danideewantsitall asked:

Hi there! What do you think of people taking scriptures “out of context”? For example, I was talking with my friends about Philippians 4:13, which is often used as encouragement. My friends said that it’s harmful to consistently quote that verse out of context, since that verse is, of course, part of a much larger story, but I say what’s the harm in someone using that verse for their own personal comfort and encouragement? Thanks!

Hey my friend, here are my general feelings about this.

1) Yes, Christians tend to take verses way out of context.

2) But most of us do it innocently without harm, because we just don’t know all the theology on that yet.

3) Certain Christians make a big deal about taking verses out of context, so they become the biblical equivalent of Grammar Nazis.

So if a superstar athlete wants to tattoo Philippians 4:13 all over his ribcage — well, why not? If a verse like Psalm 34:18 or John 3:16 can inspire someone and give them hope, then I say all the more power to them.

I would even suggest that most of us probably have entire chunks of the Bible all wrong. In other words, because of our human bias and our hazy filter of sin, I doubt any one person can properly contextualize the entire Bible at all times.

We have so many interpretive hermeneutics where everyone thinks “My camp is right,” but the older I get, the less I’m sure this or that guy has it totally right. I know dudes who are scholar-expert-level on the Bible but they’re total jerks, so it’s not working for them. I know others who are beginners at Scripture and still need the table of contents, but God has tenderized them with the little biblical knowledge they have.

When we get to Heaven, I can guarantee we will laugh at all the ways we misinterpreted Scripture and be shocked at what some passages really meant. And we’ve been doing that for hundreds of years already. Example: slavery.

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“Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the achievement, the “work” of faith…to believe that there is such a thing as love … and that there is nothing higher or greater than it … the first thing that must strike a non-Christian about the Christian’s faith is that … it is obviously too good to be true: the mystery of being, revealed as absolute love, condescending to wash his creatures’ feet, and even their souls, taking upon himself all the confusion of guilt, all the God-directed hatred, all the accusations showered upon him with cudgels..all the mocking hostility…This is truly too much.”

— Hans Urs von Balthasar