Two Inches at a Hundred Yards

If your rifle shoots 2 MOA — about two inches of spread at a hundred yards — that's amazing at ten yards, and OK at a hundred. At a thousand yards it's completely unacceptable. Same rifle. Same error. The error didn't change, only the distance.

That's why my weird obsession is Biblical exegesis.

Man, when you write it out like that it really does seem weird. I'm not obsessed with theology, though that's an inevitable topic. I'm not even really obsessed with the consequences of the exegesis, though those are certainly inevitable too.

I'm obsessed with what the Bible says in its own original context. I don't believe theology or praxis is of much use if it isn't grounded in something bigger than itself. In that sense I'm an exegesis snob. Exegesis is prior to those things the way chemistry, math, and physics are prior to engineering. You can design a car with an engine that runs on water all you want, but if math, chemistry, and physics disagree with you, you ain't driving anywhere in it.

Theological liberals threw out looking at the text of Scripture in an honest way decades ago. Today there's a conservative "backlash" of young guys, often young pastors and ministers and leaders, pushing back at liberal theology. The problem is, a lot of them are focused primarily or even exclusively on theology. Their exegesis is somewhere between nonexistent and complete crap. That doesn't mean everything they say is wrong. It means that eventually they're gonna run their churches into the ground just as much as the libs have over the long haul.

Two inches at a hundred yards. Ten feet at a mile.

This is why exegesis, as a discipline, should be at the foundation of every working minister's skillset. A small error, over the very long haul, causes big problems.

I've got a few reasons for talking about this.

I want to get some of this stuff out of my head and into the world. I want ministers to see some of it and either learn something or get excited about hard-fought exegesis once again. In my opinion, most ministers don't spend nearly enough time on sermon prep, and it shows.

Some conservative ministers do "sermon prep" or "study," and spend a lot of time at it, but their study just isn't very good, because it consists of reading what others have said about the Bible instead of wrestling with the actual text of Scripture for themselves. Because of this, what they preach is usually bland, and often wrong. It's bland — or just lame — because it didn't come from them. It didn't come the hard way, from their own personal wrestling with the Word and the Spirit. And it's wrong more often than not because the people they read are full of crap, and either have garbage exegesis themselves or were trained by the libs who hate the Scripture in the first place.

There are also some specific doctrinal things that are my obsessions, and I'd like to put them out there and demonstrate exegetically how they come from the Scripture. There's a popular idea that interpreting the Bible is impossible, that there's no way we can agree on it, and therefore it doesn't matter what the Bible says. Everyone's gonna say it means what they want it to mean anyway, so why bother?

That's a sort of fair point when we're talking ONLY about motive. It is NOT a fair point when we're talking about the process. People lie to themselves and others about everything, including the meaning of Scripture. That does NOT mean it's impossible to arrive at a really certain meaning about most of the Bible — and even more certain on the things that matter. Those are the things I'm interested in talking about here.

Finally, I hope this exercise improves me. I'm certain it will, and probably painfully at least a time or two, but that's how you get better.

Ministers are shooting at a target a thousand yards out. Everything they teach lands on people who then teach other people, who raise kids, who bury their parents, who decide what they'll stake a life on. Nobody notices a two-inch error at the muzzle. Everybody lives downrange of it.

Hope some of y'all will come along for the ride with me.

— tobe

Written in response to @antidoc's "weird obsession" prompt.