What is Context?

Context means “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”  These events, statements, and ideas are often written down and we know of them by reading about them.

But also, the older a text is, the more and more invisible is its context.

There are many different types of context.  The most common include:

1. Author’s Purpose (Why was this text written?)
2. Author’s Background (Who is the author? What do they do for a living? Are they trustworthy?  Here though we have to be careful because we need to pay attention to their argument before we dismiss it based on who they are)
3. Audience (Who were they?What were they like?)
4. Vocabulary (Does the author use any technical words or uses what we think are everyday words in a special way?)
5. Text Structure (What type of text is this? Is it a letter? Is it a book? Is it a story?)
6. Historical Context (What was going on at the time and place where this text was written?)
7. Cultural Context (What type of ideas were out there when this text was written?)

But wait!  Some of you may be thinking that context is nothing more than reading a passage and the part that comes before it and the part that comes after it.  But that’s not quite correct.  Context is much more complex than that.

A way to think about context is that you are in a dark room, and you are given one very weak light to try to reveal some big object in the middle of the room.  It reveals something about the object, but not enough so you can figure out what it is.  Then you are given several other lights, let’s say now you have a total of seven lights (one for each type of context listed above).  While they were weak by themselves, now they have revealed the object in the middle of the room.

Context is absolutely essential if we ever hope to read and understand the Bible and draw out from it as much as possible.  Yet, we do not always identify contexts when we read the Bible, and if we don’t we may have one or two dim lights trying to illuminate a dark object in the middle of the room.  We will get something about it, but we will not be able to adequately know what that object is.

Why Didn’t I Learn About This? 

Some of you are thinking, “Nobody ever taught this when I was in school.”  And possibly you were a high performing student too.  I believe you.

The reason for all this is that reading instruction has heavily emphasized comprehension only, and for that reason, there is no encouragement for students to read older texts, ones far removed from their time.

Think about it.  How many books did you read that were older than 100 years old while you were in school?  How many were not novels?  For the most part, the context of the books you read is essentially the same as the one you live in.

Now, how many books did you read that were less than 20 years old?  The context is almost the same.  Although, I found out that since the digital revolution of the 1990s, the context between then and now is indeed different.  To illustrate the point, last year (2018) I was checking one of my students’ reading ability, so I had that student read out loud to me.  She was reading a suspenseful short novel that was written in 1995.  In one scene, one of the characters takes out a camera, and has to replace the film quickly in order to take pictures of a warehouse where criminal activity is going on.  At this point, she stopped reading and had no idea what film was and why the character had to replace it in their camera.  I then literally had to explain to my student the historical context of the 1990s in order for her to understand what was going on in this scene.  After explanation, she understood, and she not only understood, but she realized how fast the character had to act before losing the chance to photograph the condemning evidence against the other character.  She had every other piece of context, but this one was enough to stop all comprehension and dissolve all feeling of suspense.  Now, there was one very positive thing that this student did: she identified the problem, which was she did not know what film was and its usage in cameras.  Most of the time, we do not cleanly identify problems in misunderstanding.

Now think about the Bible and how we are not 20 years apart from its writing like the book my student was reading, but we are 20 centuries since the last book was written in it.  Could it be that there is some context that we are missing that may possibly lead us to misunderstand the books?  Could it also be that we will not even be aware that we do not know the context?

There is good news in all this. For the grand majority of the time, we can determine the 7 types of context I listed above for the books in the Bible, but before getting into that, we need to see how big of a problem this is for all of us Christians.

What is the state of reading proficiency in the United States?

To begin with, readers can be classified into four categories:

1. Below Basic
2. Basic
3. Intermediate
4. Proficient

The average American adult (about 73%) reads at a sixth-grade reading level.  To word it another way, this means that the average American reads at Basic to early Intermediate skill.  The characteristics of this type of reader is that he or she:

1. Can understand information in short, everyday type written material.
2. Understand basic explanations in pamphlets, guides, or instruction manuals.
3. They can summarize
4. And they can possibly make simple inferences

Now, what characterizes a proficient reader?

A Proficient Reader can:

1. Read lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts.
2. Synthesize (put together) information across many different sources (this is absolutely necessary for determining context and using it to understand what you are reading)
3. Make complex inferences
4. Compare viewpoints

Only about 13% of adults are characterized as Proficient Readers.

But can’t we read without using those 7 types of context?

