Scripture Engagement & Context | Scripture Engagement in IFES

What kinds of questions are being raised in a time like this? Below you can see one possible exercise in highlighting some of these questions, as I pay attention to them in my own context. Maybe it would be a good exercise if you could also try to identify the questions being raised in your own contexts. How does the biblical story help us to engage and respond to these questions?

1. Questions about humanness

a. In this season, questions about human superiority and how much control we have over our lives take centre stage. We have had to come to terms with our limitations, our creaturely vulnerability and the uncertainty/unpredictability of human life. This also leads to further questions about the meaning and purpose of human living.

b. As we live in forced social isolation our society’s narratives of human individualism and autonomous self-sufficient lifestyles have been brought into the spotlight. Our need of the other, and the value of community has enhanced showing that we are inherently social beings and not autonomous creatures. The call to use the term “spatial” or “physical” distancing as opposed to “social distancing” is another example of this. 

2. Questions about Christian theology, disciplines and community

a. Online Church – We have had to also ask questions about the meaning of church as we meet online. Do we miss something when we meet online? Has any aspect of church life been enhanced?

b. How do we read scripture – Have we had to rethink what we mean when we talk about God’s protection and security? Does a pandemic show that God’s return is imminent or are there other ways of thinking about eschatology?

c. Forgotten Christian practices – Have we neglected some forms of Christian discipleship (e.g. lament) in our Church life? Why and at what cost? What is the relationship between doubt and faith?

d. Deepening our theology – How do we reconcile God’s goodness and the presence of evil and suffering in the world? Does our collective search for a vaccine show a dependence on science over and above God?

3. Questions about the societies we live in

a. Effects of the pandemic – While the pandemic does not discriminate, does it affect some parts of our society disproportionately? What does that reveal about the disparities in our society?

b. Hidden issues – What issues in our societies have been surfaced during this time? (e.g. domestic violence, racial and ethnic discrimination/stigmatization)

c. Crisis of leadership – How would you rate the leaders in your society? What key aspects of leadership have been missing? How have they used the pandemic to further their own political ends?

d. Questions around value – What has the pandemic revealed about the value system in our society? Have we had to depend on segments of our society that we usually neglect? (e.g. shop keepers, garbage disposal workmen, delivery persons, public health inspectors etc.).

e. Questions around structuring society – Have we excluded the environment/non human creatures when we talk about society making/development? What are the limits we are willing to place on ourselves so that we can live in greater harmony with the rest of creation? What social/economic models need to be challenged? Do we need to begin another Jubilee movement calling on a moratorium of national debt?

Yohan Abeynaike, GS FOCUS Sri Lanka

God is a revealing God, his Word is his revelation of himself and his purposes to his world. It is wonderful we are invited by God to meet him, know and love him, through the Scriptures. As we answer this invitation and engage with Him in His Word, it is helpful to acknowledge we are a diversity of peoples, times and contexts. How we approach, view, interpret, understand and connect his Word to our lives is a question we must address with faith and with faithfulness.

Just look at Acts 3:12-26 and Acts 17:22-31 as classic examples of taking the context and those people’s questions seriously when presenting the good news.

When the working group met to reflect and discuss this issue, we thought it would be important to focus on how our contemporary context affects the way we read, interpret and live out God’s Word. We do this in the wide variety of contexts we come from where we seek to be faithful to the Lord – ‘correctly handling the word of truth’ (2 Timothy 2:15) having our thinking, speaking and behaviour transformed by God through His Word and by His Spirit.

Through fostering a growing reflection and exchange in our global fellowship about “Scripture Engagement & Context”, we hope to better recognise our blind spots – those things that because of the milieu we live in/ have grown up in we do not see: about God, His purposes or ourselves. Through mutual learning in our international fellowship we hope to avoid some possible risks: a selective hermeneutic determined by culturally defined questions leading to ethnocentrism and relativism; or cultural ‘imprisonment’/bias leading to a poor reading of Scriptures even leaving out parts that don’t seem to be relevant (in our own eyes). For an extreme example of this see what King Jehoiakim did in Jeremiah 36!

We believe it is important to both grow in how we engage with the Scriptures from our own times and contexts, and at the same time become increasingly aware of how the Word ‘reads’ and engages with us. As we read and are ‘read’, as we participate, God transforms us and our context/community.

When engaging with the Word, we believe we are engaging with God himself in the Scriptures, with Jesus, the Living Word. We can therefore expect that he will engage with us – an experience that will not leave us or our communities the same.

Our different contexts raise a variety of questions which we should pay careful attention to when engaging the Scriptures. At the same time, the Word of God often raises other questions or gives answers that we would not have expected. Scripture reveals agendas and poses questions that people may not be asking. Thus, engaging with the Word will often disturb, question, and challenge what may be fully accepted in our context.

The reader of the Word is therefore not only personally challenged and transformed but challenged to be agents of change and transformation in the context and community within which they live.

In the end, when we are dedicated to a serious study of the Word, it should lead us to discover the heart and mind of God for our world: the Lord who is missionary, who is transforming and reconciling the world to Himself through Christ.

We pray that when paying more attention to the contemporary context we all live in, we will grow to become a better global hermeneutical community, learning from each other and faithfully giving witness to the Lord across the world from each of our contexts.

IFES Eurasia Scripture Engagement Coordinator (no name as in sensitive country) and Ricardo Borges (IFES Associate Secretary for Scripture Engagement)