I read a great post on Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s blog about exegesis:
I spent 8 years heavily involved in what I would call Reformed Calvinism, an interpretation of Christianity that tries to deal with the modern world while keeping a lot of the conservative tenets of American evangelicalism. Churches in this bent would typically say they're non-denominational, but often spin out from Southern Baptist, conservative Presbyterianism, or similar churches and retain some of the characteristics.
To be clear, I'm not here to knock any of that today. I had some specific problems while I was there that led to my departure, but I also made a few friendships that lasted beyond my tenure and learned some important things about my faith. But as in many American Christian churches, we did learn a particular kind of Christian view on exegesis.
For those of you who are not religious scholars or evangelicals, exegesis is defined by the Christians I've known as reading the "God-breathed" truth of the text, and is contrasted with eisegesis, which is defined as reading your biases into the text to make it mean what you want it to mean. Ruttenberg proposes an alternative view, which I read as:
You cannot read the text without your biases,
but that's okay if you understand that and are willing to engage with lots of other readings of it to find deeper truths.
She says something that really resonates with me:
"The text will really start opening up when we start to acknowledge that our biases and perceptions will always impact our readings in more ways than we think they do."
She goes on to echo the definition of the two terms from Rabbi Edmond Weiss, who said: “Exegesis is the process of extracting understanding from a difficult or obscure text. Eisegesis is the process of finding what you need in the text — whether it’s there or not.” (emphasis mine). Importantly, she then points out that eisegesis is not necessarily bad, as long as you understand that you are bringing yourself to the text. There's lots of fascinating follow-on explanation of how Jewish scholars read the text through layers of translation and commentary and conflicting analyses. But this first part is where I'd like to focus for this conversation.
I have always rebelled against the notion of an objective truth that is fully discernable to humans. This doesn't mean that such a truth doesn't exist. But this notion of Scripture as something that can be fully understood in one particular way at all times? No, I didn't agree with that.
It's my opinion that that kind of thinking is what has caused some Christians to elevate the Bible to a fourth person of the Trinity, but we don't have to fully unpack that today. The important thing is that verses from this ancient book of wisdom written in Ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek in the context of cultures that existed thousands of years ago are unlikely to yield obvious secrets to the average English-speaking American living an unfathomably rich and luxurious life in our modern age.
I went through some difficult times last year. In the midst of them, I wrestled with Bible verses like Luke 11:11-13 that had long been taught in churches throughout my life as "God is a good father and will not deny His children what they ask for." Our materialist age interprets that as "God gives you stuff because He's your rich dad and He's not mean like that other guy." The implication is that if you don't get something, you didn't ask properly ("you have not because you asked not" from the book of James is frequently quoted to the frustrated seeker), or perhaps you are still in too much sin for God to reach you and work his Santa Daddy magic. No matter what, it's probably your fault.
(I'll remind you that I'm not speaking about specific churches here but how things play out in the minds of many Christians trying to find their way under the prevailing mode of teaching in the American evangelical context.)
In my grief and anger, I read them again, more closely. And what is promised is not that. What is promised is that God will not deny Godself to those who ask. I don't find that to necessarily be a comforting message. But I do find it to leave me feeling resolved and at some kind of peace. I no longer expect the wrong things from God. God is not here to give me my heart's desire, no matter how holy or justified. I remain convinced that a God who incarnated to bring a message that boiled down to tell us to love God and love people well does have some concern about our well-being. But the entire process is something other. Getting more of Godself I think allows us to have perspective and peace, but it doesn't relieve us from suffering.
This also resolves the theodicy for me, the question of how God could be both all good and all powerful in the face of evil. The answer I come to is that God is other and is not necessarily operating along that binary in God's fullest form at all. There's an inbreaking into this plane of reality that manifests as love, as grace, as miracles. But those are not applied according to human standards or even according to what a perfect human would do given the power. There will be suffering, and sorrow, and it will not always refine us or sanctify us; sometimes it will just leave us more tired and sad.
Again, this is not a comforting Gospel. But it feels true to me. And the mandate is the same — by being loving and as selfless as we can manage, we can try to alleviate the suffering of others and in so doing serve a God that chooses to manifest in this plane as love.
That's what I see when I stare at that book right now. Maybe that's what I need. But it does feel like gleaning understanding from a difficult text.