First, I am OVERFLOWING with blessing as I received two generous checks in the mail today to go towards my Honduras trip! I AM SO EXCITED! I guarantee you I could go tomorrow and just come back July 11th and be completely OK with that. And if a child happens to crawl into my bag, well then, that's not my problem :)
Secondly, we talked about a very dangerous topic in Missions: Contextualism. This basically means making scripture appropriate to us, now. Taking what "they meant" and making it meaningful today. DANGEROUS. My teacher gave us a sheet of different random scriptures concerning everything from women and silence in church, to a man not wearing woman's clothing (if you want I can give you the scriptures later), and asked us to write "C" if it was strictly cultural or "T" if it was trans-cultural (meaning it still applies to us today and will for all time.) So, I thought, well ok, this will be easy. NOT. The more I read the scriptures he had given, the more I realized that I can't say some things are cultural and some things are meant to apply to us today. Partly because I feel that we have taken some things that are MEANT to be trans-cultural and have made them cultural. And perhaps the same can be said for the other way around. Also because I take things differently than others. e.g. Leviticus 19:28 says "Do not...put tattoo marks on yourself." I would consider this cultural because seeing someone with tattoos doesn't affect my faith and I doubt it affects theirs either. However, to my grandmother, that may be something that is trans-cultural.
Another reason I feel it is dangerous is because people, of all faiths, have the tendency to amputate a scripture from its context and say it means something. Romans was a letter that Paul wrote, as were the Corinthians. Would it make sense if I wrote you a letter for you to take out one sentence and put more emphasis on it? Say I wrote you a letter like this:
Hello there So and So! I hope you're doing great today! I flew a kite today. It was blue and yellow with red dots on it. The wind was really strong and it was really difficult to hold onto the string. Then! The kite flew away because of the strong wind. You shouldn't fly a kite! Haha. Love, Allison.
Now, say you took that letter I wrote you and all you got from it was that "You shouldn't fly a kite," without reading into anything else I said. That wouldn't make sense. Not only is that silly, but you are taking the sentence out of context to mean something it doesn't.
The devil, I am certain, uses this to his advantage. For a brief moment in class, I thought, well, if everything is contextual and we make scripture mean something to us today, then really nothing is worth living by except for maybe one or two verses that are always the same (Deut. 6:5) That is the danger in contextualization. I'm not trying to say it's all bad or all good, but it needs to be done CAREFULLY.
Phew!
I battled this in high school.
ReplyDeleteI have a different view on baptizism and women and music. so. I am use to it.
I try to read the bible and let it speck to me... personally. let it aply personally to me, let my brain connest things... it is strange. Sometimes it is silent. sometimes it screams.