God Told Me to Tell You to Read This

This post [click HERE] at baptistsforhomeschooling.com got me thinking.

The first thing I want you to do is click the first link and read the paragraph from Dr. West. It’s sort of confusing. He’s using English terms and all, and I kind of get what he is laying down, but… I says pardon?

Now go read the story at the site he is linked to and commenting on. Re-read Dr. West’s comments.

Make a little more sense?

That my friends is called ‘context’. Can you imagine if you had read the original post of Dr. West and tried to read it “literally” for what it “plainly” says, and then tried to draw out the “timeless principles”? You would come up with something fairly distorted.

This is a small example (of many) of how reading your Bible or “preaching” (I didn’t want to use the word preaching, but…) can look like if you do not take the time to fill in the context of the biblical world.

As Bruce Malina once warned [rough paraphrase] if you read the Bible and it makes sense to you, you are reading it wrong.

If you want to know what the Bible “really says” and what the biblical authors “really meant” then start studying and investigating the society, culture, literary equivalents, thought world, religion and worldview of the OT and NT.

Be careful though, once you start down this path you might actually hear the words of an ancient rabbi who will call you to a whole new way of living.

Trust me on this one: it will look radically different than what is idealized in 21st century North American culture.

And thank God for that.