[. . .] There are real problems with ignoring original context and original intent. First, we effectively lose the Scriptures. If the Scriptures really mean what they mean to this reader and that reader (no matter if those readings contradict each other), then there is no text of Scripture. The reader becomes the text because the reader is determining the text.
The irony here is that, in popular evangelical piety, this way of reading Scripture is rampant, and yet in those same settings one is quite likely to be warned about the dangers of “postmodernism”. Well, nothing is more “postmodern” than denying original intent and privileging (as they say) the reader over the author! When it comes to subjectivism and deconstructing texts, the French could learn from the evangelicals.
A second great problem is that, invariably, when the text is decontextualized from its original setting and re-contextualized in our setting, Scripture is no longer a historical text, but is turned into a myth or a moral story. If the text can be removed from history, then it does not really matter if it is historically true so long as it is morally true. Moral truth without historical truth may work for modern liberalism, but it did not work for the apostle Paul, who wrote that if Jesus was not historically, actually raised from the dead, then our faith is worthless. Paul did not know anything about the moral truth of Christianity without its historical reality.
A third problem is that deconstructing Scripture this way fundamentally corrupts its message. When we treat Scripture thus, when we lift passages out of their context, even under the context of “applying them”, we change the message of the text. This is the brilliance of Dr Bergsma’s aphorism. Any (biblical) text without a (historical, grammatical, canonical, and literary) context is a pretext (an opportunity falsely taken) for a proof-text (a text abused by a preacher or Bible study leader to make a point that is not actually being made by the text itself). Historically, the most frequent result of the abuse of Scripture this way is to make the text to be about “me” or “us” rather than about Christ (however revealed in the text), his objective moral law, his saving acts and Word, and his church (in whatever epoch of redemptive history).
Scripture is not, in the first instance about “us” or “me”. In the first instance, Scripture is about God the Holy Trinity. It is about creation, redemption, and consummation. It is about the progress of redemptive history and revelation. It is about the salvation of God’s people in Christ. We come into the story rather late. It has massive implications for us. We do have to find ourselves in the story that God has written, but it is a great mistake to make the text about us.
For these reasons, I have often been nervous about whatever the latest preaching or Bible study “model” is supposed to be, whether it is the “idols of the heart” or find the “purpose” of the text, or even Christian experience. Each of these, in their own ways, seems to me to find a way, however subtly, to move the focus of the story away from Christ and back to me. The text becomes about “us” or “me” or my life (and sometimes about the preacher).
As sinners, we have a powerful, almost overwhelming incentive and drive to rewrite the story, and if we can do that in pious-sounding ways then it is harder to detect. After all, who can object to searching our own personal idols or to making concrete practical applications of the text to daily life or to explaining Christian experience? [. . .]
Click here to read the full essay by R. Scott Clark on The Heidelblog.