancient audiences, and we do not automatically come equipped with anywhere near the necessary background knowledge to understand the words of the Bible as they were originally understood.

The idea itself of an "original meaning" is not without its complications. There were no doubt times when the original author of a book of the Bible had a different understanding than his audiences (all of the biblical authors were likely men). Further, some of the words of the Bible were spoken orally and only later written down. The words of Jesus can thus have slightly different meanings depending on whether we are thinking of 1) what he originally meant in whatever specific contexts he first spoke them and 2) the various connotations his words take on in individual gospel accounts. Further, it is certainly possible that God had meanings in mind for the words of which the original authors were not aware.

But in general, the difference between how the words might strike us and what the words originally meant is a valid distinction. For example, Judas was not the hero of the gospels, although someone might choose to read the story this way. I have heard of a certain tribe in Papua New Guinea that initially responded to the story of Jesus in this way.

Once we have established what the "original meaning" was, there are any number of interpretations of the Bible's words that differ from it. These other meanings vary from interpretations that are quite similar to the original meaning to interpretations that have little to do with anything the original audiences would have recognized.

For example, when I read about loving my neighbor, I am probably thinking things that are similar in spirit to the original meaning. But I have a strong hunch the specifics of loving my neighbor can be quite different today than when Leviticus or Jesus spoke of it (Lev. 19:18; Luke 10:27). On the other hand, countless sermons every Sunday morning do things with the Bible that may be true but have nothing to do with anything Moses or Isaiah or Paul would recognize. Indeed, you could argue that the most relevant of sermons often deviate the most from the original meaning, for the original meaning was most relevant to the ancient audiences--more than to us.

I submit to you three incontrovertible aspects of reading the Bible in context.

1. If we read the Bible for what it originally meant, it tells us it was written to someone else. The literal meaning of Deuteronomy or Romans or 1 Thessalonians requires us to recognize that none of the books of the Bible was strictly written to us. As Christians we believe these books are for us. But they were not written to us. Deuteronomy says, "Hear, O Israel" (Deut. 6:4). Romans says it was written to individuals in Rome (Rom. 1:7). 1 Thessalonians says it was written to the church at Thessalonica (1 Thess. 1:1). No one alive today is one of those Romans or 1 Thessalonians originally addressed. Even modern Israel is not really the Israel of Deuteronomy 6.

2. The way the original audiences understood the literal meaning was a function of the way they used and understood words. When Jesus said that God sends rain on the just and the unjust in Matthew 5:45, the Galilean peasants understood rain as a very positive thing. Further, they had clear ideas of what it might mean to be just or unjust--definitions that came from their world.

When Genesis 1 speaks of waters above the sky (Gen. 1:6-8) and stars put in the sky (Gen. 1:14-15, it pictures a universe in which you go up through a layer of stars before reaching primordial waters above them. When Paul speaks of three heavens (2 Cor. 12:2), he thinks of three layers of sky as you go straight up toward God. These should not be problems for our faith in the Bible. It simply confirms that God is a God who speaks to us in ways we can understand. He does the same to us today in our categories, not in the categories through which our great grandchildren will view the world.

3. The ancient audiences of the Bible's words did not understand words or look at the world the same way we do. Indeed, they differed from each other in this regard.

The preceding examples make this point clear. I might return to the example of rain to make the point again (Matt. 5:45). For many years I did not understand the original meaning of God sending rain on the just because rain in my "dictionary" is not a good thing. "Rain, rain, go away. Please come back another day." I thought the verse meant that God even allowed bad things to happen to good people.

But attention to the words around Matthew's statement (the literary context) as well as to ancient Galilean culture (the social context) at this point in history (the historical context) shows me that this interpretation differs from the original meaning. Rain was a very good thing to farmers in a land that sometimes went without rain. The verse is about how God gives good things even to bad people. We read the Bible differently from the original meaning all the time in subtle ways like this all the time.

We should probably not assume that all the new meanings we see in the words today are necessarily less from God than the original meanings were. Indeed, unless God speaks through the words beyond the original meaning, most of us are in trouble a good deal of the time. Even scholars often disagree on the original meaning. Nevertheless, the first step toward a deeper and more mature understanding of the Bible is to recognize the crucial and determinative role that context plays in the meaning we see in it.