Some of you may be wondering about all this and may be suspicious of what I am saying.  You are thinking that you have always read books (you are probably thinking novels or self-help books and probably those written within the past 100 years) and you have never had to build an understanding of those 7 types of context beforehand.

You are right.  But it’s because the context of those books is your context, so there is no need for you to consciously build an understanding of context and use it.  You already have it.

The emphasis in reading education in the past 40 years has moved away from focusing on the critical reading, analyzing, and developing as a person by reading the classics of Western civilization to simply comprehension of texts, even those written very recently.

This emphasis on comprehension has taken away the ability of students to read anything they want, and now they can only read those things that are of a fairly recent date.

This is also dangerous because it gives us an extremely false confidence that we can read and understand the Bible, and if we find something off, then it cannot be us, but it must be the Bible.  And in reality, what is off is us, and our lack of having the right contexts to use in order to read and understand the Bible.

This is dangerous in two ways. The first is that anyone who decides he or she wants to start a Bible study does so and leads it and he or she is not equipped (although they think and fully believe they are), and they start misinterpreting the Bible royally.  This can lead to division in churches and indeed the founding of new churches, maybe even new denominations.

The second way this is dangerous is that someone who wants to read the Bible (either due to genuine interest or due to doubts) will not understand the central message of the books of the Bible and will leave either not believing or confirmed in anti-Christian sentiment.  St. Augustine is an example of this.  The man left Christianity when he decided to read the Bible in his late schooling and the beginning of his higher education, and he was ill-equipped (even though he was highly educated), and this led him down the road to heretical sects and finally to full blown skepticism.  Years later, when he was in his early 30s, did he finally begin to learn the right context for reading the Bible from St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan.  The result was a transformed life (and one that continues to transform others) and one of the greatest Christian writers of all time.  He describes this in his autobiography, The Confessions, and he actually reflects on the act of reading and what it means.

Further, in his book On Christian Teaching, he goes in depth about how to read and understand the Bible, and he does so with such piercing insight that is centuries ahead of his time and still almost fully applicable to today.  He detects many of these different types of context listed above including historical and cultural context and explains how to use them in reading and understanding the Bible.  He went from skeptic in the Bible to a master teacher for others on how to read, understand, and live the message of the Bible.

Example of Context Building

The way we solve the problem of context is by asking the questions that give us the answers to the 7 types of context above.  If you scroll back up above, you’ll see that I have questions in parentheses next to each type of context.  For the most part, these questions can be answered for the books of the Bible, some much easier than others.  But answering these questions requires labor.  For example, it is not readily evident to a high schooler reading the Bible that each of the Psalms has its own context and it is not to be read as a book but as a set of poems on similar topics (this is Text Structure).  Also, it is not readily evident to that high schooler that the Psalms’ immediate context was used as praises in the Temple. (This answers on a basic level the questions of Author’s Purpose, Audience, Historical and Cultural Context).

Now let’s try building context to understand some things in The Epistle to the Colossians and The Gospel of John.

Using Context to Read and Understand The Epistles of Paul

If one builds knowledge of the history and culture of Greco-Roman society in the ancient world, then it becomes clear that the Apostle Paul was directly engaging that culture when you read his epistles.  He is not engaging a general people, but a specific people living within that Greco-Roman world and under its influences.  His choice of language shows that he is addressing the concerns of the new Christian communities he founded as they tried to integrate the Christian faith within their lives.

His choice of words reveals something about his audiences: in some texts such as Romans and Corinthians, Paul references a lot from the Old Testament and explains it at length, meaning there was the presence of ethnic Jews or former converts to Judaism from among the Greeks or well-educated Gentiles who knew enough about Judaism that the appeal to the Old Testament would strengthen their belief in Christ.  This is confirmed from the Book of Acts, and that illuminates why he does what he does.

Yet, in other epistles the Apostle Paul hardly references anything from the Old Testament because his audience was purely Gentile and were dealing with other obstacles to accepting Christ than the audiences who had some familiarity with Judaism.

This leads us to ask the question: what obstacles were there to hinder the Gentiles from accepting Christ? Was it religious?  Was it philosophical?  What were the religions at the time?  What were the philosophies?

After looking into the matter, we find that philosophical systems of thought were widespread including Platonism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism, and the writings of these philosophical schools from the time period still exist today and exist in English translation for that matter.  All three of these philosophical schools had teachings about the nature of humans, the world, and God.  For example in Platonism, the body was seen as a prison, as something hindering us from our goal, as something evil, but the soul was good.

