The New Testament book of Hebrews says, "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword." Growing up in the American evangelical culture, I heard this verse used a great deal to describe the Bible. The point was to demonstrate that the Bible is not some dusty, irrelevant ancient tome that cannot speak to modern experience, but a book that remains vital to the faith and experience of Christians to this very day. In its most extreme form, quoting this verse can amount to a promise that merely reading the Bible is enough to change your life, because God will use it to speak directly to your heart and change you.
The trouble is, that when you read that verse in context, it's clear that it means nothing of the kind:
Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. (Hebrews 4:12-13, NRSV)In Hebrews, the verse is referring not to the liveliness and potency of the Bible, but to God's personal ability to speak to and judge the human heart. The paragraphs that immediately precede this one make this more plain, as the "word of God" that is discussed in them is not a book but God's voice, speaking to David, Joshua, and others. There are places where Bible does speak directly about scripture (most notably, 2 Timothy 3:16), but this verse is not one of them.
Christians are almost equally fond of (1) quoting Bible verses while ignoring their context and (2) accusing others of quoting Bible verses while ignoring their context. One of the big reasons for this is that Christians—especially Protestants—see the Bible as the absolute best (and often only) source of proof that God agrees with them; when Christians get into arguments with each other, they resort to quoting the Bible as a prooftext to back up their claims.
A larger issue than this, however, is ignorance of and disagreement about what actually constitutes the context when it comes to a given Bible verse. Here are some examples of things that can count as "context," using American evangelicals' all-time favorite, John 3:16 as a case in point:
Immediate Literary Context:
One of the more frequent meanings of "you took that out of context" when Christians hurl it at each other is the words right next to the quoted text in the Bible. The immediate literary context of John 3:16 is the story of the meeting of Jesus and Nicodemus in which it is embedded (John 3:1-21, NRSV). Placing the verse back into this context has the effect of changing how the hearer perceives it. The verse is transformed from a pat description of God's sending Jesus to earth (supposedly a sort of summary of the Gospel in a single sentence) into a small piece of a larger story and explanation of the nature of God, Jesus, and his mission. Instead of a rote phrase, we get a more lively bit of revelation, Jesus speaking about himself and his purpose to a confused and questioning stranger.
In some cases, putting a quote back into its immediate literary context can radically alter the perceived meaning of the verse, depending on whether the usual interpretation is contradicted by the words right next to the verse in the Bible. My earlier example, Hebrews 4:12, shows how the meaning can be altered substantially by placing a verse back in its immediate literary context.
Book-Level Context:
The next level of context is the level of the whole book that the quoted verse is a part of. We can look at a verse and think about its relation to the narrative, the messages, and the themes of the book it's embedded in. How does it fit in the narrative? Which messages does it support? What themes does it relate to? John 3:16 seems to relate to John's theme of Jesus' pre-existent divinity, and it's in keeping with John's picture of a self-confident Jesus who speaks in highly developed and often mysterious theological language.
If a verse seems to contradict one of the main messages or themes of the book it's in, or if it's out of sync with the narrative logic of the book, that may be grounds for examining it with greater scrutiny—is the verse sarcastic? Is it from a different literary source from the other content in the book? What does it mean if it is?
Testament-Level Context:
We can continue to telescope out the context of a verse by talking about its relationship with the major sections of the Bible it's in—how does it relate to other ideas in the Old/New Testament? With John 3:16, we can notice and ponder the fact that Jesus does not say anything particularly similar about himself in the other gospels, or we can compare it to the way Paul writes about Jesus' identity and mission in his letters.
Bible-Level Context:
Finally, we can zoom all the way out and ask how the verse relates to the whole book it's embedded in. If it's in the Old Testament, how does it complement or conflict with ideas in the New Testament? Does it point to an event or an idea that comes to fruition in the New Testament? If it's in the New Testament, how does it draw on or relate to ideas from the Old Testament? John 3:16, for example, draws on the Old Testament language of God's son, which would originally have referred to the king of Israel, and repurposes it to mean something more than simple kingship.
Cultural Context:
What we know about the cultures of the people who originally wrote and read the books of the Bible can radically alter how we read an individual verse.
