Often in the church, lay people will hear these two words and simply raise an eyebrow about what is meant. After all, they do not have the luxury of attending seminaries that teach these confusing concepts. These concepts, however, dictate how we read the Bible and apply it. The church has done a disservice to people by not teaching them the meaning of these concepts or how to apply these concepts in their daily reading of scripture. Though I cannot fix this with one post, I do want to, hopefully, set us back on the right path. Before this can be done, we must understand what each word means.
Exegesis is the application within interpretation that “provides sound reasons for the choices it makes and positions it adopts.”[1] In short, exegesis explains a portion of the Bible by appealing to the historical, authorial, cultural, linguistic, immediate, and overall context of the passage.
Eisegesis is reading one’s preconceived notions, biases, and understandings into the text. We all bring biases to the text, but eisegesis is when we allow these biases to dictate how we read the text. If we assume, before reading scripture, that Jesus is not God, whenever we come across a passage that indicates Jesus is God, we will do what we can to twist the passage into saying what we want it to say.
