Published on Thursday, December 08, 2011
There are various approaches people take when it comes to reading, interpreting and applying the Bible. They are engaged in what is known as hermeneutics, the science of interpretation.
As soon as you open your Bible and begin reading, you are engaged in the art of interpretation. And to be fair, one act of interpretation has transpired even before you picked up your English Bible. That’s right. You picked up a translation of the Bible.
It isn’t hard to see how radically different the modern world is when compared with the ancient Biblical era.
Who Contributed to the Bible?
The writers of the Bible are kings, peasants, men and women, slaves and free, fishermen, doctors, lawyers, philosophers, generals, artists and poets, rich and poor, and so on. The bible isn’t a list of do’s and don’ts. It isn’t just packed this prose, monolithic, one dimensional, steno symbols. It has multiple genres (Law, prophets, poetry, gospels, history, letters, and apocalyptic). These genres contain information about geography, authors and audiences, population, genealogies, and much more.
The Bible is composed of 66 books written by approximately 40 authors and we even have a few books that we don’t know for certain who wrote!
To widen the gap a bit more between the “then of writing” and the “now of reading”, consider that the Bible was written from 1400 BC-93 AD, spanning the entire Roman world, using 3 languages.
This is an incredibly complex book or, rather library of books, and really does take some rigorous intellectual engagement to begin to get your head around what you hold in your hands.
The Bible old and you are new. Now, let me give you a 10 second crash course in hermeneutics. There’s no way we can come to the Bible unbiased. We all approach Scripture with a worldview, preconceived ideas, theological persuasions, political stances, personal baggage, and so forth. And that’s not a bad thing!
However, when it comes to actually interpreting the Scriptures, there’s basically two ways of going at it and the two methods are what theologians refer to as Exegesis and Eisegesis.
Exegesis means “to lead out” or “extract from.” (Maybe think ex-odus). This is our approach to the Bible with Acts 29 and the Resurgence tends to work. We want to extract from the original meaning of the text, understand it in the world in which is was originally penned and then make the hermeneutical jump over into the 21st century.
But there’s another way to read that many others choose to use and it is called “eisegesis.” This means to “read into.” These are those who have chosen to impose their own personal or cultural beliefs upon the Scriptures as an attempt to make the Bible less offensive, more palatable or to suit their own way of life and avoid being conformed to the image Jesus rather than the pattern of the world.
Christian, ask yourself:
“Who’s Word is this, actually?
“Am I out to exegete or eisegete the Bible?”
“Does my culture and personal desires trump the authority of Scripture in my life or am I willing to obey, love, and proclaim Scripture regardless of whether I am accepted or rejected?”
Pastor Alex
