The Many Contextual Lenses of Theological Writing

Books referenced:
​Yaghjian, Writing Theology Well, Pt. 1, chapters 1-2
Brettler, How to Read the Jewish Bible, chapters 1-4, 6-8

An insight I had from the above mentioned reading is how the context of the reader or audience of a theological text matters just as much as the context of the original author, translators, copy makers, and teachers that bring a theological text to an audience. This insight relates to the learning outcome “Be able to describe what "context" means (understanding) and then evaluate how context influences the doing and the reading/interpreting of theology”. The context of every person along that chain of authors, translators, interpreters, and readers has an impact on what is transmitted because each person who touches that text exists in a context: the intersection of culture, politics, scientific discovery, ecological climate, world events, and innumerable other lenses through which they understand the world. 

An insight from the reading that surprised me was the number of places where one text alone is being processed and potentially changed. I had considered the contexts of the original author and the current reader being incongruous and requiring analysis to better understand the text, but had not considered the impact of all of the hands that brought that text from one to the other. One translator may have a cultural understanding that another translator lacks, so the text that comes through may have missed cultural, political or other contextual references that result in a text with a very different meaning than the original author intended. 

I am excited to delve deeper into learning what scholars have already discovered and documented to provide a better understanding of the texts for the context in which we live.  Learning more about the theological lenses through which we view scripture and create theology is also exciting as I had not known about the creation of theology that focuses through a particular contextual lens. (e.g. disability theology)