"A young couple from another church came to one of our assistant pastors for counselling about marital problems they started having soon after their wedding. After just a few minutes of interviewing the two, he could see they were miles apart in tastes, ideas, and opinions. “What made the two of you get married?” he asked. “A sermon our pastor preached on Joshua conquering Jericho.” (to which the pastor replied) “ What did that have to do with getting married?”
“Well,” explained the husband, “Joshua and his army claimed Jericho,
marched around it seven times, and the walls fell down. Our pastor told us that
if we trusted God, claimed a certain young girl and marched around her seven
times, the walls of her heart would collapse, and she would be willing to
marry. So, I did it, and we got married.”
Our assistant pastor stared in disbelief. Was this man putting him on? No, indeed. In fact, several couples in that particular church had gotten married on the same basis after hearing the same sermon. This amazing story illustrates that first of all people can become extremely confused on what the Bible means and what to do about it; and second the interpretation and application of Scripture is crucial to life decisions."[1]
At the close of my last article, I offered five possible reasons as to why Christians may interpret Scripture differently. Let us consider each one.
The Person interpreting Scripture is not a Christian.
For sure, not everyone who seeks to understand and teach the
Bible are Christian. Many who pursue this activity would not even claim to be,
yet they will openly speak, teach, and write books about the Bible. These kind
of people, often be found within academia, believe the Bible to be no different
to any other piece of literature, and so they analyse it and understand it as they
would a Shakespearean play or a book by J.K.Rowling.
Then there are those who seek to interpret the Bible and
would claim to be Christian, but they are not. They have never repented of
their sin and made Jesus Lord of their lives. Perhaps they have grown up in the
church and been involved in the life and ministry of their local congregation,
but they have never been born again of the Spirit of God.
We could expect that those belonging to either of these
groups may, at best, stumble upon some Biblical truth, but we should never go
to them as authoritative interpreters of God’s Word.
Paul reminds the believers at Corinth that:
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit
of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand
them because they are spiritually discerned. 1 Corinthians 2:14
The Person interpreting Scripture seeks to impose pre-existing presuppositional beliefs.
No one comes to the Bible completely free from bias. Everyone will bring their life experiences, education, worldview, likes and dislikes, and their presuppositions to the table of interpretation. Therefore, without a methodology, without principles of interpretation to govern and weed out potential biases, we can be sure that such a person seeking to interpret the Bible will fall into eisegesis. Such a person may teach that walking seven times around the girl of your dreams will have her falling at your feet and accepting your marriage proposal!
Biblical eisegesis happens when a person seeks to impose
their own thoughts onto the text. This person will ‘read into’ the text what he/she
wants rather than what it says. The opposite of this is Biblical exegesis.
Exegesis has the interpreter ‘drawing out of’ rather than ‘reading into’ the
text to reveal what it really teaches, regardless of personal views.
“Uniqueness is not the aim of our task,”. “The aim of good interpretation is simple:
to get at the ‘plain meaning of the text,’ the author’s intended meaning.”[2]
Biblical eisegesis may well take place because a person
refuses to accept the plain teaching of God’s Word. They may be living contrary
to what the Word says and so they seek to bring their own interpretation to
bear upon the text or it could be our next reason.
The Person interpreting Scripture has not been trained in how to read and understand the Bible.
It is possible that some engaged in eisegesis, have no idea
that this is what they are doing. They have never even heard of the word!
The reason they find themselves practicing eisegesis is that
they have never been trained in how to read and understand the Bible. They have
perhaps never been told that the Bible, which contains 66 books by some 40
authors written over a 1500-year period, has different genres of writing. They
may be completely unaware of the quite different audiences to which each book
is written to and they may feel, that they only need the Holy Spirit to be able
to understand the peculiar Hebraic, Greek and Aramaic idioms employed by the
authors. This can lead to a whole host of fanciful and damaging interpretations.
Now let’s be clear here. I am not saying that a person needs
to be a trained scholar to have God speak to them from His Word. The Holy
Spirit can indeed illuminate our minds to understand the deeper things of God,
but this is no excuse for a lack of sound tools of biblical interpretation.
The Person interpreting Scripture has not been trained in Biblical hermeneutics.
This is like the point just discussed but it extends the problem. It is possible to be made aware of the diversity of writings found in the Bible, and even consider some of the peculiarities found therein, but still not employ a method of interpretation to aid sound Biblical exegesis. This is a little like being asked to build a house from scratch, but you are given no guidance, no plans, and no materials. Sure, you can give it a go, and you may end up with something looking like a house, but without the tools to build a solid foundation, it will all fall apart.
The Person interpreting Scripture follows their denominational tradition.
When I became a Christian, I was taken to a Baptist church. As
a brand-new Christian, I had no reason to question the form of Church
governance or the way the Bible was taught. In fact, on reflection, I believe
my view at the time would have been to think that all churches operated the
same. What I came to realise is that it
is possible, rather probable, that the Bible and its message would be seen and
understand through denominational glasses.
We may follow that which our church teaches with little
thought about whether it is biblically sound. Friends we are exhorted to test
all things.
My final article in this mini-series will consider the
hermeneutical tools available to us, that we may rightly divide the Word of
truth.
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