Context

Excerpts from Dan Kimball post: Avoiding Scary Mary: The importance of the whole Bible and knowing context

I am in the last stages of going through my next Zondervan book (tentatively titled "Adventures in Churchland") - which is quite late (Sorry Paul and Ryan!). But finally getting it done. It is my first non-church leaders book, so quite excited and nervous about it. I am directly addressing a couple of controversial and very sensitive issues such as homosexuality and the Bible along with fundamentalism and the Bible, pluralism and world religions. I am  showing how so many of the arguments we have about certain theological views are focused on isolated verses from the Bible pulled from context. Now every sentence and word of the Bible is inspired and incredibly important of course. But we have to be looking at things in context and in the whole story of the Bible.

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Now this isn't anything new, it is really basic hermeneutics. But my goodness, from spending a bunch of time reading arguments pro and against things (from both sides of various arguments, I am not talking only about conservatives or liberals here) - it is amazing how often we make Scary Mary videos from the Bible narrative to defend or teach something we want to believe. We can revise the original whole narrative and create a different Mary by piecing together what we want to in order to create the Mary we want. So if we want to believe a certain thing, we then can piece together our own Scary Mary version of the Bible. It can even sound convincing. If someone didn't know the original entire storyline of Mary Poppins and only saw that revised Scary Mary version - the story of Mary Poppins would be thought of entirely different than the actual Mary Poppins full movie. It isn't as though those isolated clips aren't in the movie. But pulling them out and revising them into something out of the whole story makes Mary a very Scary Mary.

We do have to study and  look at isolated verses in the Bible, of course. But we better be very careful what we do with them. So we aren't taking verses or even small sections of the Bible and piecing them together and revising the narrative to what we hope the Bible says or wish it would say. We can create our own Scary Mary version of the Bible. You can turn the Bible into almost anything if we do that. I wonder if we may do that more than we realize. And I wonder if we may also read someone's Scary Mary version of the Bible and think it is the true Mary more than we realize too. If it is pieced together well and has a good soundtrack behind it. And if we never really understood and studied the whole storyline of the Bible, how easy it is to then be swayed into a Scary Mary version of a doctrine or theology or biblical narrative.

For those that know me, and what I wrote in the chapters I am not a universalist and do hold the church's historical view of sexuality.However, I didn't use to hold these views as I was raised outside of the church and believed the opposite because of my cultural background. When I first read the Bible narrative I was hoping it was the opposite of what I believe now that would be true and the biblical narrative. But it was from reading the whole Bible and narrative and then looking at verses in context and then in holistic Bible context (we need to do both) is why I then went against what I personally hoped and yielded to the Scriptural holistic storyline. And then on these issues as I wrote about them in these chapters I personally then checked with scholars again - NT Wright, Scot McKnight, Stan Grenz's writings and scholars whom I respect and who give me confidence about what I was writing as I looked to them for guidance .

But the Scary Mary video was in my mind as I wrote these chapters as it reminded me of the importance of narrative and context and the danger of arguing only about isolated verses.

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