They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. - Nehemiah 8:8 (ESV)
I am a youth pastor. I preach on Wednesday evenings and teach on Sunday mornings before the main worship service. On Wednesday evenings, I seek to exegete a text for the students faithfully. On Sunday mornings, I seek to teach them how to do it.
I do not mean that I am trying to teach all my students to preach. When I preach on Wednesdays, I am doing more than exegeting a text. But I am not doing less than that. There is the old saying, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." On Wednesdays, I am giving the students fish. On Sundays, I am trying to teach them how to fish.
Eisegesis Versus Exegesis
When we meet together on Sundays, one of my main goals is to replace the students’ unlearned ability to practice eisegesis with the learned ability to practice exegesis. What is the difference? Exegesis is extracting the meaning from a text to understand it. Eisegesis is inserting meaning into a text to make it mean what I want it to mean or assume it means. Exegesis is understanding the meaning of a text. Eisegesis is deciding the meaning of a text. Exegesis is the process of taking out the meaning of a text. Eisegesis is the process of putting meaning into a text.
Why is this important? Just consider. If the point of reading the Bible is not to understand what God has said but to insert what we want it to say and convince ourselves that we found it there rather than planting it, then our Bible reading is not an exercise in listening to God at all. Eisegesis makes Bible reading an act of self-deception. If we go to the Bible not to read what God has said but to insert our own messages, then our Bible reading becomes nothing more than a circular exercise of reading what we already think. If we think we know what we are about to read and understand before we even lay our eyes on the page, then we are not prepared to see what we have not seen before. We will not be looking for it.
What good is eisegesis? None whatsoever. And yet, in personal devotion after personal devotion, in lesson after lesson, sermon after sermon, church after church, it is the unlearned practice of untold numbers to read no further than their own confirmation bias. By "confirmation bias", I mean our tendency to accept data that support what we already think and reject data that do not. We seem to have this sort of bias almost built-in to how we think. But the fact that we can know it means that we can have some sort of control over it. We are not bound by confirmation bias. Because we can perceive it, we can work to mitigate it. If we could not perceive it, we would not know how to mitigate it, and the conversation would never be had.
Some have argued that the fact that we bring our own perspectives and network of knowledge to a text means that there can be no objective, inherent meaning in a text. The text will have unique meaning for each individual reader because what the text contains will connect in unique ways for each reader. Therefore, the text cannot be said to have meaning in itself. It only bears meaning insofar as a reader brings his or her own interpretive grid to the text. This idea is at the core of how I was taught to read at university. It is part of what is known as reader-response theory, and it is part of the postmodern rejection of objective knowledge.
There is some merit to the ideas that undergird reader-response theory. If there were not, it would not be as convincing as it is. Of course each reader brings their own perspective, assumption, and background to the act of reading. Of course each reader's interpretation will necessarily be influenced by these things.
And yet, this understanding quickly breaks down. If there is no meaning that a text bears in itself, with what is the reader interacting? If an author writes an articulation of ideas presented in such a way as to motivate certain conclusions, is there nothing objective about what he has written? Like the tree that falls and no one hears, if an author writes and no one reads, is there no meaning in what he has written?
At the bottom, reader-response theory can be reduced to the premise that two people cannot communicate with one another. There is an unbridgeable gap of meaning between people that no kind of word can span. But the fact is that this is simply not the case. For all our differences, we can understand one another. And for all the theorizing about the impossibility of encoding objective meaning into a text, is not that precisely what the proponents of reader-response theory are doing as they write about it?
The fact that we do not know or understand how it is that objective meaning can be transferred from one subject to another does not mean that it does not happen. It can and it does. This post is an exercise in it as you read. Therefore, despite our lack of a unifying theory to explain how it works, we can continue to study the Scriptures with a view to learning what God has said. And we can teach others to do the same.
We Need the Sense of the Text
The verse at the top of this article is a helpful reminder for what we need from the Scripture. We do need the "sense" given to us. This word is used elsewhere for discernment, discretion, or insight (1 Sam. 25:3; 1 Chron. 2212; Job 17:4). The idea is that the people needed teachers to help them see what was there in the text.
If we fail to see the meaning in the text, then we have missed the point of the text. And if we miss the point of the text, we miss the power of the text. As dire as this sounds, it happens all the time. I have witnessed over and over again in discussions with students their tendency to give whatever answer they thought I might be looking for. They try to say what is expected rather than see what is really there.
How can treating the Bible as a repository of my own ideas lead to godliness, knowledge, virtue, or love? How could treating the Bible this way do anything other than allow me to drive my own mind in circles, building nothing new and creating nothing but an increasingly deep rut? May God protect us from such a fate. If we want to avoid it, then we need to continue to go to the text to get the sense, and we need teachers who will help us get it, so that we can understand it. This is not just doable; it is demanded if we are going to learn to obey all that Christ has commanded. If He commands it, then it is not up to us to make our own meaning, but to submit to His intention.