Kiss me once and kiss me twice, Then kiss me once again....

....it's been a long, long time.

The lyrics to that old Louis Armstrong song were going through my mind as I opened up my great big green blogging machine this afternoon.

There's a rumour going around that a civic election was held a week or two ago and that I was in it. It must be true because my bank account seems awfully empty (here's hoping it was for advertising expenses and not bribes), my daily schedule for November is full of references to various all-candidates meetings and similar events, my wife is asking me how I've been, and I'm supposed to be at the school district office next week for an Inaugural Meeting. Apparently I'm a school trustee.

More to the point, November seems to have been blown on the election. I haven't blogged on my usual neXus-ish fare for, well, forever. Perhaps I should do a real quick summary of what I've done thus far in the hope that I can figure out what to do next.

So let's see. I decided to start exploring some of the ideas associated with emergent thinking without looking to any emergent gurus for help. Now why the heck did I do that? I'm not usually all that ambitious, and I know squat about theology.

Oh yes, it's coming back to me now. I wanted to avoid having my mind "tainted" by any particular school of thought, and see if I could get to the emergent conclusions in the old fashioned way--through what is called, in the vernacular, exegesis.

What is exegesis?, you say. I'm surprised to hear you say it since you probably can't even pronounce it :-). Well, it's literal meaning is 'to interpret'. Here's a typical dictionary definition: "a critical interpretation or explication, especially of biblical and other religious texts." It has to do with examining the meaning of words in their original contexts, considering the history that informs the use of the word, and so on. One attempts to remain objective in determining the intent of the author in choosing that word, and learn from its meaning.

The opposite tendency, and one that is all too common when the reader brings an agenda to a passage, or is unfamiliar with original meanings, is called eisogesis. This is the subjective practice of reading into a word or passage what you would prefer that it meant.

[A brief note to the more linguistically inclined. The 'ex' in exegesis means 'out of' or 'from'. The 'eis' in eisogesis means 'into'. The 'gesis' root has to do with leading or guiding. So one is led out of the text, or one guides into the text.]

In order to avoid being charged by others with being caught up in the sway of some personality whose views I would prefer over those of the Bible (a common enough accusation made by one school of theological thought versus another), I thought that if I could preserve a high view of scripture (inspired by the Holy Spirit, infallible, etc.), and use the usual historical/critical/exegetical approach to interpretation, and arrive at certain conclusions without doing violence to the text, that my arguments would be more convincing than simply laying out a few propositions.

Now, let's see what topics I've considered thus far, and how much trouble that has gotten me into.