The Year of Contextual Thinking

I'm continually surprised at how well classes fit together. In high school and middle school, I was so delighted that we studied world history at the same time as world literature in another class, U.S. history the same year as American literature. Totally different teachers! I eventually figured out they did that on purpose, and was no less delighted.

In seminary, though, we decide which classes to take, so it's not really orchestrated that way, and somehow the same thing happens, at least to some degree. For instance, the word of the year so far is context. In Preaching & Worship, it's the decider of most everything. Got a congregation full of old people? Don't use too many illustrations about school or having young kids! They'll remember, but it won't make the same impact as things that are more relevant to their current experience. What if your listeners are mostly lifelong urbanites? You might want to take some more time to explain that agricultural metaphor. (Hey, even Jesus exegeted his own Parable of the Sower, and almost everyone knew the farming world then.) And it's not just illustration choices, but the length of a sermon, the style and format, even what you wear. Context, context, context.

In Teaching Ministry, it's the same. Clearly teaching a lesson to children is different from teaching the same lesson to adults, small groups are different from large, the examples abound. In both classes, a lot has to do with what happened before you were there, expectations that were set up a long time ago. That doesn't mean you can't do something different, but it means you don't have a blank canvas or an unlimited array of tools that will be equally well received. We often experience context as limiting.

The Church History application is only just becoming clear to me (which is part of why I choose this moment to write this), because it is more subtle and heady, but it may be more important. One of the things that makes me maddest so far in Church History is Constantine and his conveniently patriotic God. In very brief, Constantine was a Roman emperor who got there by killing or deceiving his co-emperors. Then he had a vision where God told him, "In this sign, conquer," the sign being the first two letters of Christ's name. So he did. He conquered a lot of people and made Christianity the official religion of the empire, ending one wave of persecutions and martyrdom, funding shiny new cathedrals in most towns, making bishops into civil judges, and issuing an imperial standard Bible. I guess I/we probably wouldn't be Christian if he hadn't had his visions and made Christianity so widely accepted, but I'm not sure the faith is better off because of him. Here's why: being a Christian came to mean something entirely different once he started his chain of events. Before, from Christ's time until his, Christians were mostly people who were desperate, marginalized, way way down and way way out. They met in homes. They didn't love the empire because God's kingdom was the true power. Some of them were martyred because they would not pray to the gods of the empire or curse Christ. That was enough to keep the riffraff out--or in, depending on how you look at it--no one would be Christian unless they saw it as a life-saving, life-changing faith that they couldn't imagine not following.

Then comes Constantine. Suddenly the emperor is doing it, so by definition Christianity is no longer so subversive. One will not die for being Christian. In fact, you're a lot better off if you are. Remember the part about bishops being judges in civil matters? If you go to church and know the bishop, well, that might pay off if you ever get in a tight spot with the law. Never mind other kinds of payoff. The church was all but overrun with what my professor calls free-riders, "people who join simply out of comfort and formality, and if it ever got difficult, they'd stop going." Sound like anyone you know? Maybe everyone (including me)? So the character of people who were attracted to Christianity changed radically. The atmosphere of worship and faith changed. The context was almost completely different. And that meant the faith itself and the practice of it were different too.

Aside from hipsterishly lamenting the mainstream-ization of the faith, I'm mad at Constantine because he made something easy that I believe was supposed to be hard. He thought God fought his battles and made his life and his reign easier. Aren't we supposed to fight God's battles instead, if we have to use that imagery at all? Since then, Christians have been reviled again, mainstream again, and everything in between, and sometimes it's hard to say where we stand today. But the point as far as this post is that the context was and is critical in determining what it means to be Christian, or to have any belief.

Then there's Greek class. When a word or phrase can mean two things, we always use context to determine which one's being used. That's a nice, small, concrete illustration: in one kind of sentence, the phrase means "her sister." In another, it means "the sister herself." So context sometimes disambiguates and always helps us discern meaning. I'm a different person with my family, with seminary friends, with Wilmington friends, with my boyfriend, in class, in France, with my two different host families from France, as a teacher, as a student...the list is exhaustingly and shockingly long. Any specific combination of people, setting, and mood constitutes a context and brings out different aspects of me.

The key is, I'm all of them. I'm only my full self when you add up all those aspects. And that's what makes the whole thing so maddening and so lovely: I can best understand Christianity when I look at as many contexts as possible. Far from being limiting, context becomes freeing and illuminating. This is what Christianity looks like in a small church in North Carolina. This is what it looks like in Peru. This is what it looks like in a megachurch in a beach town. This is what it looked like in the first century when Christians fully expected Christ to return any day. This is what it looked like when Constantine stripped it of its hipster outcast appeal.

It is very much a religion for outcasts and losers, but it is also a religion for prom queens and winners. It is for everyone, in slightly or radically different forms.

This is my Christianity.

This is yours.

All of this is ours.

Thanks be to God.