Context for life: lessons from cheesecake.

Year One.  Day One (I think).  Lesson One (probably).  The class was called “Bible Study Methods.”  I was a brand-new student at London Baptist Bible College.  The professor, Glenn Rider, was about to utter two sentences I will never forget and have frequently repeated myself.  

“Context is king.”

“A text without a context is a pretext.”

These are transcendent truths that apply to all interpretive processes.  It doesn’t matter if it is a selection of poetry, or a contract, or an editorial essay, or the note on the fridge from your mom telling you to NOT eat the cheesecake.  In order to properly understand the communication, we must know the context.  Without context, Mom’s note could be interpreted to refer to the cheesecake in the neighbour’s fridge.  Therefore, it makes perfectly rational sense to eat a slice of cheesecake that is in our fridge.  Right?  

The commitment to context makes an assumption:  the author had a specific meaning he/she intended to communicate.  We could attempt to eliminate all the possibilities of misinterpretation in our communications (in fact, it happens all the time;  we call it “legalese”).  Even that form of writing is plagued with questions as to intended meaning(s).  That’s why we have lawyers.

The idea of context is not limited to the written word.  It also applies to the assumptions upon which we build the structures of our lives.  All of us have made decisions about what we believe to be true, to be real, and to have value.  Did we sit down and write a doctoral thesis on these ideas?  Some of the ideas will be the product of formal training or learning but most of them are the result of conclusions we have made through our own life experiences.  The dynamics of those experiences have formed our life-context.

How do we know if our context for life is valid?  If we are the products of millions of years of random development, mere bags of chemicals driven by electrical impulses and an overwhelming sense of survivability, from where does our sense of purpose come?  It must come from within ourselves . . . which means it will ultimately be in conflict with almost everyone else’s sense of purpose.

On the other hand, if our context is established by something outside of ourselves, there is a basis for understanding our purpose, a foundation for unity, and a perspective for hope.  If we accept that we are the result of a creative process, then our duty to understanding context must ask the question, “What is the original creator’s (author’s) intention?”  This is critical for all interpretive processes.  Otherwise, we are living a pretext.

The first recorded context-twisting-manipulation happened to Adam and Eve.  They were asked, “Did God really say . . .?”  He did.  But the alternative context offered them by Satan made pretty good sense at the time.  We’ve been headed downhill ever since.

That distortion did not change the Creator’s context.  He didn’t blow it all up and start over.  His handiwork still holds intrinsic value and purpose.  The original context can still be known and understood.  Our challenge is to filter through all the proposed alternative contexts.  They sound good.  Few accurately reflect the original Author’s intentions.

The questions of purpose and value of life are too complex to answer in a short Monday Morning blog.  For now, suffice it to say that because there is a Creator, there is a context.  In this upcoming ministry season, we will explore part of our context:  our hope.  What is it?  Can we really live as people of hope?  NOW?  

How do we know our context for life is valid?  One of ways to measure that is to ask, “Does my context generate hope?”

Hope is a byproduct of understanding our context, that reality established by God in which we worship the Creator through our daily life events and routines.  As we see His fingerprints in His created order, we know that in spite of the dysfunction introduced by sin, there is hope.  Always.