The Queen James Version - Deliberate Mistranslation and a Big, Fabulous Bible

So big. So fabulous. Source

A few days ago, a Facebook friend tagged me in a link he'd posted about the Queen James Bible (hereafter, "the QJV," for Queen James Version), which, in the words of its editors, "seeks to resolve interpretive ambiguity in the Bible as it pertains to homosexuality." I'd never heard of it, so I clicked on the link and read about it. I ended up having more to say than would fit easily into a Facebook comment, so I decided to talk about the QJV in depth here instead.

Before I say anything else, let me state up front that I am an LGBTQ-affirming Christian. I believe that minority sexualities and gender identities are a blessed part of God's good and ordered creation, and they should be affirmed and celebrated in God's church. (I've talked about some of the reasons for this here.) At the same time, I am a thoroughly orthodox Christian: I profess the universal creeds of the church on a weekly basis with profound faith in the truth of what I am saying.* I believe that church teaching should be grounded in a faithful reading of scripture, guided also by reason, tradition, and experience.

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Now that you know my biases, dear reader, let's dig into the QJV.

The QJV is actually just a King James Bible with alterations made to the eight Bible verses that are most commonly used to condemn homosexuals. (The name "Queen James" is an allusion to the fact that King James, the person who commissioned the King James Bible, is thought by some historians to have been gay or bisexual.) It's not a new Bible translation, but an old one that's been altered to serve a particular purpose. In this, it's unlike just about any Bible I'm familiar with, although Bibliotheca, which takes the American Standard Version and updates some of the language for easier comprehension, seems like a distant cousin.

So the QJV is a weird Bible, more like a publicity stunt or a piece of post-modern art than a traditional Bible edition. It's not clear to me that there's much demand for a "big, fabulous," but very slightly modified KJV with a big rainbow cross on the cover. While the KJV is probably the most beautiful, and certainly most influential, English Bible translation, it's also among the least accurate in its renderings of the original texts.** This makes it an odd choice for making the point that an accurate understanding of the original texts shows that they make no direct reference to homosexuality as we think of it today.

As at least one reviewer has pointed out, if you really want a QJV, you can save money by modifying your own KJV: just scratch out the relevant verses and insert the edits proposed on the QJV website.

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What are the merits of the edits themselves? Some are simply rendering individual words differently than the KJV does, for what I see as legitimate reasons, but several of them are what I would call deliberate mistranslations. This is worth discussing in some depth.

When I say "deliberate mistranslation," what I mean is that the translators have intentionally rendered the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek original in English with words that do not accurately convey the strict sense of the original.† So this category includes, for example, the rendering of the Greek splagchnon as "heart" rather than "bowels" or "intestines," because the heart is the metaphorical seat of the emotions in English and the bowels are not; it includes the rendering of Hebrew zera' as "offspring" instead of "seed," because English speakers rarely refer to their children as their seed. It also includes instances where translators add words that are not in the text in order to clarify what they think the text is saying; for example, the NIV adds "the help of" to clarify that Eve is not claiming to have gotten pregnant by the Lord in Genesis 4:1.‡

Pictured: Eve and her kids.
Not pictured: Eve getting jiggy with the Lord.

Source

In this sense, nearly every English translation of the Bible is going to include some deliberate mistranslations. Looser translations that strive to achieve easy readability in English (the New Living Translation and especially The Message come to mind) are going to do this more than translations that strive to render the exact sense of the original language as strictly as possible (Young's Literal Translation or the New American Standard Bible, for example). The KJV is somewhere between; it tends to render individual words fairly literally, but often adds words for clarity. (It's worth mentioning that most printings of the KJV render added words in italics, which is a cool feature if you're trying to suss out what precisely the underlying text says, and annoying feature if you're trying to read the book out loud without sounding crazy).

Deliberate mistranslation is fine; what's important is that translators acknowledge that they are doing it and point it out when possible, so that readers can see it and investigate for themselves whether the text actually means something different. (An example of extreme deliberate mistranslation done well: The Inclusive Bible, which goes out of its way to interpret the Bible in non-sexist terms, including a refusal to use male pronouns for God. The translators lay out in detail what they're doing and make a good case for why it's worthwhile.) As far as I'm concerned, the QJV's editors are in the clear, since they're completely up front about what they're doing and include detailed explanations of each of their edits on the website. What I actually find more problematic is when translators make claims of high accuracy and then obscure their deliberate mistranslations and the ideology behind them. This is a particular problem with the NIV, for example; I've also discussed it with regard to the ESV. 

The deliberate mistranslations in the QJV are mostly added words; for example, the editors render Leviticus 20:13 with the addition "in the house of Molech" to indicate that they think the verse is about temple prostitution rather than consensual relationships. Romans 1:26-27 gets some more extensive additions and changes, but for essentially the same reason: this text is about paganism rather than homosexuality, the editors believe. The editors change "know" (in the sexual sense) in Genesis 19:5 to "rape and humiliate" to clarify that Sodom is condemned for the sin of not being hospitable to strangers, rather than for being a big ol' pile of gay (as tradition would have it).

But Lot's wife looked back at the big ol' burning pile of gay, and lo, she became a pillar of salt. Source

An exception to the rule is Jude 1:7, which does not add words, but changes "they went after strange flesh" to "they went after nonhuman flesh" to clarify that the sin of Sodom involves trying to rape angels, rather than dudes having sex with dudes. While these are not literal renderings of the exact wording of the original texts, they render interpretations of the texts that are widely, though not universally, accepted in Bible scholarship. Again, since the editors are up front about doing this, I don't see a particular problem.

