Exegesis reverently seeks to understand the author’s meaning in humble and courageous submission to the text of Scripture where by faith, under the enablement of the Holy Spirit, we sincerely accept the whole of Scripture as God’s self-revelation to humanity. An exegete is willingly under the text to devotedly keep fellowship with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The work of biblical interpretation must begin with a commitment to the humble yet courageous task of exegesis, matched with an equally daring rejection of eisegesis.

In the former, we submit to both the Divine author and human authors of Scripture. In the latter, we ask Scripture to submit to us, as we subtly, even if unwittingly, vie for a place in the authorship ourselves.

In eisegesis, the will of the reader is imposed upon Scripture. In exegesis the will of Scripture is imposed upon the reader. The former is a reading into the text, the latter a reading out of the text.

An absurd illustration can make the point. A man who takes up the Bible to discover best practices for being influential, so he might excel in 21^st century corporate leadership, is engaged in eisegesis. He comes to Scripture to read into it that which he wishes to read out of it. What he wants from the Bible is not determined by the Bible.

On the contrary, exegesis reverently seeks to understand the author’s meaning in humble and courageous submission to the text of Scripture where by faith, under the enablement of the Holy Spirit, we sincerely accept the whole of Scripture as God’s self-revelation to humanity. An exegete is willingly under the text to devotedly keep fellowship with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ: “But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isa. 66:2).

Biblical exegesis then requires we bow before Scripture, not that we make Scripture bow before us, either by forcing it to yield our pre-conceived notions, or by our presuming its reliability is undetermined until we have subjected it to our method of study.

More narrowly, in practice, exegesis seeks to understand the immediate literary context of any passage of Scripture within its historical setting. Careful and exact attention is paid to background, the parsing of lexical forms, the analysis of sentence structure, the flow and order of thought, and other features unique to the original Hebrew or Greek, such as word order or Semitic parallelism.

Read More