Chain Letter

and all the brethren who are with me, to the churches of Galatia: Galatians 1:2

Churches – When you read the Bible, do you pay attention to the proper context, culture and historical circumstances behind the text? Or do you read the Bible as if it was written for you yesterday? This is not a trivial question. I wrote about this on April 16, but it is worth repeating many times. Nothing is more important for understanding God’s Word!

One of the biggest problems in Christian practice is the lack of a proper understanding of Biblical exegesis. More theological mistakes occur due to a lack of proper exegesis than any other methodological errors. Why? Because a great number of believers treat the Bible as though it has no cultural bias and was written in its entirety last week. Neither of these assumptions is true. Just like any other document, the Bible comes to us in a cultural context (in fact, in several cultural contexts) and it is the progressive revelation of God over the course of thousands of years. These facts must become part of any attempt to interpret the text.

Imagine trying to understand the meaning of The Iliad without any reference to Greek history, mythology or culture. Imagine reading The Iliad as if it were written last week, applying it to today’s issues without any attempt to understand what the original audience received. That would be equivalent to how most Christians treat the Bible. We have this tendency to pull a verse from some book, make a direct application to our lives and act as though God’s Word was written for us and no one else. This is the “God spoke to me” variety of exegesis. This is naïve and dangerous (just ask any woman of God who has been told that Scriptures teach she cannot preach or teach men).

Walter Kaiser emphasizes one other critical point about proper exegesis. The Scriptures are progressive revelation. That means they were not all available at the same time. The fact that we have all the books now doesn’t mean the authors had all the books available when they wrote their volumes. Kaiser’s point is that if we are going to understand the writing of any particular author, we cannot use material written after the passages we want to interpret. We can’t use Revelation to help us understand what John was thinking when he wrote his gospel because Revelation didn’t exist when he wrote the gospel. But we can use Psalms, Deuteronomy, Genesis, etc. because those works were available to John when he wrote his gospel. This might seem like an obvious point until we consider the chronology of authorship in the New Testament (in Hebrew the Ketuvim Netzarim). The order of the books in our New Testament is not an authorship chronology. In fact, the order is completely arbitrary, established by some church council without any regard to events or authors. Why does this matter? Well, when we look at authorship chronology, we discover Galatians was written before any other Pauline letter. Therefore, what Paul (Rabbi Sha’ul) writes in Galatians cannot be interpreted according to what he later writes in Romans or Thessalonians. Galatians is the foundation for the rest, not the result of a long process of theological reflection from the rest. The letter to the Romans does not come first.

We know that Paul wrote Galatians with the intention of having the letter circulated among the churches in that province. And we know he wrote it after the Jerusalem council (Acts 15). We know the real issue among assemblies in Galatia is the relationship between law and grace. But what we can’t do in order to understand Sha’ul’s thinking in Galatians is to run to Romans 6-8 and use that to explain Galatians.

For a fuller discussion of this issue, go here.  But even if you don’t look at the rest of the picture, start treating Scripture as if it were a screen play. Take it in the order that it was written. Your exegesis will improve. You will be able to see the relationship between historical events and the words of Scripture. Things will make a lot more sense. And you won’t make so many mistakes when it comes to understanding the context before the application.

Topical Index: exegesis, Galatians 1:2, church, history