The rest of the edits simply re-translate the individual Greek words arsenokenotai and malakoi, which are often rendered as if they referred to consensual gay sex between adults, though it is far from clear that that is the case for either. (The former, which means something like "male beds" or "male bedders," appears to have been coined by Paul, and it's unknown what exactly it refers to; the latter means, literally, "soft," and Paul uses it in a way that his contemporaries don't, so again, we're in the dark about what exactly it means.) I think the changes the editors make in translating these word are adequate, though they're not what I would have chosen. These edits are not deliberate mistranslations at all, but simply different interpretations of the exact meaning of the underlying word.

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So, is the QJV worth buying? Certainly not, except to prove a point, or if your church has some really specific and slightly bizarre liturgical needs. Do I have a problem with what its editors are doing? Certainly not, though I wouldn't personally have made all the changes they did.

What's important when considering the QJV is acknowledging the continuity between the QJV and other Bible translations. "Every translation is a betrayal" is a cliche among translators, but it's true: no translator can faithfully, completely render a text in another language. There will always be wordplay, connotation, allusions, and other elements that get lost in the new language, and the text in the new language will tend to generate (however unintentionally) its own wordplay, connotations, and allusions. In addition to this, every translator has some kind of agenda: at the very least, they must have some answer to the question, Why do we need (another) translation? The fact is that the QJV's editors have found an answer to that question, one that no one else came up with, and however odd its actual implementation, their answer is worth pondering.

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*Note that in declaring myself an orthodox Christian, I make a distinction between affirming the dogmas of the church and the doctrines of the church(es). The dogmas of the church are the ideas that the whole church has, at some point, come together and agreed upon in a church council, such as the Council of Nicea. These ideas are affirmed in the creeds, like the Nicene Creed; they're things like the virgin birth of Jesus, his death and resurrection, God's creation of the world, and so forth. Human sexuality and gender identity are not topics that the whole church has ever come to an agreement on in a churchwide council, and given the fractured state of modern Christianity, it is unlikely that such a council will be convened any time soon. While many church denominations have different doctrines regarding human sexuality and gender identity, none of them has been affirmed by the whole church, and none can be a measure of Christian orthodoxy. I've written at length on the subject of who can and cannot be considered a Christian in an essay called The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be.
**Not primarily because of what I'm calling "deliberate mistranslation," but because the 17th-century translators did not have a completely firm grasp of Hebrew, and they didn't have access to the vast library of manuscripts of the texts that modern archaeology has provided us with.
†Deliberate mistranslation, then, is related closely to what Robert Alter calls the "heresy of translation by explanation," which I've discussed at some length here. Alter's category is essentially a subset of the larger category of deliberate mistranslation.
‡The NIV reads “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” Young’s Literal Translation more accurately renders this, “I have gotten a man by Jehovah.”

ESV Reader's Bible Review, with Notes on the Translation

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine alerted me to a Kickstarter she thought I would want to see, for a project called Bibliotheca. (See the video below—for real, see it, it's a great video).

The idea behind the project is that, because of the format in which it's usually published, the Bible is actually really hard to just sit down and read at length the way you would, say, a novel or a book of poetry (just two of the many genres which it contains).

I watched this video and was overcome by profound booklust, but at the end of the day I wasn't quite willing to part with $70 for this particular item—I wasn't sure I'd like the translation, and backing on Kickstarter is not quite the same as buying something outright. But the same friend who pointed me to Bibliotheca told me about the Bible Design Blog, a lovely site where I learned about the ESV Reader's Bible, a volume with a similar aim at a more affordable price. I tried to avoid buying the thing, but I eventually lost all resistance and shelled out $20 for a copy.

This was a problem, because my wife had already been pointing out, ever since we got married and moved in together, that we genuinely own too, too many Bibles as it is:

Above: the reasons I should probably not be buying more Bibles

Fortunately for me, when my ESV Reader's Bible arrived and I told Anna about it, rather than scold me, she merely lamented that she couldn't really be mad, since it was, after all, a Bible. I was relieved.

The Book:

The ESV Reader's Bible comes in two formats, a hardcover version (cloth over board), which also comes with a lovely slipcase, and a softcover, leather-bound edition. I opted for the former, mostly because I associate the soft, leather-bound book feeling with Bible-y-ness, and I was trying to get as far as possible from that feeling in my reading experience with this volume.

Bible in its slipcase, a lovely feature in and of itself

This Bible doesn't really feel like a Bible. Held in the hand or the lap, it feels much more like a thick hardcover novel, the kind you take to the beach for a long afternoon: it fits comfortably in one hand, its cover pleasantly rough against the skin, like any really good hardcover without its dustjacket. The cover and binding are of high quality and lovely both to look at and touch.

The ESV Reader's Bible, fitting pleasantly into my hand(s) as I sit in my library/office at home

Like Bibliotheca, the Reader's Bible aims to improve the ease of reading through the Bible by stripping away the apparatus that normally clutters up the text when we we pick up a Bible from a pew or hotel drawer. Verse numbers, section headings, footnotes, cross-references, and double columns are nowhere to be found. Instead, each Biblical book looks like a long chapter in a novel, with the title at the beginning, words broken into paragraphs, and small section breaks between chapters:

The poetry sections are similarly uncluttered, though they don't reserve a single page for each poem the way most volumes of poetry do:

Just for comparison's sake, take a look at the Reader's Bible next to my mom's old Thompson Chain Reference Bible, which is designed for doing pretty much exactly the opposite of extended, pure reading. Here, both volumes are open to the first chapter of Mark. See how the Reader's Bible lets the text breathe without distraction for the eye, where the Chain Reference squeezes the text into tiny columns and loads up the margins with cross-references that pull the eye away from the story:

