God helps those who help themselves. – 1 Hezekiah 3:4
State your devotion to God when making pronouncements, associating such devotion with the ends you are pursuing, as this is pleasing to God. – 2 Bartholomew 4:7
Of course, there’s no 1 Hezekiah or 2 Bartholomew. I made those up. Making up your own Bible verses is fun. You should try it sometime. But as fun as it might be, it’s problematic. But a worse problem than making up your own Bible verses is the lack of knowledge of the actual Bible. For example, according to 82 percent of Americans, “God helps those who help themselves,” is a real Bible verse.[1] That’s a problem. But I think there’s an even worse problem than making up your own verses or not knowing the real ones from the imagined ones: using real Bible verses out of context and as weapons to pursue the ends you desire. In my judgment, this is not pleasing to God.
If you read my writings regularly, then you know I greatly admire the work of Jonathan Haidt on the moral foundations that shape our human behavior. Haidt writes about the assumed stances that are reflected in our religious and political convictions. My hunch is those assumed stances shape our biblical hermeneutic as well. Rather than exegesis, i.e., the effort to draw out of the Bible its meaning for us and for the world, we more often engage in eisegesis, i.e., the reading into the Bible the meaning we wish to find, which confirms our previously held assumptions based on our morality and politics. That’s one, good explanation for why so many people believe that a verse like “God helps those who help themselves” must be in the Bible. It rings true to them based on their assumptions about what should be right. Since it rings true, it must be Scripture.
Yet, we can’t avoid eisegesis completely. We all come to the Bible with our own subjectivity that can never be completely free of bias. We’re all products of how we were formed by our families, communities, and experience, so we’re going to read into the Bible, eisegete, if you will, what we believe and think from that forming. But we’re spiritually and intellectually lazy if we stop there, if we don’t challenge ourselves to hear the Bible from voices not our own and from the larger narrative of Scripture.
I believe the Bible is completely true down to its very last word. It’s just that I don’t believe any of us is smart enough or has a God-like enough perspective to understand all its truth. The Bible, then, isn’t self-evident. Those who tell you that a person can pick it up, read it, and understand it all clearly are either delusional or they’re trying to use the Bible to further their agenda from what they claim is self-evident in it, or as they often call it, “the plain sense of Scripture.” The Bible is God’s gift to the Church. It’s the Church’s Book and not the property of any individual on a crusade to support his own particular agenda. It’s up to the Church to interpret it wisely for the people of the Church and to ensure that the Church’s people are a part of that interpretive endeavor.
+Scott
[1] Most scholars think the phrase originated with Euripides (a Greek polytheist) in 428 BC. The more modern phrasing came from that notable Deist, Benjamin Franklin, in his Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1736.
The Rt. Rev. Scott Anson Benhase was the tenth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia from 2010-2020. This website serves as an online archives for the weekly email reflections, the eCrozier, he wrote during his episcopacy.