Ep. 25 - What is Historical, Cultural Context?
Episode Transcript
Ep. 25 - What is Historical, Cultural Context?
[00:00:00] JC Schroeder: Hello friends. In this episode, I'm going to talk about an important aspect of our interpretation of the Bible, that is the historical, cultural context. I'm gonna talk about what this even is, some differing approaches to it, and why it is important, and how do we understand it? Let's dive into it. I'm JC Schroeder and this is Bite Size Seminary.
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[00:00:24] Presuppositions
[00:00:24] JC Schroeder: Have you ever been in a Bible study? And you're reading a passage, you're studying a passage together, and someone, maybe the leader says. What do you think about this passage? And then someone starts talking about the passage. And they say, well, what I'm getting out of this or what I think this means or what this means to me is X Y Z and then they go on. And then you have that awkward feeling where you're just like, what in the world does this person [00:01:00] talking about? How in the world do they get that out of this passage? That is just gibberish.
[00:01:07] And it's in those sorts of scenarios, those experiences that I think a reminder to us that we all have different perspectives and different pre-suppositions when we come to Scripture. Really, when we come to anything. But especially when we come to Scripture. That can be true for the person that we think has a crazy reading and that's true for us as well. Maybe their reading is not so crazy. Maybe our perspective is not so sane.
[00:01:36] But the point here is that we all have our own perspectives, pre-suppositions and these can be warranted or they can be unwarranted. But the point is these presuppositions shape and at times can even distort our reading of the Bible. And what we need to do is acknowledge that we even have those presuppositions, because if we think that, no, I [00:02:00] totally read the Bible completely, without any input of myself or my background into this text, then you're not evaluating your reading methods very well. And what we need to do is check those presuppositions with the evidence that we have in front of us to see if those presuppositions are warranted or not, we're never gonna be able to just completely throw them off. We'll never become a blank slate and just come with a just perfectly clean eye. But we want to see, is this a good presupposition? Maybe it's warranted. Maybe it's not warranted and I need to adjust it. So that I can hear what God is saying in his word.
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[00:02:39] The Why of the Historical, Cultural Context
[00:02:39] JC Schroeder: Now one of the ways that can help us to be free of this circular reasoning of our experiences, our shaping, our reading of Scripture. Is to look at the historical, cultural context of Scripture. There are a variety of other tools and approaches that will help us with this [00:03:00] looking at the literary context, looking at the linguistic context. There's, there's several of them. But what I wanna just look at today in this episode is the historical/cultural context of Scripture. And I think this is probably one of the most helpful and most important context for us to think about in our own reading of Scripture. And it really does help us to bridge the gap between the differences between me, and you in our 21st century context and the Bible and it's ancient context.
[00:03:35] One thing I think is helpful for us just to remind ourselves, is that the ancient world is very different than our own. There are a lot of similarities to our own. Like we're both human. Both contexts are human with same fears, hopes, those types of things. But there are some significant differences in how we even see [00:04:00] the world. Just as if we were to go to a different country, uh, and has a different culture. We might be in a little bit of a culture shock, going to a different, place in the world today, this is exasperated even more because we're going into not only different place, but in even a different timeframe. So for us to understand Scripture well, we need to know the historical cultural context of Scripture.
[00:04:25] Now I use that term historical/cultural context, because I think historical context alone, doesn't fully grasp it. Cuz then we think if we just know a bunch of ancient history, then we're good. But we also need to know those cultural aspects of how daily life was lived and really that's the point, that we're trying to get at with this historical cultural context. The question we're asking is what was life like in the ancient world? Whether we're studying something in the late Bronze Age, like in the book of Judges or we're dealing with the Roman empire in the New Testament. What was life [00:05:00] like in those particular periods? So we're thinking about what are people's beliefs, practices, their politics, technologies, cultural norms, daily life, etc. All of those things can influence different aspects of a text. Not all of them will influence every single text. But all of them will influence some text at some point.
[00:05:22] So thinking about this, what sort of beliefs were there about the Messiah when Jesus comes to this earth, when he comes to Judea in the first century? What sorts of beliefs were circulating about what the Messiah would do and who he was? That's gonna influence the disciples' perspectives, Israel's perspectives and how Jesus communicates who he is.
[00:05:44] This is, I think just such an interesting thought is that when Jesus came to this earth, he came as a man. We, we celebrate the incarnation at Christmas. And how beautiful and wonderful, and thankful we should be for him coming to this earth. And we [00:06:00] remember that he came as a man, but we also have to remember that he came as a Jewish man. Like he entered, he didn't just come as like an alien floating and then like, he's human. And then he, he died and he came and lived in a Jewish family. He grew up as a Jew. And he went to the local synagogue and heard Scripture being read and memorized it. So if we're going to, know Jesus as a man, as we read of him in Scripture, in the Gospels, if we're gonna read him well and know him well, we have to know some things about what ancient Judaism look like. So that's what we're doing, that's what we're going for with the historical cultural context. What was life like in the ancient world?