Top: ESV Reader's Bible; bottom: my mom's old NIV Thompson Chain Reference Bible

The Bible it most resembles in my collection is probably Robert Alter's translation with commentary, which also uses a single-column format and no verse numbers, but which does include a great many footnotes that draw the eye:

Both open to 2 Samuel; note the majority of text in the Alter volume below the footnote line

So the Reader's Bible feels more like a novel than any Bible I've ever encountered. The feeling would be complete if not for the Bible-thin paper that's used in the book. If you look at Genesis and the Psalms above, you can see that there's a fair amount of text on other pages "ghosting" through to the page it's open to; this seems like a product of the thinness of the paper. The paper also warps and wrinkles easily under pressure from your fingers, like most Bible paper does.

Of course, the Reader's Bible is packing a ton of text into a regular hardcover novel-sized codex; to get a sense of how thin the paper needed to be to do this reasonably, I compared the thickest books in my library to the Reader's Bible:

Some of my thickest books, ordered by width

All of these were thicker than the Reader's Bible, and yet none of them had even half as many pages! Don Quixote comes close, but it's nearly half again as thick as the Reader's Bible.

So the book design is just a bit of a compromise. Bibliotheca deals with this problem by splitting the Bible into four volumes, but if you want to pack the whole Bible into a single volume, even stripped of everything but the bare text itself, thin paper is apparently the only way to make it happen without creating a monster brick.

We're looking at you, Neal Stephenson, with yer Cryptonomicons and yer Anathems. (Source)

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The Experience: 

The Bible study I'm a part of, a group of residents from Anna's hospital and their spouses, is currently studying Mark. In the absence of any reason to read anything else, I settled on that as my text to read as a test run with this volume. I also ended up reading Galatians, Colossians, and Ruth later on because of the pervasive joy I feel when I pick this thing up.

But let's start with Mark. Mark is the shortest gospel, and the gospels are easier to get through than a non-narrative text like a letter or a poem, but it's still usually a bit of a challenge for me to sit and read Mark all the way through without my mind wandering. This volume's presentation of the text without numbers, columns, headers, or section breaks, though, really drew me into the reading—it made the book actually hard to put down! I got wrapped up in the story and, maybe for the first time, really felt like I understood the flow of it, how each element of the story leads to the next: Jesus' incredible healings gather crowds; he teaches them about the kingdom of God that's just about to break through in an unexpected way; his explosive message angers varying groups in turn—the Pharisees, the scribes, the Herodians, the Sadducees, the priests—who, though they are each other's enemies, conspire to trap him; he angrily drives out the money changers at the Temple, which is enough for his opponents to arrest him; finally, he's executed and rises again.

That narrative sequence has never fully come through for me before. Normally it's easy to read Mark in little fragments and analyze what Jesus is teaching or doing here or there, because the textual apparatus is set up for that kind of thing, especially in Bibles with section headings announcing what's about to happen and breaking up the text. But absorbing the story as a whole is another task entirely, and this is the first Bible I've encountered that facilitates that task at all.

It also made some more local narrative elements come through in a different way. Mark is an efficient, plain, effective storyteller, very much an inheritor of the Hebrew Bible's starkly economical and bare narrative style. His dramatic, fast-paced style really came through to me, and I was drawn into the text in a way I haven't been before. I've read a lot about the Bible, so I know some important literary devices in Mark from an intellectual level—things like the suspense involved in putting the hemorrhaging woman story in the middle of the story about Jairus's dying/dead/resurrected daughter, and the big turning point at the center of the book when the disciples finally get who Jesus is and then he's transfigured before their eyes—but reading the book this way helped me experience them viscerally, as not just as ideas but as feelings, connections, for the first time.

Galatians and Colossians, both letters of Paul (a biblical genre I have particular difficulty getting into) were both a breeze, and like Mark, I found myself grasping what they were each actually about, as a whole, much more than I usually do.

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The Translation:

The English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible is entirely new to me. I'd literally seen the name of the translation before, but until I purchased this volume, that was pretty much the extent of my exposure. By curious coincidence, at our most recent Bible study, which is a group that leans pretty heavily toward the evangelical wing of the Church, someone brought out an ESV and several others commented that it was their favorite, the best translation, the most accurate, etc.

So I did some digging, talked to my dad, searched Wikipedia, and so forth, to figure out what is the what of the ESV. Turns out it's a revision of the Revised Standard Version (RSV). We already have one of those, of course; it's called the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which is a great though by no means perfect translation. (The NRSV is what I typically cite and link to on this blog, and it's the translation I'm most used to.) The ESV, though, is a conservative revision of the RSV. In more ways than one, actually: all the sources I've seen say that a mere 6% of the text has been changed in any way. But what I really mean by "conservative" here is that the ESV was translated for and by conservative Christians.

I don't have a real problem with Christians of a certain ideological bent creating a translation that reflects their views; after all, I bought the Inclusive Bible for my wife, a translation that explicitly eschews gendered language for God, even though the original text frequently refers to God in male terms. She loves it. My issue with the ESV is more specific: there's a tension between the translators' biblicism and the actual features of the original texts themselves, and this causes them to do some slightly wacky things.

