This post is the first in a series in which I share 10 things that I wish student exegetes would understand and think about as they are learning the craft. Of course, there are certainly more than 10 things about exegesis I wish students (for that matter, anyone) would grasp, but I have to put some kind of limit on it, right?

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#10 There’s no cookie-cutter approach or single checklist of to-do's

In The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckmann rightly argue that "all human activity is subject to habitualization" (p. 53). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; habitualization provides "a stable background in which human activity may proceed with a minimum of decision-making most of the time, it frees energy for such decisions as may be necessary on certain occasions" . . . and thereby "opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation" (p. 53).

But habitualization can also lead to a strong desire for shortcuts, and that can be a problem.

Many student exegetes just want their exegesis teachers to provide them with a list of the 10 to 12 procedures that comprise "exegesis" so that they can check those things off as the complete them, thinking—wrongly—that the end product would be a complete exegesis.

But, it is not that easy. In fact, it’s much more complex than that. As Porter and Clarke remind us ("What is Exegesis?" in Handbook to the Exegesis of the New Testament [ed. S. E. Porter], 17–18):

…exegesis is no single thing, but rather a complex and multifaceted collection of disciplines. The approach or orientation one takes to exegesis, which is most often determined by the particular interests of the interpreter and the questions brought to the text, may only constitute one part of the whole exegetical task. For the linguist, exegesis becomes an analysis of lexis and grammar. For the historical critic, exegesis concerns itself with uncovering ancient backgrounds and original intentions. The theologian embraces exegesis in order to aid in the contemporization of traditions and doctrines that will continually speak in a new and vital way to present believers. The fact is that there are various aspects of a text’s meaning and different types of exegesis can address these various aspects. For this reason, the exegete can never hope to present the exegesis of a passage as it it were the final word. Rather, one does an exegesis of a passage in which a coherent and informed interpretation is presented, based on that interpreter’s encounter with and investigation of a text at a given point in time.

This means that, although there may be a handful of procedures common to many (but not all!) instances of exegesis (e.g., lexical studies), the final forms of those researches may vary, perhaps even quite broadly. For example, an exegesis of Jesus’ parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30) produced by the social-scientific critic Richard Rohrbaugh ("A Peasant Reading of theParable of the Talents/Pounds: A Text of Terror?," BTB 23 [1993]: 32-39) will be different in many ways from one produced by, say, historical-critical exegete Lane C. McGaughy ("The Fear of Yahweh and the Mission of Judaism: A Postexilic Maxim and Its Early Christian Expansion in the Parable of the Talents," JBL 94 [1975]: 235–45). This is because they come at the texts from two different perspectives. Both might agree (at some level) where the locus of meaning lies (the world of the text’s author), but they will differ with one another in terms of how that meaning is produced and how to get at it—among other things. This will result in similar, yet different forms of exegesis.

So, exegetes-in-training here is the hard truth: there is a lot to learn and there is no single cut-and-dried checklist for "doing" exegesis.