[00:06:43] The How of Historical, Cultural Context
[00:06:43] JC Schroeder: Now, how do we find any of this out? Well, for us, it might be slightly challenging because we don't have advanced history degrees or something like that, but what scholars do and what we can do as well, because we have great access to this material as well, is that [00:07:00] we're gonna look in various texts, images, and other artifacts or material culture, that can help us understand that ancient world better. So different texts, so what sorts of books or documents were circulating, and this goes from just your generic sort of letters that are circulating at this time to very literary works like 1 Macabees or even something like Josephs' writings. These give us a better picture of the world that the New Testament lived in, or, you know, you have to shape of, of whichever. Uh, period that you're in. Another feature that we don't really discuss a whole lot is different images. What sorts of images do we have? And how does that shape, the language, and the metaphors and the images that are shared in Scripture.
[00:07:51] And then finally thinking about like material culture. What sorts of things did people live with? What did it look like to [00:08:00] be in a boat with Jesus in that storm? Like what did that boat look like? Was it a tiny little , canoe or was it different than that? Those things need to be attended to.
[00:08:11] Now, sometimes those aspects of the text, images, and artifacts can really play an important part in our reading of a passage in other times it plays more of the role of shaping our imagination, shaping our expectation and the picture that's in our brain of what life was like in the ancient world.
[00:08:32] Now another way we can think about the historical cultural context is that these are elements that affect life and culture both consciously and unconsciously. So this is not just things that we right now are aware of in our own culture and things that they were aware of, but even things that we are unaware of that affect us. So I like this quote from Campbell and Pennington's book Reading the New Testament as Christian Scripture. They say this on page 23. "Cultures [00:09:00] have elaborate systems of meaning that provide a framework for how people understand their lives individually and corporately. We call this the symbolic world. The system of values, habits, and beliefs that operate at a conscious and subconscious level." So that symbolic world works at the conscious and subconscious level. So, they were aware of some of these things. And some of these things were just a part of normal life that they didn't really think about. We want to attend to both of those.
[00:09:31] Differing Approaches to Historical, Cultural Context
[00:09:31] JC Schroeder: Now there are different approaches to the historical cultural context. The first one I want to talk about is called parallelomania. That's a mouthful. And this is the idea that we can go overboard in our connections and parallels that we draw between the ancient world and Scripture. So we're going manic in our parallels, parallelomaina. We see something in the ancient world and we say, oh, that's [00:10:00] just like what we have here in Scripture. It's the same thing. There's no difference. And there are a lot of these parallels. But we can go overboard with it sometimes. And that can lead us to making missteps in our understanding of what God is intending for us to read in Scripture, but also in what ancient Israel believed and practiced.
[00:10:20] One of the ways that's helpful to go against this overuse of parallels is to highlight the differences between ancient Israel, ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and it's surrounding context. There are a lot of similarities. But there are some differences and important differences. Between them as well.
[00:10:42] Now another approach is called parallelophobia. These are not my terms. Other scholars have used these terms, parallelomania and parallelophobia. And here the idea is that you are afraid, phobia, of parallels. Or you think that this is way overplay, that there are very limited, if [00:11:00] any sorts of parallels from the ancient world to Scripture. And I think this sort of approach or this sort of posture, comes up more when you have something from the ancient world that looks similar and maybe a direct parallel, or maybe not is a direct parallel, but seems to be close enough and it threatens our sort of established interpretation of a passage. And so we resist seeing that as a parallel, just for the reason, not because of evidence. But just because it challenges kind of the vision of what the passage or an event looked like. So we have that pre-supposition of what the passage should mean. And when we encounter new evidence that corresponds to the ancient world. We go. Uh, I don't like that, so I'm just going to discount that that's kind of a, a parallelophobia.
[00:11:53] Now with both of these, parallelomania and parallelophobia. There are instances [00:12:00] where we should not make an overuse of parallels and we should be concerned about making too limited use of parallels.
[00:12:07] Now a third sort of approach that we can use is I'm gonna call it just background material and kind of the emphasis is on the term background. And I don't know if this is just the type of term that's used a lot of times. Or I think this comes out as kind of a more subtle approach as more of a middle ground between parallelomania and parallelophobia, where we recognize that the historical cultural context is important. But really, it just becomes something that's in the background. It's not that important. All this historical cultural context does, is it gives us a bit of an extra little spice, uh, an extra little bit of knowledge about this passage. But it's really not that important. Like you can get what's going on without the historical cultural context. And, but if you got it [00:13:00] you're like extra smart. That's what I'm thinking of when I think of that approach of background material.
