Big Questions: How Is My Context Impacting my Reading?

Last time, we looked at the Bible through a critical lens, asking whose text it is and whose it isn’t. But postmodernism isn’t just about asking hard questions of existing systems and structures (including sacred ones), but also about asking those same hard questions of ourselves. We don’t just look for biases in the text we’re reading, but we look for and acknowledge our own biases as well.

This is the flip side of the very first Big Question we asked; that one was in part about allowing ourselves to bring our whole self to the Scriptures. But equally importantly, part of that ‘whole self’ includes the ways our experiences can influence our readings. Our sex, gender, sexuality, class, race, or culture will impact our experience of a text — in powerful, positive, and deeply personal ways, but also potentially in ways that might lead us to misunderstand or even dismiss a text.

The point of this is again to be honest enough about our own biases to allow the biblical texts to engage with them. I remember when I was in seminary, the passages in the Gospels in which Jesus teaches about the dangers of wealth were very problematic for some of my fellow students. They came from cultural backgrounds or theological traditions that saw the accumulation of wealth as the greatest sign of God’s blessing; some went so far as to tell the class, “There is no way I could ever preach this in my church.” Recognizing those biases is necessary work — the challenge is to move past that resistance and recognize that if we do in fact consider ourselves followers of Christ, we have to listen to what he actually taught, especially when it makes us uncomfortable!

In the interest of fairness, there are also parts of my own culture and experience that make some texts difficult for me: For example, I was born and raised in a Western democratic society, so I can struggle with texts that assume a divinely anointed status for human rulers. I live in a country that is just starting to try — and struggling — to come to terms with its imperialistic and colonizing history, and so I can struggle with texts in the Old Testament advocating for land theft and genocide. I live in a diverse, multicultural, and cosmopolitan environment — and love it — and so I dislike texts that promote sameness at the expense of difference. Irrespective of which of these perspectives is ‘right’ (for I can point to other texts in the Scriptures that promote the same values as my own), it’s clear that there can be a distance between me and certain texts — a distance I must acknowledge if I’m going to be able to understand these hard texts as Scripture.

In this discussion it’s important to remember that there is no ‘default human’. We all have parts of our identity that will bias our readings of the text in certain ways. It’s not that a queer person is more biased in reading Romans 1 than a straight person, but that those biases are going to be different based on our different experiences of being human. Neither is a male reading more biased than a female reading, or a reading of the wealthy more biased than a reading from among the poor. We all bring our assumptions, experiences, and therefore, our biases to the text, none of us more or less than any other.

All this is about intellectual honesty and not pushing anything — in ourselves or in the Scriptures — into shadow. If we truly want to interpret and apply our Scriptures appropriately, we need to keep our assumptions and, yes, biases where we can see them, while also not shying away from the parts of Scripture which challenge us or make us uncomfortable. To paraphrase the late great James Baldwin, what is not acknowledged cannot be changed. And as Christians, change — the transfiguration of the heart and person into the likeness of Christ so that we might better love and serve the world — should be our top priority.

Reflection Questions

1. Write a list of some of your cultural values, life experiences, and parts of your identity and then think through some of the ways they might influence how you interpret the Bible.
2. Thinking of the following verses, what is your reaction, and how is that shaped by your values and life experiences?

a) “among you is the living God who without fail will drive out from before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites” (Joshua 3.10)

b) “This is the word of the LORD, which he spoke by his servant Elijah the Tishbite: “… The corpse of Jezebel shall be like dung on the field in the territory of Jezreel, so that no one can say, This is Jezebel.”’ (2 Kings 9.36-37)

c) “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but at the beginning it was not so. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery.” (Matthew 19.8-9)

d) “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ (Matthew 19.24)