What Is Contextual, and Why Does It Matter?

Setting the context for discussions of context

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

The internet tells me that the first day of fall is two days from now, on September 22. When my kids ask me about the seasons changing, I always tell them it’s on the 21st of the month, but I guess sometimes it’s on the 20th and sometimes on the 22nd? Who can tell. In any case, fall is my favorite season, and where we live in Virginia, it’s a really special time of the leaves changing, the air getting crisp, football starting, and even more ribeyes, strip steaks, and hot honey bratwursts than normal.

To honor this meatiest of the seasons, I’d like to quote from one of my favorite poems, by one of my favorite poets. No, not “Friday” by America’s poet laureate/resident “girl whose job it is to fun, fun, think about fun” Rebecca Black, but I can see how your mind would go there. I’m talking, of course, about “To Autumn,” by England’s sad boi poet/failed Fanny Brawne marrier John Keats. The poem is so good that I don’t want waste it all in one go, so I’ll do one stanza today, and finish off the other two in the next two weeks.

The poem, then *ahem*:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

The line that always gets me is the first: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Every morning I drop off my kids at school and drive to work, and the drive takes me along a river and then across it. In late August and September, when the nights start to get colder but the sun still warms the mornings, the ground respires a misty fog that just hangs in the air for a few hours. The fog waters the valley fields in a calm, deliberate way, and you end up thinking that Keats must have been in the Shenandoah when he wrote the poem, because he got it so right.

Next two stanzas coming next week!

What’s coming this week, though, is context. Last week we finally got started thinking about how revelation is contextual, and what that means for receiving and understanding it. We reviewed a bit of stuff we’ve said previously about revelation, and gave some brief examples of how the context of a revelation can influence both its content and interpretation.

Today we’ll be looking more closely at the idea of a “context” itself. I suggested before that it involves basically everything going on in and around a revelatory experience, but that isn’t very helpful. We can be more specific than that, and that’s what’s up today.

So, as Keats said, “I could be martyr’d for my Religion — Epistemology of revelation is my religion — I could die for that. I could die for you principles. My Creed is Epistemology of revelation and you principles are its only tenet.” My friends, let’s follow Keats’s example, and die today.

The revelatory environment

I don’t know what the word “context” suggests to you, but for me it carries the idea of a larger situation or circumstance in which a particular thing is happening. There’s a certain event or object of interest, and that event or object is embedded in a larger place or set of events. The larger set of events may or may not be of interest, but they’re there. That’s the context.

Focusing on revelation specifically, another way to think about the context is as an environment, or to think of a revelatory environment. In fact we could have called the second principle of revelation the environment principle, but the adjective doesn’t really work—we don’t want to say revelation is “environmental,” it would have to be like “revelation is environment-based” or something like that, and that would ruin how cool it sounds to just use a single adjective. So we say that revelation is contextual, but we could very easily think in terms of the environment, or the revelatory environment.

The revelatory environment would be everything that’s happening in and around a person or group of people who are having or seeking a revelatory experience. This idea of a revelatory environment is intentionally broad and even vague, because we want it to be able to include a whole bunch of things. Normally when I think of an environment in this sense, I envision a bunch of trees and some dirt and predators and prey stalking around. I’ve clearly got in my head a biological idea of an environment, and that is sort of what we want here, but it’s not quite all the way. We’ll come back to the biological idea of an environment in a future essay, but in thinking about the revelatory environment here we want to go beyond stuff that’s relevant to survival and reproduction to include many more things.

In general, the revelatory environment would include at least all of the following: