christian living on Context

While in seminary I did some research and editing work for a missiology professor, and I came across a story of a missionary who took Jesus’s illustration of sheep and goats quite literally when worki...

We must allow the text to speak for itself, in its own words, from its own context, on its own terms, so that its theological and missional significance can then be more accurately gauged.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue reconnected thinking about ethics back to virtue by connecting virtue to the story a life is a part of. In order to know how we ought to live, we first need to answ...

My friend Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute once used the following example to demonstrate how important frames are if we are to make sense of reality’s puzzle. This may seem like a head scratcher...

As in buying real estate, three principles are crucial to understanding a person’s words: location, location, and location. We cannot make sense of what someone says unless we understand the context i...

Context matters. According to the Terman Study, which followed one thousand study participants from childhood until their death, the people we surround ourselves with are who we become. We see those a...

Christian leaders tend to use the Bible as their exclusive source for framing Christian speaking and living. Yet only through a kind of “thick description” of our present circumstances, being attentiv...

A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.

No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most "entire" context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text i...

No one statement wrested from its context is a sufficient warrant for actions that plainly controvert other commands. How excellent a thing it would be if the whole Church of Christ had learned that n...

No matter how adept an exegete a theologian is, . . . it is all for naught if he does not understand his contemporary audience.

Exegesis is loving God enough to stop and listen carefully to what he says.

When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories...