Quotes About Context

I wondered if when we take Christian theology out of the context of its narrative, when we ignore the poetry in which it is presented, when we turn it into formulas to help us achieve the American dream, we lose its meaning entirely, and the ideas become fodder for the head but have no impact on the way we live our lives or think about God. This is, perhaps, why people are so hostile toward religion.

anachronisms.

That's probably because they said a lot of other things, as well.

We do not create meaning out of a text; rather, we seek to find the meaning that is already there.

Anyway, there's a time and place for everything, and while this may have been the place, it wasn't the time.

We need leaders of conviction who have diverse constituencies always in mind, who carefully consider the larger contexts of their words and deeds. We need people who aren't afraid to stand for what they believe in, but who also recognize the privilege of their position. We need leaders who hold themselves accountable to their peers – leaders of great fortitude and great integrity.

New Testament scholar Richard Hays notes that there is not "an exact equivalent for 'homosexual' in either Greek or Hebrew."22 The Bible, in its original Hebrew and Greek, has no concept like our present understanding of a person with a homosexual orientation. Indeed, the concept of an ongoing sexual attraction to people of one's own sex did not exist in European or American language until the late nineteenth century.23

Theological Seminary, points out that the sin of Sodom is mentioned several times elsewhere in the Bible, but never in connection with homosexual acts.

To justify their inability to cope with cultural change, they turn to the Bible and proof-text, that is, they take verses out of the context of the whole and make universal laws of them. Instead of reading the Bible through the lens of Jesus' life and ministry, many have again tried to make the Bible a law book, which they then apply selectively, only to those with whom they disagree.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.

There is nothing outside of the text.

What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions … and yet which still remains a context.

Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

An event is never just what it is in itself and nothing more. It's what goes on around it, at the same time, that makes it — potentially — a tragic situation. You have to have been exposed to this, at least once, to understand it.

If you want a branch of mathematics, you develop it in the physical context, not as something separate, which you then try to apply, rather than integrating it from the beginning.

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire specialized college education on the society in which your story takes place, because all sorts of things were happening that you need to understand before you can even begin to tell a story in that milieu.

It is a form of generational narcissism to change texts to suit one's own needs.

Form is what transforms the content of a work into its essence.

Benedict and Bernard and the other true monastic peacemakers of history have been effective because they have acted from a deep source of peace within themselves, dating a context for peace. This is the contribution a Christian man or woman of peace can make.

The task is not to explain the being of the world but to interpret our place in the world based upon what we know about the world at the time, which is what is what the authors of the scriptures were doing and why we have to start all over again in every new age.

Scripture to its literal, grammatical, historical sense.

There is no pleasure in being duped by the text into a helpless viewer, but there is considerable pleasure in selectively viewing the text for points of identification and distance, in controlling one's relationship with the represented characters in the light of one's own social and psychological context.