Is Background Information Ever Necessary to Understand the Bible?
Yes!
Wayne Grudem ignorantly answers, "No," writing in an article titled "The Perspicuity of Scripture":
"Historical background information can certainly enrich our understanding of individual passages of Scripture, making it more precise and more vivid. But I am unwilling to affirm that background information can ever be properly used to nullify or overturn something the text actually says. In addition, I am not reluctant to affirm that additional historical background information is ever necessary for getting a proper sense of a text."
The problem with Mr. Grudem's argument is that without historical-cultural context of what was happening in the Roman Empire, in Israel, and in the Congregation at the time, you are likely to misrepresent the text and misinterpret it by turning it into mere verses to be ripped out of their immediate context at random and arbitrarily used in isolation of their context to say whatever your opinion of them is.
Galatians was Paul's very first letter written. It was arguably the first letter of the New Testament ever written, with the letter of James possibly pre-dating it. Romans was Paul's sixth letter written. There are eight years between these two letters. Paul was not writing doctrinal treatises with his letters. He was responding to precise issues. Unless you know what these issues were, you will inevitably misinterpret Scripture.
The early Christians experienced these things, and understood what the apostles were writing about. We are 1,900 years removed from their experiences. We need that historical-cultural background in order to properly understand their letters. Some of that information is provided in the book of Acts, but not everything. Reading the letters in their proper chronological context helps a little, but not completely. Any Christian who says that we do not need such information is putting his ignorance on full display for all to admire.
Paul had gathered several Christians from various congregations he had already planted and was sending them to Rome to establish a congregation there, since Jews had been banished only years earlier. Romans 16 is a list of the friends Paul had sent to Rome. This should be the first chapter you read, followed by chapters 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, and 11, which give us the need of salvation for both Jews and Greeks, and lastly by chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, which are about the Christian life. Chapters 12-15 list almost every problem Paul or the congregations ever experienced in community life. (A true dose of community life will be similar.) Paul is writing primarily to these Christians, and to any believers they convert.
Does Mr. Grudem understand any of this context? Does this context inform any of his beliefs as to what the letter to the Romans is actually saying? Not in the least. As a typical theologian, Mr. Grudem uses the typical two tactics the Jewish theologians had perfected in order to gaslight the "ordinary and uneducated" believer: (1) language bullying and (2) a claim to special status as the official interpreter of Scripture.
Mr. Grudem's interpretation is that the apostle Paul was discussing theological dogma, which simply is not true. You have to engage in a great many mental gymnastics in order to retain that erroneous and fallacious belief. Were the "ordinary and uneducated" twelve writing theological treatises with their letters, too? Highly unlikely. None of them, including the apostle Paul, wrote theological treatises. The first 300 years of Christianity are opposed to the last 1700 years.
The fact of reality is this: the further away from the time of writing you are, the more historical-cultural context you need to rightly interpret the text. Individual verses mean nothing. In fact, chapters and verses are 700 and 500 years old respectively. They were not put their by the original authors, and they are a distraction to reading Scripture accurately and correctly, paying attention to the natural breaks provided by the author. Christians need to come to terms with this quickly because they keep getting further and further away from the teachings, practices, and traditions of the apostles and the early Christians who were all loyal to Jesus.
What did the early Christians understand from these letters? How did they use/interpret them? If you ass-u-me that they were in error in their usage/interpretation, being only 50 years separated from the apostles, and that we are somehow correct, being 1,900 years separated from the apostles, then you have some serious issues to address in your thinking processes. Specifically, you need to study logic because yours is fallacious. I will reiterate Tertullian's argument:
"I say that my gospel is the true one. Marcion [a leading Gnostic teacher] says that his is. I say that Marcion's gospel is adulterated. He says mine is. Now, how can we settle this stand-off, unless we use the principle of time. According to this principle, authority lies with the one who is prior in time. It's based on the elemental truth that corruption (of doctrine) lies with the one who is shown to have originated later in time. Since error is falsification of truth, truth must necessarily precede error."
If your interpretations are in the same vein as Augustine, Luther, or Calvin, then your interpretations are justifiably in error. If you do not know why that is, then you are not as intelligent as you suppose you are. You need to do more reading. These men had no qualms about willfully contradicting the Lord Jesus' teachings and insinuating that they were merely suggestions than actual commands. Interestingly enough, the early Christians for the first two and half centuries took Jesus' teachings literally. It was not until the fourth century that everything fell apart, and the Congregation has never recovered—not even with the Reformation!
