"Christians
routinely take verses out of context and misapply them to their daily
living. Seeing the Scripture in its proper historical context will
safeguard you from making this all-too common mistake.
[U]nderstanding the story [of the New Testament] will forever deliver
you from the 'cut-and-paste' approach to Bible study that dominates
evangelical thinking today. What is the 'cut-and-paste' approach to
Bible study? It is the common practice of coming to the NT with scissors
and glue, clipping and then pasting disjointed sentences (verses)
together from Books that were written decades apart.
This
'cut-and-paste' approach has spawned all sorts of spiritual hazards—one
of them being the popular practice of lashing verses together to build
floatable doctrines. Another is that of 'proof-texting' to win
theological arguments. (A vast majority of Western Christianity behaves
as if the mere citation of some random and de-contextualized verse ends
all discussion on virtually all subjects.)
The Medievals called this
'cut-and-paste' method 'a string-of-pearls.' You take one text, find
some remote metaphorical connection with another text, and voilá, an
ironclad doctrine is born! [Such as the 'Rapture.'] But this is a
pathetic approach to understanding the Bible. While it is great for
reading one's own biases into the text, it is horrible for understanding
the intent of the biblical authors.
It has been rightly said that a
person can prove anything by taking Bible verses out of context. Let me
demonstrate how one can 'biblically' prove that it is God's will for
believers to commit suicide. All you have to do is lift two verses out
of their historical setting and paste them together:
"And he [Judas]...went...and hanged himself" (Matt. 27:5).
"Then said Jesus...'Go and do the same' " (Luke 10:37b)
While this is an outrageous example of the 'cut-and-paste' approach, it makes a profound point. Without understanding the historical context of the NT, Christians have managed to build doctrines and invent practices that have fragmented the Body of Christ into thousands of denominations. Understanding the sequence of each NT Book and the socio-historical setting that undergirds them is one remedy for this problem."
—Frank Viola, The Untold Story of the New Testament Church
We Christians have been taught to approach the Bible in one of eight ways:
→ You look for verses that inspire you. Upon finding such verses, you either highlight, memorize, meditate upon, or put them on your refrigerator door.
→ You look for verses that tell you what God has promised so that you can confess it in faith and thereby obligate the Lord to do what you want.
→ You look for verses that tell you what God commands you to do.
→ You look for verses that you can quote to scare the devil out of his wits or resist him in the hour of temptation.
→ You look for verses that will prove your particular doctrine so that you can slice-and-dice your theological sparring partner into biblical ribbons. (Because of the proof-texting method, a vast wasteland of Christianity behaves as if the mere citation of some random, decontextualized verse of Scripture ends all discussion on virtually any subject.)
→ You look for verses in the Bible to control and/or correct others.
→ You look for verses that "preach" well and make good sermon material. (This is an ongoing addiction for many who preach and teach.)
→ You sometimes close your eyes, flip open the Bible randomly, stick your finger on a page, read what the text says, and then take what you have read as a personal "word" from the Lord.
Now look at this list
again. Which of these approaches have you used? Look again: Notice how
each is highly individualistic. All of them put you, the individual
Christian, at the center. Each approach ignores the fact that most of
the New Testament was written to corporate bodies of people (churches),
not to individuals.
But that is not all. Each of these approaches is
built on isolated proof texting. Each treats the New Testament like a
manual and blinds us to its real message. It is no wonder that we can
approvingly nod our heads at paid pastors, the Sunday morning order of
worship, sermons, church buildings, religious dress, choirs, worship
teams, seminaries, and a passive priesthood—all without wincing.
We
have been taught to approach the Bible like a jigsaw puzzle. Most of us
have never been told the entire story that lies behind the letters that
Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude wrote. We have been taught chapters
and verses, not the historical context.
For instance, have you ever
been given the story behind Paul's letter to the Galatians? Before
nodding, see if you can answer these questions off the top of your head:
Who were the Galatians? What were their issues? When and why did Paul
write to them? What happened just before Paul penned his Galatian
treatise? Where was he when he wrote it? What provoked him to write the
letter? And where in Acts do you find the historical context for this
letter? All of these background matters are indispensable for
understanding what our New Testament is about. Without them, we simply
cannot understand the Bible clearly or properly.
One scholar put it
this way, "The arrangement of the letters of Paul in the New Testament
is in general that of their length. When we rearrange them into their
chronological order, fitting them as far as possible into their
life-setting within the record of the Acts of the Apostles, they begin
to yield up more of their treasure; they become self-explanatory, to a
greater extent than when this background is ignored."
Another
writes, "If future editions [of the New Testament] want to aid rather
than hinder a reader's understanding of the New Testament, it should be
realized that the time is ripe to cause both the verse and chapter
divisions to disappear from the text and to be put on the margin in an
inconspicuous a place as possible. Every effort must be made to print
the text in a way which makes it possible for the units which the author
himself had in mind to become apparent."
You could call our method
of studying the New Testament the "clipboard approach." If you are
familiar with computers, you are aware of the clipboard component. If
you happen to be in a word processor, you may cut and paste a piece of
text via the clipboard. The clipboard allows you to cut a sentence from
one document and paste it into another.
Pastors, seminarians, and
laymen alike have been conditioned by the clipboard approach when
studying the Bible. This is how we justify our man-made, encased
traditions and pass them off as biblical. It is why we routinely miss
what the early church was like whenever we open our New Testaments. We
see verses. We do not see the whole picture.
—Frank Viola, Pagan Christianity?