The other thing they brought up was how their religious group always quoted scripture out of context.
This pretty much reminded me of the Church of God. We pick and choose what we want to believe and follow out of the bible and then use proof texts to validate that belief, most of the time ignoring the story before and after the single scripture quote.
One of the comments a person made was, "I am always suspicious of people who throw around scripture by memory. It is usually done to impress us on how knowledgeable they are, but, yet actually proves they aren't when they take those quotes out of context.
Another said, "But a lot of times when you see that there's a quote, there's no context. And so, because the Bible is so complex in terms of differences in the same story and by other contradictions, I just wonder sometimes why there's not more skepticism."
Anyone who has been in the COG for long knows how church leaders and ministers love to throw around bible scriptures dripping like honey off their smooth tongues. COG leadership has always been good about never practicing what they believe. Tossing around bible verses is meant to impress the sheeple in the congregation and give them the air of authority. The vast majority of COG ministers have never had a real theological education where they dissected scriptures without a COG booklet by their side or even been given space to have doubts and questions about verses or teachings. Questioning and doubting are anathemas in the COG.
That's why you see poorly trained leaders like Bob Thiel thrusting his big fat bible in your face in his videos. That big fat bible is meant to impress you that he is a follower of the words inside the book. He has proven he is not. Then there is Dave Pack who admits he no longer needs to open his big thick bible up because it all in his head now. We have witnesses who wrong that belief is now for many years.
If COG ministers actually told you the truth, the vast majority of them do not believe the bible is infallible but they would never publicly admit it.
Some Seventh-day Adventists say this:
Of course the Bible contains errors, big and small, because its writers were human. Sometimes, the errors were "innocent," other times they were contrived, purposeful, and made to fulfill an agenda. Anything that involves humans comes with a taint: and that includes products resulting from God’s use of human agents to reveal himself. Humans often hijack and distort God’s message. That’s how God in the Bible is made to promote genocide, regulate slavery, and ban women from church leadership. But as Jesus’ ethic reveals, genocide, slavery, and a host of other ungodly behaviors are inconsistent with God’s character. A good God does not endorse evil in one era and disavow it in another. And if this God promotes immorality, that is a bridge too far.
The process of biblical composition, compilation, and canonization involved humans, who are incorrigibly prone to error, deceit, and manipulation. Those involved in the writing and vetting of what became our Bible had a full complement of human frailties. And the 66 books they canonized, even granting the Holy Spirit’s involvement, showcase these imperfections. Is God inerrant and infallible? Yes. Inerrancy and Infallibility are baked-in suppositions about God. But we cannot extend these same attributes to anything fallible human intermediaries helped to produce. The only possible way in which the Bible could be error free is if God verbally inspired the writers. But this is a position we have consistently rejected.
Something similar happens in how adherents of scriptural religions relate to their sacred texts. We call it interpretation, or its other fancy name, hermeneutics. In all three Abrahamic religions, we approach our different texts, whether it’s the Hebrew Tanakh, the Christian Bible, or the Muslim Koran, as individuals – and interpret the same materials individually, differently. The writings are the same, the expressions are the same. What is different are the humans who interact with the texts. Their differences are informed by a variety of factors, including culture, education, and gender. If we are exposed to the same source material but end up with dramatically different, sometimes opposite understandings, how then could we argue that the source is infallible? In these “books” slavery is good and bad at different times. And through its pages this blight is countenanced and denounced by different writers. Limited polygamy is endorsed and practiced by virtually all the patriarchs but is circumscribed in the New Testament. Some would be killed by God for improper Sabbath observance and others allowed to violate the same with impunity. All these opposite moral portrayals couldn’t emanate from the same God.
A true God wouldn’t behave so ungodly. But humans could. And it is these human behaviors, often attributed to God by the same humans who serve as God’s prophets, priests, and disciples, that are at issue. Any faults we find in God, when reading the Bible, tell us more about ourselves, about human agency, than about God. Humans are perfectly capable of indulging evil independent of God. But we drag God into the mix and have the effrontery to “defend” him for the indefensible things we “made” him do. GOD IS INERRANT AND INFALLIBLE; THE BIBLE IS NEITHER
COG ministers have a great track record of using scripture to prove their point and enforce their rules. God's name is tossed around and occasionally Jesus may be quoted, but ultimately it is about their authority of you and how they can use scripture to control you, almost always out of context.
The other problem with CO Gministrers and those who claim infallibility is that their own human interpretations come into play.
Fallible people have to decide what the Bible is affirming. Mistaken-prone human beings must do the hard work of interpretation. Imperfect people have to determine the meaning and purpose of Scripture.
Our track record in the COG with this has left us with between 400 - 700 different splinter groups with the vast majority of them claiming infallibly in their teachings. They all can't be right and there isn't one group out there who demonstrated they are the one true church. The Churches of God have turned into the very thing they have been accusing other Christians of for decades.
The obvious danger of taking the Bible out of context is that we end up with the wrong message. And our culture is saturated with the wrong ideas about the Bible, Jesus, and Christianity. But I don’t think that’s the extent of the dangers of taking Scripture out of context.
Often times when we take scripture out of context we remove the “we” and insert “me”. We’ve made verses all about ourselves. We read the Bible as if it’s a personal letter addressed to us. The problem is the Bible isn’t written to you. It’s written for you, but not to you.
When we ignore the context we miss the original meaning. We read the Bible for what we can get out of out, and not what God wants for us. The Bible has something for you, but it’s not written to you.
Our culture has made reading the Bible a very “I” centric thing. But much of the Bible is written with a “we” centric theme. We are going to look at a few verses in the next section that show just that.
The point is we need to read the Bible in context. We need to pay attention to the surrounding verses AND who those verses were written to.
If you only remember one thing from this article remember this. Context is king.
In other words, the verses around the verse you are reading will tell you a lot about the verse you are reading. If you ignore the context you will likely end up with a skewed view of the Bible. Context is king.
The context of a verse is one of the most crucial elements of Biblical exegesis. And it’s also one of the easiest things to do. It only takes a few minutes to look at the context in which something is said. If we spend just a few extra minutes on the above verses we would easily arrive at the intended meaning of the passage.
This isn’t just a principle for Biblical interpretation. Imagine if you actually read that article or listen to what that politician said. Rather than jumping to conclusions based on a one-sentence soundbite. Context is king. It tells us the whole story.
If you take a sentence out of context you can make anyone say anything you want. That’s the danger of taking scripture out of context. You can make the Bible say anything you want if you ignore the context. You HAVE to pay attention to the context of the Bible. Context is king.
Stop Taking The Bible Out Of Context (and how to avoid it)
Today in the COG its leadership thrives on proof-texting and taking scripture out of context. When one holds them accountable they are proven to be liars and false prophets. No one in the COG should take the words of their leaders as gospel truth. Throw away the booklets they wrote and the other useless material and check it out for yourself and you will quickly see how spiritually depraved they all are.
