During an era in history called, “The Enlightenment”, it was fashionable to use what has been termed as “higher criticism” to introduce questions & doubts about biblical inerrancy, biblical historicity, & general presuppositional belief – that ultimately would lead to the undermining of faith.

One way that higher criticism has been defined is:

Another offshoot of the higher criticism approach is often misunderstood as “exegesis”.  The word exegesis literally means to “bring out of” in that a person who is approaching the Bible in an “exegetical” manner is supposed to be bringing the meaning of the text out rather than reading their opinion back into the text.  But this distortion of true exegesis is really a form of “rationalism” which supposes anyone can find the rational meaning of the text using textual deconstruction – grammar, idiom, context, audience.

Rationalism is often passed off as a person being exegetical when actually the person is engaging in a more detailed version of proof-texting.  This approach is often displayed when two theological participants debate.  Each marshals his or her supporting proof-texts & whoever has the most or does the better job at stringing their proof-texts together, feels like the winner of the debate.

Rather, Christian theologians used to make an argument based first on PREMISES before even bringing out a single text.  You can even see this in how Jesus Himself would make an argument.  Jesus would often state some truism premise that could not be denied, either by a person of great learning or an illiterate.  From there Jesus would bring in the actual biblical support to back up the premise.  This is what is often considered a “parable”.

You will often see many Christians today who will either make up their own brand of faith by filling it with loads of sugary emotionalism or you will find those who claim to be “exegetical” by filling their faith with all sorts of detailed proof-texts.  Both types of Christians typically ignore the overarching premises of the Bible.  Both types end up undermining faith.  The emotionalism is soon seen as a shallow crutch invented by the person to get through life & the rationalistic type is seen as testosteronically combative & self-serving.

What is worse is that the rationalistic type works at chipping away at a person’s faith perhaps quicker than the emotional type because the rationalistic type deconstructs faith until every element is contradicting itself.  They do this typically by during an argument, trying to use evidence of discontinuity or contradiction of a doctrine or belief to undermine their opponent’s position, but what ends up happening is that they actually begin to chip away at faith in general.  So the “victory” that such an approach brings is comparable to a person mowing down allies & enemies together to win a war.  The “champions” are left to cheer to themselves “We won! We won!” while standing in the midst of their complete destruction.

This undermining of faith has caused many to become atheists or at least non-participants who become dormant in their belief. 

So, beware of people claiming to be “exegetical” & “logical” when actually they are ignoring the overarching premises of Christianity & are engaging in a scorched-earth policy of win the battle at all cost – even at the cost of undermining of faith.