At this same time, there arose a heresy called Gnosticism.  The Gnostic heresy was a sort of mix between Platonism and Christianity and spread throughout the Roman Empire in the first several centuries of Christianity.  Paul engaged the Gnostic heresy in his Epistle to the Colossians.  Gnostics believed somewhat like Plato that all matter including the body was evil, and only the spirit was good.  They explained this as being the result of the one highest God, whom they called “The Father” as emanating lesser gods called aeons.  The whole of the aeons with the Father were called “The Fullness.”  They were also referred to as “The Godhead” which means the “state of being divine.”

One of these aeons, the Demiurge (a term borrowed from Plato’s writings), created the material world, and because he was a lesser god than the Father, the resulting world was evil.  But we drew our spirits from the Father, so they were inherently good, but our spirits became imprisoned in the material bodies in the world that the Demiurge created and were subject to many heavenly beings who stood between us and the Father.  This is the origin of evil in their view.  This led them to fear these heavenly beings and work their whole lives doing things such as learning about them in order to be able to move beyond them after death in their ascent to the Father.  It also caused them to hate the material world, so they practiced severe fasting and ascetism because they saw the body as evil, so it was worthy of mistreatment because it was the source of evil in their lives.  The last of the emanations from the Father was called the Christ.  In the Gnostic teaching on Jesus, they denied that He ever became flesh, but He only appeared to be that way.  He was the Son of the Father, not of the Demiurge who made the world.  And he came to rescue the humans by showing them the way back up to the Father through a secret knowledge by which they can bypass the different heavenly powers.

Now, the Apostle Paul working within the authentic Christian tradition as received from the Twelve Apostles, took the Apostles’ understanding of our Lord Jesus and explained Him using the terminology of the Gnostics in The Epistle to the Colossians but with the goal of clarifying the true nature of our Lord Jesus to them.  This is why Paul uses very different terminology in this epistle than in his other epistles such as “Godhead” “fullness” and “philosophy.”

The word philosophy here does not refer to philosophical methodology such as logic and explanation, but to philosophical systems or thought such as Platonism and Gnosticism.  The historical and cultural context helps us determine what philosophy means here, which is a system of thought.  If one referred to logic in the first century they called it “logic” or “dialectic,” not philosophy.  Now this bears on modern day interpretations of Paul’s argument in Colossians.  I have often heard Christians whether Orthodox, Catholics, or Protestants claiming that we should be wary of philosophy and not waste time with it because even Paul says so in this epistle.  No logic, no systematic thinking, no nothing.  Even in some Orthodox cultures, if one is talking too much or being complicated, they berate him saying, “Stop philosophizing!”

But with our knowledge of context, if the Apostle Paul was writing against philosophy as a whole as we understand the term today, then this would make no sense at all because he uses philosophy in the form of logic and systematic argumentation everywhere he writes.  The Epistle to the Romans is a large argument.  The Book of Acts portrays him as “reasoning” with the Jews and Greeks regularly.  The word used for reasoning in The Book of Acts in the original Greek is derived from the word “dialectic,” and this is philosophical methodology.  What the Apostle Paul is doing here in The Epistle to the Colossians is also philosophy, but not the same system of thought as the Gnostics.

Further, when he writes to the Colossians, “In Him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9) he is explaining that Christ is not part of the Fullness of the gods, but He contains the totality of all that is divine in His body, which counters the claim that Jesus only appeared to be human, but He is actually human and He is not part of the gods, but He contains all of divinity within Himself.

Further, what is translated as “and you are complete in Him,” should be translated “And you have come to fullness in Him” as it is in the NRSV.  It is the verb form of the Gnostic term “Fullness.”

What the Apostle Paul is saying is that Christ is not the last of the heavenly powers but he is above them all, and we are full in Him meaning there is no need for anything else other than Christ.  There is no need to fear any heavenly powers.  There is no need to become obsessed with the secret knowledge about them.  Christ contains the fullness of the Godhead.  Further, Christ has “disarmed principalities and powers [having] made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it” through His death and resurrection.

He also addresses their asceticism at the end of chapter 2 and says that these things are not helpful in “checking self-indulgence” because treating the body as evil in itself is missing the point of Christian asceticism which is to train the body for virtue.