[00:13:06] Now the fourth approach. Is the one I think is probably the best one. And that's where we see the historical cultural context as being essential, but not everything. So, here, we were recognizing that, yes, we need to know that historical, cultural context. We are not gonna overuse it. We're not going to underuse it. And we're not just gonna see it as something that's like extra spice, but it is essential to our understanding of the meaning of the text. But we also recognize that that's not everything. So it's not just that we know everything about life in the ancient world. Or all of the history and now we know everything about this passage. Nope. There's more to it, but this is an essential component to understanding the meaning of Scripture.
[00:13:48] What about...?
[00:13:48] JC Schroeder: Now, one of the challenges I think that people have in thinking through the historical context in the Bible is dealing with the issue of the uniqueness of [00:14:00] the Bible. To say, well, the Bible is unique so there wouldn't be parallels to the ancient world or the beliefs that we have in the Scripture to its surrounding context. And for some of that there, that is true, there are unique things in Scripture. But what makes the Bible. Unique is not that it's separated from its larger culture is that it's the revealed word of God. It's God speaking to us through the human authors in their cultural environment.
[00:14:28] That's what makes the Bible unique is that it's God's word. And so it's important for us to recognize that the Bible is immersed in a culture, not separate from it. I think it was R. C. Sproul that talks about how the Bible does not descend from heaven on like a heavenly parachute. It is immersed in a culture. He chose his people Israel. He gave them the Oracles of God. And he made that in a way that was understandable in their own environment. [00:15:00]
[00:15:00] And so for us to understand Scripture well, we have to insert ourselves into their world. And when we insert ourselves into that ancient world, into their environment, their history, their culture, that will keep our modern perspectives, our modern pre-suppositions in check.
[00:15:22] So going back to what we discussed at the beginning, is that we all have those pre-suppositions, those differing approaches and we can shape and distort a passage based on our own presuppositions and what the historical cultural context can do is that it can bring us back to what the text is actually saying of what it meant to them. I think this is a helpful kind of maxim for us in reading Scriptures that the Bible can't mean something to us that it didn't mean to the original audience. [00:16:00] We have to first attend to what did God say to them. And what he, and that will be, and what he says to us is. Going to be built off of what he said to them.
[00:16:12] Tools for the Historical, Cultural Context
[00:16:12] JC Schroeder: So this is maybe just a long diatribe and encouragement for us to pay greater attention to that historical cultural context of Scripture. Now, just as I conclude here, I just wanna give you a variety of different tools that are out there to help us with this.
[00:16:28] One of the best ways, I think one of the best tools is a book called The Lost Letters of Pergamum. This is written by Bruce Longenecker. It's a historical fiction. It's a short little book and it's all about the New Testament world. And it is, uh, designed to be an entertaining story that helps you learn about the historical cultural world of the early church. So you can understand the New Testament better. And I use this as a textbook and it's just a phenomenal little book. It's very easy to read. It's very [00:17:00] enjoyable. And you can glean a lot from it. So it it's fiction in that the people that are described in there are not real are mostly not real. But it's written by a very well respected scholar that knows his stuff and is writing this to help teach in kind of a backwards way that background material.
[00:17:21] Now a couple other resources that are very, very helpful are study Bibles. One is the Cultural Background Study Bible, published, I think by Zondervan and then the ESV Archeology Study Bible. I have the cultural background one and I really, really enjoy that one. I've seen the ESV one. Uh, the ESV archeology one. And, uh, it looks really, really great and I've ha heard really great things about it. So those are two one volume sort of text, you know, that's with right there with your Bible. And with the Scripture that can help explain different difficult passages. And I think that's really valuable.
[00:17:56] Now in terms of commentaries, there's the IVP [00:18:00] Bible Background Commentary. This is very accessible, very inexpensive. As far as commentaries go. Two volumes, just gives, really great information. You also have a, in terms of. , other texts that are bigger. Well, beefier more information. Uh, you have the World of the New Testament, which is a handy one volume book. on all things, historical cultural for the New Testament, and then one for the Old Testament Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament. Those are, I think really, really good and really, really helpful. So there's a lot of other good resources and material that are out there, but I think those are good entry points. And, uh, really easy to use types of resources.
[00:18:42] So again, long, sorry, this is so long, but, Yeah, my and just encouragement to us that we would get out of our own presuppositions of what we want the text to say, but we want to hear what God has to say to us. And I think one of the helpful ways of doing that. [00:19:00] Is to look at the historical cultural context.
[00:19:02] That's all I have for today. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget, you can sign up to receive episodes, email directly to you at bitesizeseminary.com. And you can connect with me there or on Facebook or Twitter. Thank you so much for listening. And I'll see you next time.