We think "reading the Bible in context" means thinking about the handful of verses before and after the verses we're looking at on the page. That isn't the case. While that's important, context is so much wider than a handful of verses.

Our contexts are foreign. They derive from church tradition that is thousands of years removed from the people who wrote Scripture and the audience to whom those people wrote.

We impose our modern worldview on the Bible to make it conform to our intellectual happy place. But we deceive ourselves into thinking this works or is legitimate. We fail to realize that the supernatural things we want to avoid are no more supernatural (or "weird") than the things that define the Christian faith. What's so "normal" about the virgin birth, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the hypostatic union of the incarnation (Jesus was 100% God and 100% man)?

God doesn't save us to perpetuate a particular Christian sub-culture. He saves us to advance a supernatural kingdom that is not of this world.

What I mean by context is worldview - having the ancient Israelite or first-century Jew in your head as you read. How would an ancient Israelite or first-century Jew read the Bible - what would they be thinking in terms of its meaning? The truth is that if we put one of those people into a small group Bible study and asked them what they thought about a given passage meant, their answer would be quite a bit different in many cases than anything the average Christian would think. They belonged to the world that produced the Bible, which is the context the Bible needs to be understood by.

Why are you uncomfortable with the supernaturalist worldview of the biblical writers? Evangelicals don't want to just say, "Well, the inspired writers were wrong about some of their beliefs about the spiritual world and its inhabitants." That really doesn't work in a confessional situation! So instead we come up with excuses and interpretations that allow us to remake the biblical writers in our own post-Enlightenment image. I understand that impulse, but it's not honest.

How much of what the biblical writers believed about the supernatural world do I believe? They weren't us. We are products of the Enlightenment; they were not. So let's stop denying that reality. Rather than sitting in judgment on them from our Enlightenment perches, we ought to have them sit in judgment on us when it comes to informing us about the supernatural world. After all, what they wrote was ultimately overseen by God.