Biblicism is a subject that I've discussed before in detail, but it's basically a set of beliefs structured around on the idea that the Bible is the inerrant/infallible word of God. I think it's a silly and ultimately unworkable way of reading scripture, but the point here is that it seems to be the ESV translators' view of scripture. The problem with scripture is that it's messy—confusingly messy, if you think it's the "very words of God speaking to us," as the translators put it in their introduction. Why is the order of creation different in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2? Why does Judges tell us Moses' father-in-law was Hobab, but Exodus calls him Jethro or Reuel? Why does 2 Samuel say Elhanan killed Goliath, when 1 Samuel tells us it was David? And so on.

This is a problem the translators of the NIV (the favorite translation for evangelicals while I was growing up) also ran into. Their solution, notoriously, was to alter the text to make it both internally consistent and consistent with their theology. Their insistence that the Bible was infallible, "God's Word in written form," was directly at odds with their translation practice, which is that the Bible needs to be altered so it does not contradict either itself or evangelical Christianity.

I checked to see if the ESV would do the same thing, and it does, though to a lesser extent. (The list I found of mistranslations in the NIV had 125 instances; 41 of those showed up in the ESV, too.) The ESV harmonizes some different versions of names in the texts and does some Christianizing (most egregiously in Isaiah 7:14, where it deliberately mistranslates "young woman" as "virgin" to match the citation in Matthew, where it's used to predict the virgin birth of Jesus). It's also been criticized for being clunkily literal, unidiomatic, and tone deaf,* and to my personal distaste it has an overtly conservative translation in some of the "clobber passages" for homosexuality.

I will say, however, that in reading the ESV Reader's Bible, my experience was never impinged upon by the translation. It's an "essentially literal" translation, but not so much so that it's unreadable as English or anything. (Young's Literal Translation this ain't, and I'm told it's easier to read than the also very literal New American Standard Bible.) There were many times where I quite liked what I was reading, so please take these criticisms with a large grain of salt.

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Wrapping Up:

If you watched the video at the top of the post and can't bear the thought of not owning a Bibliotheca, the bad news is that the Kickstarter is done and you can't back it anymore, but you can actually still preorder it at bibliotheca.co any time up until the creator, Adam Lewis Greene, actually places an order with the printer. So get on that!

I'm really hoping (1) that the popularity of the Bibliotheca project will not cause so much hassle for Greene—who originally envisioned making 500 volumes but is now going to need to figure out how to make thousands—that he gives up and doesn't deliver, (2) that its success will spur him or someone to make Bibliotheca more broadly commercially available, and (3) that it'll eventually appear in a translation I already trust. At all events, I'd love to see one in person sometime...

The good news is that, however great Bibliotheca is, I'm satisfied that the ESV Reader's Bible is a great substitute, or at least a very strong second place. It's also currently available at an astoundingly good price for a book of such high quality over at the Westminster Bookstore (you can also get the leather bound edition in brown and black there for good prices, though not the fabulous $14.99 the hardcover is going for).

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*Favorite example: Jesus' perhaps inadvertently sexual assertion in Luke 17:35 that "There will be two women grinding together."

The Altar Call, A Thing of Troubling Beauty

Roswell UMC

All your anxiety, all your care,
Bring to the mercy seat, leave it there,
Never a burden He cannot bear,
Never a friend like Jesus!
"All Your Anxiety," by Edward H. Joy

The above chorus exhorts its hearers to come to the "mercy seat" and leave their burdens there with Jesus. To many it will sound at best obscure and at worst completely foreign, but to me, a person raised in the Salvation Army, it is the very sound of my childhood.

"All Your Anxiety" is the kind of song that gets sung during an "altar call;" it encourages people to step out of their ordinary experience and come to have a special moment with Christ. That, basically, is what an altar call is: an invitation to a special encounter with God. The altar call can be an instrument of manipulation and even cruelty, but at its best, it can also be a thing of profound beauty. I have not always recognized this.

To explain in a little more detail: an altar call, or "invitation," is a portion of a church service, usually coming at the end of the service after an extended period of exhortatory preaching, in which the preacher invites his or her audience to come forward to the front of the room to pray at an altar.¹ The altar can be an object specifically designed for the purpose (say, a large block of wood suitable for kneeling around), or it can be something more ad hoc, like a simple row of chairs. The point is to have something to kneel at and rest one's head and arms against in a praying position, and to have it placed in front of the congregation.

The altar call always takes place during an extended period of singing and music. During breaks between songs, the musicians continue playing in the background while the preacher resumes his or her exhortations, encouragements, and appeals to the congregation, often inviting again and again anyone who was too afraid or stubborn to leave their seat at the first invitation.

The purpose of all this is to (1) invite people to convert to Christianity by "accepting Jesus into your heart" and (2) to offer an opportunity for Christians to either recommit themselves to Christ or pray in a special setting about a deep concern. In both cases, others will typically come to pray with those who come to the altar.

The altar call is a holdover from a tradition that still survives in parts of American Christianity, the camp meeting.

Camp meetings originated on the American frontier as a way of bringing church to sparsely populated areas that couldn't support a church building or a full-time minister. Instead of regular Sunday services, folks would plan to gather and set up camp in a specific place and time, where one or more itinerant preachers would show up and preach an extended series of sermons, typically lasting for several days. There would be a great deal of music and prayer and religious fervor, often to a degree that modern Americans might find strange or uncomfortable:

"Revival" by James Sturm, pg. 15, from James Sturm's America

The altar call originated in this setting, though it has persisted beyond it even as the American frontier disappeared and the camp meeting became a rarity, serving as it does now a much less dire need (most populated areas in the States these days having enough people to sustain stable religious communities of some kind). Unsurprisingly, the altar call still carries with it some of the camp meeting's faults, namely a certain irrational emotionalism and an over-reliance on the rhetorical skill of the preacher.

