Despair

As I sit to write this four events are fighting for domination in my thinking.  First, an email I got yesterday from a person who I have known for about 40 years asking me to pray for and event that violates the clear teaching of the Bible.

Second, a conversation with a pastor in Morocco this morning in which he asked prayer for a person I know who has bought into false teaching (which by the way is rampant in Africa).

Shortly after that conversation the third event was a the observation by a man I was bringing up to speed on the workshop that started this week that one of the reasons he thinks that men, him included, do not engage with the Bible is that they are too concerned with their careers.  That echoed exactly what the men in the workshop said on Tuesday night by the way.

Lastly, and this may bring all of these into focus, I was reading the introduction to Scalia’s book, Reading Law during lunch in there I read:

Is it an exaggeration to say that the field of interpretation is rife with confusion?  No.  Although the problem of tendentiously variable readings is age-old, the cause is not: the desire for freedom from the text, which enables judges (and Christians) to do what they want.  (parenthesis added)

He goes on to say:

Distortion of the text to suit the reader’s fancy is by no means limited to the law…The practice of injecting one’s own thought into texts has long been given free rein in some schools of scriptural exegesis – so long, in fact, that scholars have given the practice its own disreputable name: eisegesis.  The antonym of exegesis, the term eisegesis denotes the insertion of the reader’s own ideas into the text, making the reader a full collaborator with the original author and enabling the introduction of all sorts of new material.  For eisegetes, the possibilities are endless.

Think about that and I will comment on how these all relate tomorrow, or you can tell me how you think they relate in the comments.