Contextualizing Scripture - 2025-02-13
Generally when reading the Holy Scriptures I like to read from a Bible that contains a lot of footnotes. In one of them (a large edition of the Jerusalem Bible in Spanish) four fifths of the first page of Genesis is actually filled with footnotes. For some I've met this is a hindrance for the reading of Scripture - a distraction - and to each their own, I guess. But for me it is a great aid for the reason that I want context.
While reading Scripture we often come across passages, both in the New and especially in the Old Testament, which are quite incomprehensible to our modern minds. This is because we lack a lot of the knowledge of the culture, customs, and language of the time. For me this makes the reading of said passages to be greatly difficult and even misleading, since at a loss for the proper context we may come to an erroneous conclusion (something which the devil truly desires as we attempts to use Scripture to confuse for his own purposes). Thus it can also be perilous to our spiritual life to read the Bible without proper guidance. To borrow a silly example given by Trent Horn, imagine two thousand years from now someone were to look at media from our era and find the term “lady-killer,” and assume we're speaking of someone like Ted Bundy, because they lack the cultural and linguistic context to know that it is a colloquial term used to refer to men who are unusually attractive to women. This demonstrates, therefore the importance of contextualizing texts.
This being said, it's important to know the difference between contextualization in order to know the meaning underlying the text (which in the case of Scripture is inerrant) versus contextualization so as to arbitrarily dismiss parts of Scripture as merely products of their time. This sort of practice is very common among the more liberal Christians (and sometimes even not so liberal) who will look at certain passages, particularly of St. Paul's epistles, and claim that we can completely disregard them because it was “merely a product of his time,” in what ultimately amounts to suggesting that we strike through an entire passage of Scripture. Yet, this is not to say that the passage ought to always be interpreted in its most superficial meaning, but to understand that there is an underlying meaning to the passage that must be sought. A clear example of this can be seen in the case of St. Paul's teaching on women's head coverings (1 Cor. 11:2-16). Surely today even the Church does not require, as it did, that women wear veils in churches, yet this does not mean that this passage may simply be ignored, because although we are no longer bound by the disciplinary ruling that St. Paul prescribes, the teaching underlying it about the place of man & woman respective to one another in the order of creation. A similar point can be made for all the disciplinary laws found in the Old Testament: we do not simply get rid of the Old Testament as something no longer applicable, but we maintain it as part of our Bibles as something which has perpetual significance in spite of its most superficial meanings having been fulfilled already in Jesus Christ and no longer binding on the participants of the New Covenant.
I am not saying that reading with footnotes is necessarily the superior way of reading Scripture. After all, I do not think that the Church Fathers had footnotes while reading the Scriptures either. In fact, much of Scripture, particularly in the Catholic tradition, is meant to be read in a liturgical context where one has the guidance of a priest, is prepared spiritually by the context of the Mass, and is primed for the reading by the flow of the liturgical seasons. However, especially when reading the Scriptures privately I think it's worth the effort to have some clarifying contextualization that helps us to understand the meaning behind the words of the text. We must remember that Scripture, like any sign, is a visible symbol of an invisible (and spiritual) reality.
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