At times, the altar call can be an aggravation, or worse. If part or all of the congregation does not feel convinced by the preacher's message, or is simply not in the correct frame of mind, the altar call can be a hassle; some preachers have difficulty accepting that no one really wants to come forward, and will drag the invitation out for a while just to make sure, or to try to save face. (Making an altar call that no one responds to can be a little embarrassing.) Sometimes preachers play on the listeners' fears, usually of negative outcomes in the afterlife should they fail to accept Jesus,² in order to get people to come forward.

What's more, sometimes an altar call just is not the appropriate thing: I once was in a church service at which it was announced in the middle of the sermon that one of the congregation's members had died quite suddenly (an accidental death). The preacher chose that moment to make an extended altar call, but no one was in the mood for (re)committing their life to Jesus; we really all just wanted to go home and be sad over our friend's passing.

At the same time, however, the altar call carries on some of the best elements of the camp meeting with it, too. Camp meetings were a time of fellowship, bonding, and community for people who otherwise might not see each other much, or who might never even have met otherwise. The altar call preserves this communal element by creating a time in which members of a church body can come and pray over their concerns together, to forge special sacred bonds with God and one another in prayer at the front of a community of supportive, prayerful witnesses and friends.

Camp meetings and altar calls will likely strike many as holdovers from an embarrassing time in American religion, in which an ignorant, backward religious culture sowed the seeds that would grow into the worst excesses of modern American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. While there may be some truth to this, it misses an important fact: the camp meeting, for all its excesses, was a tool for great good. The best example certainly lies in that most daring of nineteenth-century movements, abolitionism.

Wikimedia

As Marilynne Robinson puts it in her essay "Who Was Oberlin?", the abolitionists of the early 1800s "embraced unpopular, deeply controversial opinions. There was such a powerful stigma attached to abolitionism before the Civil War, and after it as well—what fanatics these people must have been to hate slavery so much they wanted to put an end to the institution altogether!—that to this day it is treated as at best a dubious project."³ While ending may slavery seem like the obvious moral choice to most people today, it is wise to bear in mind the weight of history and social pressure that the abolitionists were up against in the 19th century. Slavery of one kind or another is as old as human civilization itself, and it is no exaggeration to say that much of the prosperity and happiness of the abolitionists' neighbors would have rested on the economic benefits provided by an enslaved population. To the people of their day, the abolitionists were viewed the same way one might view a group that was trying to end the existence of marriage, or money, to name two equally venerable institutions. They were, in a word, radicals.

They were also certainly in the right, which should only serve to enhance our view of their courage. The abolitionists worked tirelessly and, in extreme cases, even fought and died in order to end a barbarous and inhuman practice. They successfully spread the message of freedom and justice from place to place and state to state, moving west to settle and create states of the union that would be free from slavery. The key motivation of the abolitionist movement was a Christian belief in equality of people before God. And the main tool by which the message of abolitionism was spread to the frontier was none other than the camp meeting, complete with altar calls during which people would affirm their commitment to the cause of abolition.⁴

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I have not experienced many altar calls in the last few years; my current church does not employ them. There was a time when I would have called them at best unnecessary and at worst actively harmful to the faith—what use, I wondered, was all this focus on emotional conversion experiences?

I have since circled back round to appreciation, however. The altar call, when done appropriately, when the congregation is ready, when the Spirit of God is moving, can be a special, I dare say sacred, time in the life of the Christian. To quote another Salvation Army tune:

When God comes near,
It is a special moment. 
He calms my spirit,
He takes away each fear. 
Oh such an hour, 
Of sacred, special friendship:
Such is the time,
When God comes near.

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1. In Salvation Army parlance, the altar is often called a "mercy seat," a lovely Old Testament reference which hearkens back to William Tyndale's beautiful, though illegal, English Bible translation. Hence the reference to "mercy seat" in the song at the beginning of this post.
2. Hell, in other words.
3. Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books, pg. 176.
4. I will note here that "the abolition of slavery and the advancement of women's rights were strongly associated in the period before the Civil War;" Robinson also says of Charles Finney, an influential revivalist preacher of the era who serves as her primary example in writing about this period, "Charles Finney was a great reformer. His two signature causes were the abolition of slavery and the enhancement of the status of women." Both quotes ibid., pg. 170. When I Was a Child is a fantastic book, by the by.

Give to Everyone Who Asks of You

For two years immediately after finishing college, I served in an AmeriCorps program with a group of 100+ other young adults. They were a bright, energetic, and above all else, idealistic group of people. "Idealism" was literally in the job description, and it was a principle that came up daily as a part of the organizational culture.

(I say this to show that the conversation that follows does not involve any cynical, jaded souls, but two people who cared deeply about and worked to improve the lives of others.)

One day during this time, I was at the office with a friend, and conversation turned toward giving money to people who begged on the street. I expressed some ambivalence about it; "It's hard to know what the money is going toward, and it might be better in general to give to charity," I mused.

My friend, on the other hand, stated that he thought it was wrong. Not questionable, not a gray area: wrong. He pointed out that many people begging on the street suffer from addiction to harmful substances; he felt it was his responsibility to not feed these addictions by giving away money that could possibly be spent on substances to abuse.

I have no memory of whether I responded with any kind of counterargument. But I have done a great deal of thinking about conversation since.

Eventually, I concluded that I had been wrong. And that my friend had been wrong, too.

