From the Pastor.....

Pastor's Corner May 2025

Inspired: Church  Stories

We take for granted the receiving of letters, emails, and texts, but, in the first century, receiving a letter from Paul or Peter was truly special. These letters were written for the purpose of helping the church in her particular context, something that is important for us to remember as we read their letters almost 2000 years later. For example, Paul did not write his letters to us in 2025. It is for this reason that the first step in our interpretive process is to try and understand Paul’s letter in the context of the first century. This doesn’t mean that Paul’s letters are meaningless in our day and age. They are meaningful. We simply must start our interpretive process in the first century and work our way forward into our day. This also means that we must be careful to assign the label “universal truth” to everything that Paul wrote. We need to be open to the possibility that some of what Paul wrote is only going to make sense in the context of the church to which he was writing. When we read the letters of the New Testament, we need to keep in mind that, more often than not, these letters were written to provide instruction on particular issues, or to answer questions that came up in the ongoing life of the church. It is for this reason that we find passages dealing with issue that seem irrelevant to us. For example, is it right to eat mean that was purchased in the market? This question doesn’t make much sense to us, but in the early church it was an important question. After all, meat that was sold in the market often came from the animals that were sacrificed on pagan alters. Should a faithful Christian not eat such meat? Another important example was whether or not Gentiles needed to become Jewish first before they could become Christian. For Gentile men, this meant that they would have to undergo circumcision. Again, this is not an important question to us, but it certainly was in the first century. When we read the letters of Paul specifically, we need to keep in mind that his primary purpose was sharing the gospel of Christ. Therefore, Paul’s instructions on what to do and not do was based upon his understand of what would help or hinder the sharing of the gospel of Christ. Again, this is something that we need to keep in mind as we interpret and apply Paul’s letters to today’s church. We could ask the question, how does our interpretation and application of Paul’s letter help or hinder the sharing of the gospel of Christ? This is an important question to ask because there have been many times that Paul’s words have been used to hurt people on the one hand and deny the God given gifts of others. After all, as Evans writes, “Paul did a lot of theologizing. The man never met a metaphor he didn’t like. But every letter he wrote was in service to an inclusive, grace-filled gospel that he believed was good news for everyone, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, man and woman alike.” As she finishes up her book, Evans points out that the Bible is more than just a collection of sayings. It is more than nuggets of truth that we must mine in order to advance our cause and crush our opposition. The Bible is even more than a collection of stories. It is one big story, filled with many, many smaller stories. When we keep that in mind, we steer clear of turning the Bible into just another answer book. As Evans writes in the last sentence of her book, “We may wish for answers, but God rarely gives us answers. Instead, God gathers us up into soft, familiar arms and says, ‘Let me tell you a story.’”