Yet some modern Protestants misinterpret this verse as dismissing all forms of asceticism and find fault with Catholics and Orthodox Christians for fasting and practicing other forms of asceticism.  Yet, Gnostic and also Platonic asceticism has one goal, which is denial of the body because it is evil, and Christian asceticism has an entirely different goal, which is training the body for virtue.  The Apostle Paul is addressing the former.  He practiced the latter as is evident from the Book of Acts and his epistles.

The Gospel of John

The Apostle John also engages the Gnostic heresy in his Gospel.  That heresy had grown more widespread in his days than in the days of Paul.  He uses the philosophical terminology of the ancient world in addition to the terminology of the Gnostics themselves in order to explain who Jesus is in the grand scheme of things.

For example, the words “world” “Word” “only-begotten” and “fullness” are words that are used to explain who Jesus is and how the Gnostics do not have the right explanation of Jesus.

The word “Word” in Greek is Logos, which refers to the ordering and sustaining principle of the universe.  It is immaterial, but without it the material world would not continue nor would it be ordered.  In Jewish philosophy in the Greco-Roman world, the Logos was equated with God’s Wisdom as explained in the Book of Proverbs 1-9. This Wisdom of God is an attribute of God not separate from Him but which can be distinguished in Him. Further, it appears to have a personal dimension.

When the Apostle John begins the Gospel with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing which has come into being came into being” (John 1:1-2) he shows that Jesus participated in the creation of the world and also orders and sustains the world.  He slams down the idea that the creator of the world is any different than the Father of Christ and also Christ since He is the Logos/Wisdom of the Father.  So there is no inherent evil in the material world, and in the final part of the prologue he writes, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us… and of his fulness we have all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:16).  He becomes what He Himself has created, and thus we partake of the fullness in Him.  He also described Him as “an only-begotten” meaning there are no others gods, but only the Word of God who in actuality belongs to God.

The entire Gospel focuses then on the aspects of Jesus’s words and ministry which reveal this understanding of Jesus.  The Gospel’s events and subject matter being situated within a firmly Palestinian Jewish context, it also reveals from those events the evidence that the Gnostics are mistaken in their understanding of Jesus.  Jesus is the only-begotten of God, He is God made human, He is the one who has power over the material world, not to show us an escape from it.  This is His world, and He has chosen to come down to it out of God’s love for us as a way to show the end purpose of God.

What We Learn From Such a Reading of the Scriptures

What do we learn from such a close reading of the Scriptures?  To step back for a moment to something discussed above, the last two points characterizing Proficient readers is that they can 3. Make complex inferences and 4. Compare viewpoints.

A lot of church people discourage a deep historical reading of the Scriptures because it can lead to an emphasis other than the spiritual and applicable, and no doubt this is true, but it is not related to such a reading, but a lack of knowing how to apply such a reading.  This is why it is possible to have atheists teaching the Bible in mainstream colleges and even seminaries while not believing a word of it.

Yet on the other hand, such a deep historical reading reveals a spiritually applicable way of life, but it requires a lot of contemplation on it by comparing the contexts of the Biblical writers to our context and us making inferences about how we can apply what we see.

For example,

After such contemplation, many virtues of the Apostles appear which we can imitate in our own contexts such as:

1. They truly understood other viewpoints.
2. They showed others a better way than those viewpoints.
3. They focused the intellect on the work and life of Christ as it makes sense in and of the world.
4. They were not afraid of the views of the world around them.
5. They were courageous.
6. They truly had the joy of Christ live in them and radiated that joy to others.

These are all things we can imitate, and this is the model for true teaching.

What often happens in the churches is repetition and not actual teaching for the purpose of understanding. This type of “learning,” leads to fear and/or hatred of other viewpoints and lack of any type of tolerance in any way of those who hold them.  To draw an analogy, in school, a lot has to be memorized and repeated before understanding can happen.  Churches, like schools, spend most of their time on memorizing and repetition, but not enough time on understanding.

If we grasp and apply the pattern that the Apostles show us, then we will have a deeper insight into the Scriptures, the world, and our lives.  We will integrate everything, and our minds will be firmly grounded in Christ and such a grounding will make it easier to follow Him.

Furthermore, in a world more and more hostile to Christianity and on seemingly intellectual grounds, it will encourage us to learn something about those grounds, compare it to what we know of Christ, and bring the understanding of Christ to them as the Apostles did, and as the early Christians did after the Apostles.

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