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"When the Bible refers to the poor, I think of those who are downtrodden emotionally or romantically, not those who are poor financially."
— Bible Students Say.. (@BibleStdntsSay) April 7, 2014

Any Christian argument against giving to the needy is going to run up against a number of, to put it mildly, strong arguments from scripture pointing in the exact opposite direction. Perhaps the most famous and wrenching is a parable Jesus tells, in which he depicts himself reprimanding a group of people at the end of time, saying "You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me." And they ask Jesus in turn, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?" And he tells them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me." When we refuse to give to the poor, in other words, we refuse Jesus himself.

More so even than this image—Jesus, destitute and in need of my help—the scripture that I am mentally confronted with whenever I refuse money to a beggar is the direct command* Jesus issues to his followers: "Give to everyone who asks of you."

It's such a simple command: Just give. Don't think. Don't judge. Don't worry. Give.

And, simple as it is, it can be quite hard to actually do.

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As was mentioned, one obstacle to giving to the homeless is the fear that it will feed addiction. "It's a waste of money," "It does more harm than good," etc.

A few months ago, I read an article, written by a real, live, homeless person, that altered my view of addiction and homelessness. I'll let his words speak what I can't really do justice to:

I've coined a phrase for the kind of sleep you get on the street: "the one-eyed sleep of the homeless." When you sleep in public—well hidden though you may be—anyone can walk up on you in the middle of the night. It may be another homeless person looking for a good place to sleep. Or one of the nighttime criminals who beat the homeless and steal from them. Or the police, looking to move you out of  your spot. You never know what to expect, and it makes sleep difficult. Sometimes I'll see a homeless person dead asleep in the middle of the day on the sidewalk along some busy thoroughfare, but I don't know how they do it. Unless they've simply collapsed from exhaustion. Or maybe they're drunk or high.

Alcohol and drugs do play a big part in street life. I've tried to stay away from drugs and have succeeded for the most part. Drink, however, has been a different story. We all have our poisons, something that helps carry us through, that gives us pleasure, whether good for us or not. But when you're homeless, you definitely need something to take the edge off being exposed, every minute of every day. It's difficult to explain this to someone who has never had to live outdoors in the midst of several thousand people roaring around them at all hours. ("Homeless in the City," Theodore Walter, emphasis added)

Substance abuse is a coping strategy for the homeless, who deal with unbearable quantities of stress. In giving someone money, I trust that they're going to use it to get what they feel they need to keep going one more day, even if that includes substances that may not be good for them in the long run. They know their needs better than I do. I remind myself that if the recipient of my money is suffering from addiction, my money may help keep them from feeding that addiction in more dangerous ways, like theft or prostitution. Above all else, I remind myself of Jesus' commands: to give to the one who asks, and also to judge not lest I be judged by the same standard—how often, after all, have I spent money on things that are not healthy for me?

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For me, the other major obstacle to giving is more selfish: I tend to worry that I am being conned somehow. I know I have been conned out of money with a slick story at times, and it's a terrible feeling.

But what this feeling boils down to is pride. I get mad that someone fooled me into handing over my hard-earned money after I hear a made-up story. Which, when I think about it, is essentially what I do every time I go see a movie or buy a novel. Even if the story coming out of the stranger on the street is marketed a bit more aggressively or is somewhat less entertaining than I'd like, no story I ever hear is going to be worse than A Rat's Tale, a movie that features marionette rat puppets and terrible rat puns like "aloe verat"** and which is, I can assure you, totally real and not made up, because my sisters and I sat through the whole thing in a movie theater as children.

However little the recipient may seem to need or deserve my money, I remind myself when handing over my cash that it is unlikely that a successful person with access to steady work is going to be out on the street begging. If someone asks for money, there is a high likelihood that they need some, no matter the way they go about asking.

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Last year, I decided to try out the traditional Lenten discipline of almsgiving.† I made a conscious effort to always have cash somewhere I could get it easily on my person, and anytime I saw someone begging or was approached by someone asking for money, I had some to give. Each day, I relieved myself of some of my cash by placing it in a different pocket, and told myself it was no longer mine: I was simply carrying it for the next person I met who needed it. I found this practice to be such a relief to my anxieties over giving that I have never stopped since. I recommend it to all who would take seriously Jesus' command to give.

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*This command is found in both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. The first half of the command in each version is essentially identical, and the second half somewhat amusingly demonstrates the differences between the two authors—Mathew has a tendency to soften Jesus' more extreme social teachings in Luke (or perhaps it's the other way around?); see, for another example, the contrast between the Beatitudes in each. 
**Not only is "aloe verat" a real, live, terrible rat pun from this film, it is in fact the MacGuffin that drives the whole plot.
†I will admit that in writing this post, I worried about Jesus' command to give to the needy in secret. I actually kept my Lenten discipline to myself for a long time, and only told someone about it when it would have required a lie to keep it secret, at which point it seemed like I might be taking the whole secrecy thing a bit far.

Photos:
1. Chris Sampson
2. Edouard Manet, "Beggar with Duffel Coat" - This is one of my favorite pieces of art at Chicago's Art Institute; it's one of a pair of portraits that Manet painted in which he portrays beggars as noble philosophers.

The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be

by James Davisson

Once when I was in college, a friend of mine made some disparaging remarks about Christians. I don't remember what he was objecting to—people who bomb abortion clinics or whatever, some extreme thing—and I helpfully pointed out that people who did that sort of thing aren't really Christians. "That's just the 'no true Scotsman' defense," he retorted.

I had nothing to say to that, mostly because I'd never heard the phrase "no true Scotsman." I think it's a phrase Christians would do well to remember.

