Quotes about Context

If you preach the gospel in all aspects with the exception of the issues which deal specifically with your time, you are not preaching the gospel at all.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does

A marriage is meant to be a blessing on the world, because it is a context in which two people might become more than what they would have been alone.  The entire world is healed by the presence of healed people.

the miraculous power of love to create a context in which people naturally blossom into their highest potential.  Neither nagging, trying to get people to change, criticizing or fixing can do that.

History, like beauty, depends largely on the beholder, so when you read that, for example, David Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, you might be forgiven for thinking that there was nobody around the Falls until Livingstone arrived on the scene.

One great function of Bible verses: To keep us from drawing false inferences from other Bible verses.

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.

Reading and understanding the Bible involves lots and lots of interpretation. Not just in light of the world and culture around us, but in reference to other parts of the Bible.

we need to learn to tell the story that makes sense of Jesus. Not a story that we ask Jesus to fit into.

readers. The story of the Bible is creation, fall, and then covenant community—page after page of community—as the context in which our wonderful redemption takes place.

hold it, then, as an axiom — or else I'd stop writing right now — that our calling is to follow Jesus in our context rather than to retrieve and re-create his context in our world. What

The question we need to ask today is this, and this question strikes to the heart of how we read the Bible: Do we seek to retrieve that cultural world and those cultural expressions, or do we live the same gospel in a different way in a different day?