context defined concepts

It’s no secret to anyone who has ever spent any time with me, or who has ever read my blog for any length of time, that I have specific issues and passions. Often, someone who hasn’t spent time with me might observe me doing something, or hear me say something and just correct me off-the-cuff, assuming that what I did or said was off-the-cuff. It wasn’t. So I tend to warn people – of course I may be wrong, but if I am, I’m still wrong after MUCH thought, grappling, observation, assimilation, study and prayer. The irony is that having heard me say something, if someone takes exception, they are speaking without having thought through what I’ve said, or what they are saying in response. For this reason, I tend to frustrate people who correct me thinking I’ve just made a rebellious or knee-jerk reaction to something. They aren’t prepared for me to be able to back up my statements.
Of course I know that I respond to other people in the same way. They’ve thought, prayed, observed, assimilated and grappled, and I hear them without having done the same with their issue. I may respond in my mind, but I know better than to attack their opinion without the same hard fought ammunition as they’ve built up.
I’ve given talks before, after which folks have come to me to say, “Rod, I’ve done a lot of study and teaching on this subject, and don’t agree with what you’ve said; if you don’t mind, I’d like to send my notes to you so that we can talk about it later.” I’ve received many documents that had nothing whatever to do with what I was talking about. I’ve got to figure this out! People will tend to zero in on something you say and apply it to their own context that doesn’t apply. But the biggest fallacy I’ve come across in my being misunderstood, (brace yourself) deals in (it’s not a surprise) methodology(!)
Yes, I’ve ranted about it on these pages ad nauseum. But it SO gets in the way. So from time to time, as is my way, I come across a thought, or a statement that tends to help make sense of something I’ve been trying to verbalize for some time.
You’ll remember that I spoke last spring about methodology and spiritual gifting, and was challenged in ways that proved my point. My point was that we reduce a concept to a methodology and then defend the methodology by referring to the concept.
Just the other day through an unlikely series of hyperlinks, I read a comment to another’s blog that pointed out our faulty processes in pondering the phrase, “God is Love”. Most have a tendency to purport to understand love and thus believe that we are meant to understand God based on our understanding of love. So we read the statement as if it is using our meager understanding of love to define God. We are left with a faulty picture of God based on our shallow understanding of love. Others of us don’t think this statement is meant to describe God at all, but assume that the statement means that God is the ultimate picture of love. Either of these processes betrays our assumption that we know something that we may not know.

We do the same thing with hundreds of things that we defend as inseparable from our theology and doctrine. Specifically, I mentioned preaching as one such misunderstood concept. Today preaching refers to a specific activity, done in a specific way, in a specific context. Folks who are trained to preach, are trained in a methodology. We no longer recognize any activity, though it may accomplish the same goal, as preaching if it doesn’t fit our methodological and contextual definition of the act of preaching. We have a tendency to misunderstand or misapply biblical terminology and concepts based on our current methodology of the same context.
If you have a picture in your head of the Apostle Paul standing on a platform behind a lectern above a crowd of people among the statues of Greek gods on Mars Hill in Athens, preaching the gospel, you are victim to word-defined contexts. Yes, he was preaching, but his methodology had nothing to do with our methodological definition of the activity. What Paul was doing was verbally, interactively engaging the people around him. People he had sought out and placed himself in the middle of in order to converse with them.
The truth is, that words often have to be defined by their contexts, not contexts defined by words.
If I were to use the word “row” in two entirely different contexts, say, first, “I will row my boat along the river bank,” and, “let’s place the chairs in rows,” the word row must be defined differently in each of the two contexts. In fact, I’m using it as a noun in one context, and a verb in the other. This may seem like a silly illustration, surely no one who understands a row of chairs would assume that I am making rows of boats along the riverbank. Or would they? This is what we do with concepts whose methodologies have changed over time, or whose purpose could as easily be accomplished by many different methodologies. So we do a thing, call it preaching and assume that anytime anyone ever preached, they did it just like us. Our method becomes sacred to us because we know absolutely nothing else.
Of course, “preaching” is just used as an illustration. We’ve done the same thing with many concepts. We define a word based on a context and then apply that context faultily to another context. Because back in the Spring, I spoke about the contexts of Pastor, Preacher, Poet, Prophet, these are the persons, gifts, and contexts that I see as most confused, misapplied, misdefined and misunderstood. If I get enough guts to continue here, I think I’ve finally got enough clarity in my head to let it fly. I hope you’ll interact, otherwise it’s just me squawking.