First, an explanation: "no true Scotsman" is a logical fallacy that gets used sometimes when people argue. Person A states a generalization ("No Scotsman hates haggis!"), Person B finds a counterexample ("I'm a Scotsman and I hate haggis!") and Person A excludes that example with hand waving ("Well, no true Scotsman hates haggis!") without referring to any external, objective rule.

I definitely used this flawed defense in my argument with my friend. No one had ever told me I couldn't.

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Christians are quite fond of dismissing each other as "not really Christian" when they disagree with each other's actions or beliefs. Three examples, running across a spectrum of beliefs and circumstances:

Rebels in northern CAR. Source.

1. As you may know, there is currently an ongoing crisis of horrific violence in the Central African Republic. In a recent article, local Catholic priests were described providing shelter for Muslims fleeing the people who would murder them, Christian militias known as "anti-balaka." In the article, one priest is quoted as saying, understandably, "the anti-Balaka are not Christians." 



2. Christian charity World Vision recently announced that, in view of the fact that many church denominations have become open and affirming towards LGBTQ persons, it would begin hiring people in same-sex marriages on its staff. When thousands of people decided to stop donating on the grounds that they could no longer consider World Vision a truly Christian organization, World Vision reversed its decision. Other Christians subsequently pointed out that refusing to hire gay people is, to their minds, not really Christian. 





Not Phelps, but one of his cronies. Source.

3. Notorious bigot Fred Phelps recently died. While Christians have had much to say about that fact, few are standing up and claiming that he was a Christian just like them. Phelps was, in fact, a pastor, who preached weekly from the same Bible as all Christians, from his church in Westboro, Kansas.

As far as the world is concerned, these people are Christians. They call themselves Christians, they go to church, they talk about Jesus, they read the Bible—these are the things Christians do. They are Christians. Our internal disputes about what a Christian really is—like, "someone who is for/against gay marriage," "someone who is pro-life/pro-choice," "someone who is patriotic/anti-war," "someone who is not a complete asshat"—are immaterial to outsiders, and what's more, they typically have little or nothing to do with the central tenets of the church that formally define the core of the Christian faith.*

Refusing the label "Christian" to people we disagree with—even when that disagreement is passionate and seems vital—is a crutch. It is an excuse to dismiss someone. And it is not convincing; to an outsider, it sounds like the old joke that the worst player on your team is actually the best player for the other team—it's funny, but few people are likely to take you at your word.

Dismissing others as "not really Christian" allows Christians to free themselves from blame for their actions and to make no effort to engage, correct, or counteract fellow Christians who do wrong. If people call themselves Christians, it is up to their fellow Christians to point out when they are not imitating Christ, and to actively oppose them when they do so. We neglect this duty when we simply reject them as Christians.

Conversely, we also risk missing possibly valid points of view, ideas that bear considering, when we dismiss others as "not really Christian." It's a lot easier to ignore fellow Christians if we simply refuse to consider them Christians at all.

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Let me be clear: I am not saying anything about whether anyone in the list above is following the example of Christ. Several of them very plainly are not, to my mind. I am also making no claims about the nature, or reality, of the personal faith of those involved, or whether any of them are saved.

What I am saying instead is that, as Christians, anyone who confesses the central tenets of the faith, and claims the label "Christian," is our responsibility. To borrow an ecclesiastical term, all such persons are part of the "church visible"—the institution of the church and the body of believers on earth. Whether they are recognized by God as part of the "church invisible"—the "true" church of God (the true Scotsmen?) is simply unknown to any living person, and we therefore have no way to judge and should not try.**

In other words, it is not up to us sort the wheat from the tares ourselves. Let us instead focus on planting as many good seeds as possible.

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*Human sexuality, the dignity of human life, and issues surrounding force and violence are all important matters, but you will not find any of them in the creeds set out by the early church councils, which formally define the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. The ideas inside these creeds are the dogmas of the faith; stepping outside of them is heresy. Important topics not addressed in the creeds are matters of doctrine; different denominations disagree on doctrines; all are still Christian so long as they do not stray from the central dogmas. Things outside of the central dogmas but permitted by the church are sometimes called adiaphora, "things not essential" or "matters of indifference." I like this word and don't get to use it very often.
**I note here that the church invisible is almost certainly not a smaller circle within the church visible; rather, the church visible is a circle in a Venn diagram that overlaps with the church invisible. In other words, there are undoubtedly people who do not profess Christianity yet nevertheless are members of the church, doing God's work in the world.

Sex, Christ, and the End of Time

He's coming, he's coming, HE'S COMING

by James Davisson


One of the most fascinating things about Christianity is that—alone among the major religions of the modern world—it began as a doomsday cult. This has had interesting consequences.

(Quick definition: "doomsday cult" refers to a religion that expects the end of the world as we know it, and soon. When I say Christianity began as a doomsday cult, I mean that most early Christians expected the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the beginning of a new world, within their lifetimes. I use the term in a descriptive sense, not a disparaging one: the earliest Christians expected, eagerly, the end of time, and acted accordingly.)

One obvious consequence of this is the shape of the New Testament itself. Its earliest documents are not treatises laying out a systematic theology of a new religion, but ad hoc letters from early church leaders, especially the apostle Paul, providing solutions to the particular problems of individual churches (these are books like 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans). Paul and his compatriots saw their mission as incredibly urgent—gotta tell as many as we can about Jesus before he comes back!—and they had no time for such detailed projects as systematic theology. After Paul's death, letters were composed in Paul's name (and that of other church leaders, like Peter) by his followers, that started to fill in the gaps in his teachings and wrestle with the delay in Christ's coming (these are books like 1 and 2 Timothy and Ephesians). Finally, recognizing that the end might be a little further off than they'd initially thought, Christians collected stories about Jesus himself and shaped them into narratives that could be used to instruct future generations (the gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

Sometimes, the consequences of early Christian apocalypticism are more subtle than this, at least to modern Christians like me, with little knowledge of early Christian history. One fascinating example: early Christian thought about sex, especially abstinence.