John 3:16 speaks about people who believe in Jesus receiving "eternal life." Evangelicals have a tendency to equate this with life in Heaven with God after death, but in the first century CE, when Jesus spoke, the notion that after you die, your soul can go to Heaven, was not current. The closest concept to an afterlife at the time was the resurrection, in which people would be raised, body and soul, (or, have their souls given new resurrection bodies), to live again on Earth in God's new kingdom. Jesus could have said, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish forever but may be resurrected," but he didn't, which leaves us to wonder just what exactly he might have been talking about. Here's one interesting interpretation.
A more immediate example of the cultural context reversing our understanding of something is Matthew 5:45, when Jesus speaks about God who "sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." American Christians might be tempted to quote this to mean, "bad things happen to everybody," but if we remember that Israel is a hot, dry climate, where rain is very desirable, we can realize it means something more like "good things happen to everybody." (The immediate literary context also helps clarify this.)*
Documentary Criticism:
One way in which laypeople are especially prone to take the Bible out of its context is to ignore the fact that many of the Bible's books are composed from multiple sources. (John is probably not such a book, but there are people who think that it is.)
Scholars have spent a great deal of effort attempting to pick apart the seams of the Bible and discern where the different parts come from.** Especially if the narrative that you're reading seems to contradict itself, paying attention to the details of the story in this way can be crucial to a full understanding of the text.
Church History:
Finally, the historical teaching of the church is an important context. How the church has read the verse you're looking at down through the centuries can be key to fitting it into one's faith. (For example, even if the original meaning of John 3:16 might not have referred to the afterlife as we conceive of it, the fact that many Christians have long treated it as if it does bears.) Not only that, but it's important to read the Bible in the light of the basic creeds of the church, without which it can sometimes be easy to end up believing some heterodox things; the Arians knew their Bible just as well as orthodox Christians of their day, after all.
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These contexts are all worthy of attention when speaking of a passage in the Bible. Note, however, that paying attention to different contexts may lead to contradictory or more complicated interpretations: the interpretation from immediate context may be muddled by something in the Bible-level context,† and the context of the verse in church history may be very different from its context when seen from a documentary-critical perspective. In fact, it's almost always possible to accuse someone of taking a verse out of context, because there are so many contexts one can pay attention to, and interpreters are rarely able to incorporate them all in their interpretations.
Even so, if we aren't mindful of context when reading the Bible, we take some very significant risks: the risk of accidentally reading our own culture into the text, or worse, we risk setting aside real interpretation for mere prooftexting, a mindless search for verses to prop up our pre-formed ideas about the world. But keeping all of these contexts straight—literary, historical, or what have you—is next to impossible without help.
There's a notion abroad in American evangelicalism that the Bible by itself is sufficient for God's purposes. It's what people mean when they say "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword;" they think they can just open up the Bible and it will speak to them, to their specific needs, right then, the things they need to hear. While I hesitate to suggest that God is incapable of reaching people in any fashion that God chooses, to expect that the Bible will operate this way is essentially magical thinking. When we read the Bible as if it's somehow written just for us, like there's a code there that just needs interpreting, we treat it more like a tool of divination—like a pack of tarot cards or tea leaves at the bottom of a cup—than a scripture.
The Bible deserves more respect than that. If it is to be, as it's described in 2 Timothy, "useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness," then Christians who read it must make every effort to examine what it means, and how that meaning fits into the larger picture of our faith. In practical terms, this should mean that when Christians study the Bible, they should do it with a study Bible, or a commentary, or a Bible history reference, or something to inform them of what is going on at a cultural, textual, or historical level around the text. To do anything less is to risk too much.
*I could add some related categories here, like Genre and Authorial Intent, but this list is already getting very long. Suffice it to say that we can also take the Bible out of context by ignoring what literary genre we're reading—e.g., forget that Revelation is a piece of apocalyptic literature, which makes considerable use of certain kinds of metaphor and hyperbole, at your peril. And we ignore the context of authorial intent when we forget to combine our knowledge of genre, cultural context, and other factors to make educated guesses about what the author meant when they wrote the book. Here's a great example of this kind of investigation into the authorial intent behind Romans 1:26-27, which is often used as clear biblical proof that homosexuality is a sin, but which is more complicated than that.
**A while back, my dad put together this neat demonstration, picking apart the two Noah stories that are woven together into one big story in our Bibles today.
† For example, Paul's assertion in Romans that Christians are justified by faith alone is complicated by the letter of James, which points out that faith without works is dead.
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