This further exposes the logical fallacy committed by Paul Washer:
"Let's go back through 2000 years of Christian history. If the men and women who loved and cherished the Scriptures, and had a high view of Scriptures, are all in agreement with regard to a certain doctrine, and they don't agree with you, then who's probably wrong?"
The beliefs, practices, and traditions of the last 1,700 years of Christian history are opposed in many ways to the beliefs, practices, and traditions of the first 300 years of Christian history. Ergo, who is most definitely wrong? Clearly Mr. Washer with his several beliefs that originated with the Gnostics, such as: that man is totally depraved, that we are saved solely by grace, that works play no role in our salvation, and that we cannot lose our salvation once we obtain it. If our evangelical doctrine of salvation is true, we are faced with the uncomfortable reality that this doctrine was first taught by "deceivers and antichrists," according to the apostle John, before it was taught by Luther, Calvin, and others. If this does not concern you, it should.
Lastly, historical-cultural context is of grave importance because the Bible is an eastern book. The Eastern mindset is based on collectivism and communal conformity, while the Western mindset is based on individualism and countercultural nonconformity. Westerners regularly eisegete the Bible by reading into it their own preferences and experiences. For example, we assume that on the night He was betrayed, Jesus went to a private place in the garden of Gethsemane to pray. But this is inaccurate. He merely separated Himself from the disciples. At Passover, the garden was most likely packed with people, making it not a good place to find privacy. Observe the following:
"The very nature of Scripture demands that the exegete have some skills in investigating the historical-cultural background of NT texts. The NT, after all, does not come in the form of timeless aphorisms; every text was written in a given first-century time/space framework. Indeed, the NT authors felt no need to explain what were for them and their readers common cultural assumptions. Only when provincial customs might not be understood in broader context are explanations given (e.g., Mark 7:3-4); but these instances are rare.
The lack of such help within the texts themselves is only to be expected, since most people who communicate with each other do so on the basis of shared assumptions that are seldom articulated. These shared assumptions have to do with common history (family or group stories), sociology (the relationships and social structures that determine everyday life), and culture (the values, often not articulated, that a group shares in order to function). Contemporary readers share very few of these assumptions, but at the same time we bring to the text another whole set of shared assumptions within our own culture(s).
These matters are the more complex for the reading of the New Testament because it is the product of two worlds: Jewish and Greco-Roman. This complexity can be seen simply by looking at its two primary figures, Jesus and Paul. While they shared a common history—the OT story of God and his people—which is assumed in everything they say and do, they were born and raised in quite different socio-cultural settings, evidenced first of all by their native tongues (Aramaic for Jesus, Greek for Paul) and then found in a whole variety of other, mostly sociological and cultural, differences.
When one turns to the communities to which the NT documents were written, one finds similar diversity in sociology and culture. The majority of NT documents were addressed to church communities in the Greco-Roman world, most of whose adherents would have been [non-Jewish]. By conversion these people now shared the common history of the people of God—indeed, from Paul's perspective they were integral to the completion of that story, in keeping with the Abrahamic covenant (Gen. 12:2-3) as ti had been articulated eschatologically in the prophets, especially Isaiah. But their sociology (government, city/town structures, family structures, etc.) and their cultural assumptions on all sorts of deep-seated values (honor/shame, sexual morality, patron/client relationships, friendships, etc.) were of a considerably different kind from those shared by Jewish communities in Palestine who followed Jesus (just read James and 1 Corinthians side by side to sense the differences).
The problems that the modern exegete faces here are several. First, we have our own (mostly unrecognized) set of historical-social-cultural assumptions, which cause us unwittingly to read our ideas and customs back into the first century. So one of the difficulties lies in learning to become aware of what needs to be investigated, in overcoming the assumption that we know what the NT writers are saying. The second problem has to do with the immensity of the task of investigation and the paucity of material that is accessible. But even that which is available is mostly beyond the mastery of any one of us; thus we are dependent on others to do some of this work for us, and they will themselves be interpreters of the data. Third, part of the complexity of this issue is that, on the one hand, one needs to read widely on the larger historical-sociological-cultural issues that impact on these early Christian communities, while, on the other hand, there are specific matters that are related to the paragraph you are exegeting that need investigation. This leads to the questions, fourth, of how one goes about the process of investigation and, fifth, of how to evaluate the significance of what has been discovered. This is obviously the (off-and-on) work of a lifetime. Fortunately, the last two decades of the twentieth century saw a spate of studies that are designed to guide one through these matters." —Gordan D. Fee
Ignore historical-cultural context and you necessarily misinterpret God's Word.