Context and Rethinking

N. T. Wright uses this sentence to demonstrate how important it is that we read a text in the context of its author, its audience, and its cultural and historic setting:

“I’m mad about my flat.”

To understand this sentence, we must know whether the speaker is American or British. Will the speaker soon be heading off to the tire store, or will he be showing off his new living quarters?

We may believe in the inerrancy of the biblical text, but if we are careless in reading it, what we read in that inerrant biblical text may be errant if we fail to read it as the author and audience in that cultural and historic setting would have heard it.

I’ve been reading The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. Stark is a sociologist asking the question which the subtitle states. He notes that when Constantine gave Christianity official recognition in the 4th century, he was bowing as much to the inevitability of numbers as he was to principle. Christianity simply grew and overwhelmed the empire.

Stark is not a Biblical scholar, nor an historian. He calls himself ‘a sociologist who sometimes works with historical materials.’ I am not sure whether with that admission he is inviting us to question his historical conclusions, but they are nevertheless fascinating.

Some are more well known – that Christianity grew through greater fertility, with prohibitions against abortion and infanticide, common practices in the ancient world among pagans. Christianity grew as well through a willingness to nurse and care for those suffering through plague and other culturally devastating diseases.

Two things, however, in my reading have challenged my perceptions of the ancient world and how one reads the biblical text in the light of that.

First, he makes a strong historical case that women were granted great authority in the early church, particularly functioning as deacons. My denomination appoints only men to the office of deacon, and this has been a subject of significant debate recently. Stark makes an intriguing case for seeing that women were indeed accepted as deacons from the earliest days.

Intriguing to me as well is this:

The epistles of 1 Corinthians and 1 Peter both give instruction to Christian women regarding how to behave when married to non-Christian husbands. We who read that today make the assumption that this was pertinent to the (assumed) many women who were converted after marriage to non-Christian men. No doubt this situation existed. But Stark notes that in the church, because the church treated women with far greater equity and decency, the proportion of women to men was lopsided. The result was that for the Christian girl of marriageable age, there were not Christian men enough to go around. It is possible, therefore, that our assumption that the counsel of Paul and Peter was only to women who converted post-marriage may in fact be wrong. The early church may not have encouraged marriage outside of covenantal considerations, but it certainly may have been forced to permit it.

I’m not making any case for changing how we counsel young men and women regarding marriage partners. That’s not the point. The point is for biblical interpreters to be diligent to know the context of the biblical text and to take care how they interpret and apply that text. We handle God’s word. People will hear it preached as God’s word. And if we speak what is NOT God’s word, we are wielding a dangerous weapon carelessly which may do more harm than good.