“In this connection, the first obvious point to make is that the scriptural passages used for doctrinal ends were normally taken out of their original context and considered in isolation, producing results sometimes quite foreign to the sense which they would have had if interpreted within their proper context. Take, e.g., Jn. 4:24: ‘God is spirit’. In the setting of the words which Jesus addresses to the Samaritan woman, the expression contrasts the new worship given to God, ‘in spirit and in truth’, with the older worship which was concretised in sacred places of Jerusalem and Mount Gerizim. But, the word pneuma had a whole philosophical (especially Stoic) tradition behind it, so that, taken out of context, it was often used to indicate the divine substance of the Father and the divine element in the Son. When the development of the Arian controversy turned the attention of theologians to the Holy Spirit, the text was then even used to demonstrate the divinity of the third hypostasis of the Trinity.
Precisely because these texts, isolated from their original context, take on a life of their own and are often interpreted in the most diverse ways by different parties in controversy, but always in terms of the new doctrinal polemical contexts into which they are inserted and which condition their meaning, the hermeneutical procedures which are employed to accommodate them to these new needs entirely abandon the interpretative structures normally used in specifically exegetical settings.”
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