When modern Christians talk about sexual abstinence, it is usually to demand it from either (1) people who ain't married yet or (2) priests and members of certain religious orders. It is not, typically, a practice of ordinary lay people. In this, early Christianity and modern Christianity are distinct.

In general, it's best not to mess with nuns.

Many early Christians chose to become or remain completely chaste for the duration of their lives. While some Christians today choose lifelong chastity as part of their calling to service in a religious order, these early believers predated such Christian institutions as monks, nuns, and even, perhaps, priests. The reasons they chose chastity are complex, but here are a few:

1. As an expression of radical Christian equality: Christian communities were incredibly diverse: people of distinct social class, gender, and social freedom were all admitted, and faced challenges in creating unity among themselves. Christians believed they were supposed to be "one body," that they were a community of "neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female." Some sought to create this unity by deconstructing social structures like marriage and slavery, and instead tried to live together as one, equal body, renouncing sex. "Only by dissolving the household was it possible to achieve the priceless transparency associated with a new creation," as Peter Brown puts it in The Body and Society, (pg 53). (It is likely that this was what some of the Corinthians were doing when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians; more on that in a moment.)
2. As a way of achieving high spiritual status: In an opposite impulse from the previous one, some sought spiritual excellence and even fame through abstinence. Most early Christians thought of complete sexual abstinence as better than sex within marriage, because they associated sex with the weakness of the human body and its associated temptations.* So living completely sex-free was, in a way, spiritually glamorous.
3. As an announcement of (or preparation for) the return of Christ: Today, society is dealing with the consequences of advances in medicine and food technology that have led to rapid population growth, to the extent that humanity is straining the earth's capacity to hold us. It wasn't always like this, though: the Roman Empire's death rate was such that, just to keep society from collapsing, every woman needed to give birth an average of five times.** So complete sexual renunciation was actually a direct threat to society, a refusal a key social obligation, which pointed to the immanent total re-arrangement and renewal of society at Christ's return.

Complete abstinence from sex was seemingly a part of Christianity from the start, so much so that Paul had to address it in one of the earliest known pieces of Christian writing, his first letter to the Corinthians. What's interesting about the early church in Corinth is that part of it was interested in complete abstinence, and part of it wanted the opposite. Some insisted that "all things are lawful for me," on the grounds that God's grace could be counted upon to cover their sins. In his letter, Paul had to mediate: "Between those who said, 'All things are lawful for me' and others who insisted 'It is well for a man not to touch a woman,' Paul sought a defensible middle ground" (From Shame to Sin, Kyle Harper, pg 88). Paul's solution was to have surprising consequences, not least because it was a temporary solution, created with the understanding that the problems it addressed would soon be swept away by Christ's return.

The "libertines" (the Corinthian faction who said "all things are lawful for me") were probably not interested in crazed orgies or depraved sex acts, but in participating in the normative sexual ethics of the Roman empire—men were expected to have some measure sexual self-control, but were allowed to have sex with prostitutes (or, if they were wealthy, with their slaves). On the opposite side were a group of Corinthians who believed that strict abstinence "was the measure of holiness" (Harper, pg 92). Paul's middle ground between the two is this: (1) don't have sex with prostitutes, (2) it's okay to be married, so that you aren't tempted as much to have sex outside of marriage, but (3) he wishes that everyone could abstain completely from sex—but recognizes that celibacy is a gift.

What Paul wants is to unite the divided Corinthians so that they can get back to the work of bringing people to Christ. He is interested neither in a radically egalitarian, celibate commune (because this would be unlikely to draw new members) nor in adherence to Roman sexual codes (which he and most other early Christians saw as sinful.) His goal is certainly not to set a sexual standard for the rest of Christian history: not only is he explicit that his advice on sex is a temporary measure made in view of "the coming crisis," but he even makes it clear that his advice is just that: advice, not a divine commandment.

This does not stop the early church from developing Paul's words in 1 Corinthians into a full-blown sexual ethic, however. In the centuries that follow, many Christians will conclude on the grounds of 1 Corinthians that sexual abstinence is morally superior to marital sex; some will retreat to the desert for a life of asceticism, others will live by example in the cities, and a few will even insist that marriage or sex of any kind is completely wrong. While these views of sex and abstinence will start to shift dramatically with the advent of Protestantism, there will still be resurgences of the more radical older views.

All of this is a direct consequence of the early Christian belief that Jesus was returning soon. Many Christians still believe this, and while I think that's a belief that's worth examining, what I think is more worth examining is what parts of our faith are the direct result of inhabiting this apocalyptic worldview from the start.

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*This attitude vis-à-vis marriage and chastity—that is, that chastity was morally superior to marital sex—held sway in the Catholic church for a long time; it was one of the things the Puritans objected to about Catholicism, because they were all about sex (within marriage, naturally). Have I mentioned that I love the Puritans, like, mostly unironically?
**This is about the birth rate of modern Kenya. By comparison, the US birth rate is about 2 births per woman (source). Keep in mind that in both of these places, it is easier to give birth without dying than it was in ancient Rome.

Photo sources:
1. A modification of this, which I've been unable to find an original source for.
2. lucyfrench123
3. Luz Adriana Villa

What Does it Mean to Quote the Bible Out of Context?

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.

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*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.

Photo source
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/lmlienau/121073591/