Have you heard that phrase, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail?

It's something we're all prone to, a cognitive bias, which means that we can be over-reliant on

the same repeated way of seeing the world and the same repeated way of relating to it, even

when that may not be the right approach.

It's actually called Maslow's hammer.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow explained it like this.

It is tempting if the only tool you have is a hammer to treat everything as if it were a nail.

This is one way of describing isegesis.

Isegesis is when we approach the Bible as if we were a hammer,

which means that we inevitably treat every text as if it were a nail.

Isogesis literally means to lead into, as in leading our own ideas into the text.

The opposite is exegesis, which means to draw out. So, isegesis is when we read something into a biblical text that may not actually be there, and exegesis is when we try to

draw out of the text what is actually there. An example of isegesis reading into a biblical text

might be the small group member who, no matter which passage of scripture you're reading,

always manages somehow to bring the discussion around to their particular hobby horse, whether it be

predestination or God's love or human sin or the need to care for the poor. All these things are

in the Bible, but they're not in every verse. If we think

they are, then we're isageating the text instead of exeguting it. The 18th century preacher

Charles Simeon put it like this. My endeavour, he said, is to bring out of scripture what is

there and not to thrust in what I think might be there.

I have a great jealousy on this head, never to speak more or less than I believe to be the mind of the

spirit in the passage I am expounding. So the question is not, how can I make this biblical text say

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