Out of Context Comfort

When I was in college studying Biblical Languages, my mother told me of an encounter with a biblical scholar who had corrected her somewhat forcefully on the use of a text. She had claimed Isaiah 49:25, “… I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children” and done so with reference to her own children.

Now anyone who has studied Isaiah, and especially 2nd Isaiah, will recognize that this text is not addressed to parents whose children leave the church, and is not intended to promise that those children will certainly return and be saved. When my mother presented the issue to me, however, I looked at it a bit differently. In my view, the promises of return from exile are pardigmatic, and proclaim the nature of God as a saving God, one who seeks and saves the lost (Luke 19:10). So while the text doesn’t directly answer the question, it does point to a comforting promise of God’s faithfulness as a seeking God.

That’s a theme carried forward from the Exodus, through the exile, and into the salvation stories of the New Testament that draw heavily on those stories in coming to understand the mission of Jesus as the Christ.

So I felt that not only was it very harsh to correct someone in that particular fashion for the use of a particular verse, in one sense, the verse is quite applicable, even if the application isn’t that direct.

I was reminded of this story when I read the post, You’re Taking That Out of Context! on The Good Book blog. I think the examples and the comments on handling them in that post are excellent. Those of us who get technical in our study of the Bible would do well to be careful with “the weaker brethren,” at least “weak” in our technical view, and avoid doing harm.

I would draw one more lesson from such incidents, however. It is quite easy to be rigorous in our methodology of interpretation, and equally rigorous in critiquing others. It’s quite easy to give people the impression that they are not really capable of studying the Bible for themselves, and that any error they might make is of eternal import. We can make people afraid to look at the scriptures for themselves.

Now there is an opposite error, or perhaps more than one. There are those who believe they have no need for scholars. Such people forget that the very translations they read, not to mention the source texts on which they are based, are produced by scholars who put in much painstaking effort. There are also those who believe it doesn’t really matter whether they are right or wrong, so long as they are expressing their own opinion.

Somewhere between those views there is a good place, a place where one realizes the importance of pursuing accuracy, and yet is not afraid of the process of learning, in which one will certainly make errors. In this wonderful place, one would pursue accuracy and truth without living in fear of making a mistake.

It is my hope that scholars can aim to make such a place of learning for those in the church who have not been privileged to spend as much time studying as they have.