Quotes About Context

They do not realize that knowing history is the only way to make educated guesses about present quandaries

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.

Hauerwas said it, "The sermon, therefore, is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus."39 Church, then, forms the context for the ethic of Jesus.

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?

The entire sweep of the Bible teaches that Christians in non-Christian environments are not to be worried so much about changing their environments as they are to remain faithful in whatever kind of environment they find themselves.

Sometimes in our zeal to "apply" a text, we fail to read the text in its context. And more often than we may all care to admit, our frustrations over how to apply a text can be completely resolved with a more accurate interpretation.

It is a fact that many statements about what the Bible says are derived from contextless exegeses of a former generation

In his book The Indelible Image, New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III reiterates a common piece of interpretive wisdom: "A text without a context is just a pretext for what we want it to mean.

Since—and this is why it changed how I read the Bible—God chose to communicate in language, since language is always shaped by context, and since God chose to speak to us over time through many writers, God also chose to speak to us in a variety of ways and expressions. Furthermore, I believe that because the gospel story is so deep and wide, God needed a variety of expressions to give us a fuller picture of the Story.

History creates context; context creates meaning.

Sounded big," DeVontay said. "It's all relative. Bigger than a car, smaller than a house.

Life is the pursuit of eternally broadening context.

When you take somebody's quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody's ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong.

All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.

I think one thing people forget is that every technological advance we fetishize had its place in time.

Every time [Rand Paul] opens his mouth, it gets a little crazier. Today he angrily demanded that the liberal media stop quoting him in context.

As you see, context is everything and nothing at the same time. Words stand alone and with each other.

The 1947 Court (Everson v. Board of Education) for the first time had used only Jefferson's metaphor - completely divorced from its context and intent.

You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture. You've got to become them." (Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But there is always a time and a place for the subsets within genres.

People can't help what topics cut them deep. It all depends on who's inferring - and what the contexts of their lives are at the time.

The next time anyone asks you "What is Bertrand Russell's philosophy?" the correct answer is "What year, please?"