Context, Context, Context Part 2

The second way in which the context error shows up is in forgetting who a particular book or passage was written to, or what exactly it was written to address. This is very common in the teaching of the New Testament epistles. You have probably even heard it in Sunday sermons, though it is certainly not limited to that, I mention it only to show how pervasive it tends to be. How often do we sit in Church and hear a passage read from one of these letters as if it were written directly to us in the twenty-first century? Certainly it was given, at least in part, for us, but it was not written directly to us, and if we are to understand it correctly, we must first understand who it was written to, that is the cultural context.

A good example of this is to be found in Ephesians 5:18 which states, “And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit,” [ESV] Again, this is part of a larger portion of Scripture, so it could be used as an example of the first problem, but it also works well to show the second one, so I’m going to use it for that. Clearly this is a true statement and a good rule to follow, and you would not be wrong to say that we can take this as a command to not get drunk, but if that is all that we take away from this, we are missing a lot. Often, we don’t even see the second half of the verse, which says to be filled with the Spirit. This gives us a clue as to what the passage is talking about. While “don’t get drunk” is good instruction, the fact is that Paul is here addressing the fact that Pagan “worship” rituals of that time included getting drunk as a means of communing with the false gods of their false religions, and as many of those in the Church had been saved out of such practices and either were starting to fall back into them, or at least Paul had cause for concern that they might fall back into them, and was here giving instruction to the Christians so that they might avoid such things as they learned to walk with God. Hence he does not command them to simply not get drunk, but wants them to know that if they want to be close to God and commune with Him, they need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. By missing the cultural context of the passage, we miss out on its’ richness and simply walk away with rules that we may, or may not, understand. We may also walk away from some passages with terrible false ideas because we did not take the time to study the text in its’ original meaning. A good thing to remember to help to avoid this error is this; a text cannot mean what it has not meant. That is to say, it still means what it meant when it was written, the only thing that will be different is how it applies to us, since we live in a very different world, but the meaning of it is the same.