Ms. Crankypants

A Text Without a Context … February 16, 2007

Just so you know why I haven’t posted very often yet, I’m not cranky everyday.  Consequently, the postings on this blog might be few and far between.  But, then again, sometimes crankiness seems to come in seasons.  So there might be a cranky flurry from time to time.  Whenever I feel a cranky moment coming on, I’ll try to remember to come here and let you all in on the current gripe.

So, on to today’s cranky post.

My 12-year-old daughter is in a small group at church for sixth graders.  They have a little booklet for the girls to work through each week, and then they all get together to discuss it with their leaders and each other.  So far, so good.

My older daughter (almost 20) helped out with a middle school small group last week, so she reviewed one of the booklets.  She was pretty disappointed with it (maybe “horrified” would more accurately reflect her reaction?).  Basically, it was poorly written, poorly edited, poorly thought out, and poorly communicated it’s poor points.  Poor little booklet.    I think my older daughter could write her own cranky post about what she saw and read, and for that matter, I could probably go and on about it, as well, but I’ll spare you the tirade (for today, at least).

My particular beef is more about something that came to me as I woke up this morning.  (Yes, I wake up in the morning having cranky moments.)  😉

All the booklet did was have the girls look up fairly random verses and answer questions about them.  Just so you know, I have a SERIOUSLY cranky attitude toward people who take a Bible verse out of context and then try to make the verse mean whatever the person wants it to mean.

It seems to me that by having the girls read one isolated verse from, say, Philippians followed by one isolated verse from Romans, followed by one isolated verse from the Gospel of Luke, it just trains the girls to think that Bible verses have no context and that you can just randomly choose a verse and read into it whatever you want.

As they say in some inductive Bible studies I’ve been in over the years, “A text without a context is a pretext.”

Taking isolated verses out of their immediate context — and out of the overall context of the entirety of Scripture — can be a path into error, false doctrine, and even trying to find ways to circumnavigate clear teachings of Scripture in order to gratify the flesh.

I would rather see the girls do something like maybe read an entire chapter of a Bible book, then discover what it means through good Bible study methods, and then try to find some sort of personal application.  But it seems that the most common form of Bible study these days — especially for kids and teens — is to just grab an isolated verse and then immediately try to bend and stretch it into some sort of personal application, whether that interpretation or application has any validity within the immediate or overall context of the verse or not.

Maybe it’s time to write my own Bible study series for middle schoolers?  🙂

I personally subscribe to the belief that I shouldn’t officially complain about something at the church unless I’m willing to step in and be a part of solution.  So I’m not officially complaining to the powers-that-be about the shallow and ill-thought out study books the kids are using.  But if I decide I want to write my own studies, then I feel I’ll have a real purpose in stepping forward with a bit of constructive criticism.  Hmm … just what I need.  Another “project.”  lol  😉

And speaking of random Bible verses, here’s one that’s running around in my head today:

“The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked.  Who can know it?” Jer. 17:9