"He married my daughter"

OK, you may ask, "are you talking about your son-in-law or the pastor who conducted the wedding?" Good question, with only that information you are left to determine the point of the statement from your predisposed notion of who I might be talking about. This orientation to make sense of something a certain way is called your worldview.

To see more clearly you need more information. This is called "context". Within what larger frame of reference did I make this statement? What was the major point I wish you to know?

I could give you his name, but if you didn't know from his name whether he was my son-in-law or the one who conducted the wedding, you would still have to infer from your orientation which person I was talking about.

I could give you information about the person in addition to his name. But again, if the information did not explicitly reference this person in a way that provided you understanding without the need for your orientation to be active, then your worldview is still instrumental in knowing the truth with certainty who I was talking about.

Such it is with reading the Bible. The Bible tells stories about God's story. Often it is not obvious who the characters are, especially in Jesus' parables. Our core assumptions (worldview) about God, the world and ourselves tend to affect how we discern truth from the story.

See, the point of this blog is that its not God's truth that is ambiguous or transitory from situation to situation and person to person, its the flawed orientations or worldviews from which we try to discern truth that causes us to disagree in dogmatism or assume truth is relative.