A Word from Bob: Guest Post by Biblical Counselor Joseph Leavell
Joseph Leavell is a teacher, counselor, and blogger with an M.A. in Biblical Counseling from The Master’s University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart, Rebekah, since 2001, and together they have 4 children. Formerly a pastor, Joe is now the Director of Biblical Counseling of Arizona.
What follows are the words of my friend, Joseph Leavell.
*Warning: Eisegesis in Use, but for Demonstration Purposes Only!
What follows will be painful to write, but that is the point. This is a demonstration of how easily Scripture can be used incorrectly to “prove” almost anything we want.
The formula is simple:
- Pick a Bible story.
- Import your preferred modern category into the text.
- Twist the story and the facts just enough to make it support your position.
This reflection was prompted by recent articles in the biblical counseling world that invoke the usage of biblical narrative to argue that certain counseling methodologies are not merely unwise, but spiritually deceptive or even “forbidden by God.” Whether one agrees or disagrees with those conclusions, they raise an important hermeneutical question:
Are we interpreting the text, or are we recruiting the text to support our preexisting positions?
Biblical Counselors Must Be Biblical Interpreters of the Word
When biblical is the descriptive adjective of our counsel, we are holding ourselves to a very high standard. That means concern for exegetical method is not optional. It is essential.
If we are going to call our counseling “biblical,” then we must be equally committed to biblical interpretation. We cannot demand fidelity in our counseling while being careless in our hermeneutics.
This concern is not theoretical for me. It is informed by personal experience.
I learned to recognize this pattern firsthand growing up in fundamentalist circles, where I regularly heard sermons constructed by selecting proof texts to explain why THOSE people were wrong, and WE were right.
Passages were often only partially exegeted, followed by leaps in logic used to explain why, for example:
- The King James Version alone was the uniquely inspired Word of God.
- Women should never wear pants.
- Avoid the appearance of evil by not going to the theater.
- The backbeat was rooted in voodoo and, therefore, satanic.
- Disregarding inherited traditions from mid-century church culture was sinful.
These were patterns of argumentation and divisiveness used to unbiblically divide over 2nd or even 3rd-tier doctrinal disagreements. Patterns of divisiveness repeat themselves.
A Deliberately Eisegetical Example
The very first classical nouthetic biblical counselors were Job’s friends. They:
- Spoke theology.
- Spoke about guarding the truth.
- Defended God’s glory and justice.
- Sought Job’s repentance and sanctification.
They began well. Their failure was not a lack of being present. They were there seven days in silence before they even spoke.
The problem was their methodology. The moment they opened their mouths, they moved from compassionate presence to rigid theological certainty. Their counseling failed precisely because their counseling method failed.
And it was God who rebuked them. Why? Because they treated suffering like a theological equation instead of seeing the wounded person in front of them. They assumed suffering must fit neatly inside their doctrinal framework. They believed that if Job was suffering, then Job must have sinned. Their system required an explanation for Job’s pain, even if the explanation unfairly judged their friend. They were more committed to defending their framework than understanding the person in front of them.
They:
- Rushed to correction before compassion.
- Exhorted before they truly saw.
- Had doctrine before discernment.
- Ignored God’s common grace observations and interpreted everything through their own rigid framework.
Sound familiar?
Many modern “classical” biblical counselors are still making this same error and should be rebuked just as God rebuked Job’s friends. Like Job’s friends, they often speak endlessly about theology and guarding the truth. They can frame suffering primarily through categories of sin, repentance, and sanctification without stopping to consider what may be happening outside their own enclosed counseling paradigm.
Job’s friends could speak about sin. They could speak about justice. But they had no category for profound human suffering that required patience, curiosity, and careful real-world observation.
They mistook theological accuracy for wisdom.
Meanwhile, clinically informed biblical counselors more closely reflect what Scripture itself models in this passage: that God often ministers through common grace observations.
When God comes to Job, He does not begin with a sermon. He points to creation:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”
God directs Job’s attention, not to a theological construct, but to the created order and shows him his place in it. God primarily used common grace observation from creation to make His case to Job.
Therefore, using clinically informed tools drawn from observing God’s created order, such as mind, body, and nervous system, is not a compromise. It is simply following God’s lead in how He cares for sufferers both body and soul.
Was That Relatively Convincing?
If you are more on the clinical side of the conversation and read that and thought, “That was actually kind of biblically compelling,” that is exactly the reason eisegesis exists: to persuade.
At first glance, the argument appears to try to biblically correct a genuine problem. That is what makes subtle eisegesis so dangerous. It rarely sounds absurd. It attempts to sound wise by making biblical correlations.
If you are more on the classical side of the conversation and read my eisegetical example and think, “That is not a fair representation!” you are right to raise objections.
I took half-truths and manipulated them to fit neatly into the text in order to paint you in the worst possible light in a way that is hard to argue against.
After all, I briefly showed how God Himself used common grace observation!
Where the Eisegesis Happened
The issue here is not even just unfaithful argumentation; it is fundamentally a misuse of Scripture by practicing eisegesis by reading meaning into the text rather than drawing meaning from the text.
Here is how. Here is where the eisegesis happened.
- Importing modern categories into the text.
The book of Job does not address debates about counseling methodology, sufficiency, or trauma theory. Those are modern categories.
Job is not about “historic biblical counseling” versus “clinically informed biblical counseling.” That debate was imported into the text.
- Turning biblical characters into modern representatives.
- Job’s friends are shown as “classical biblical counselors.”
- God becomes the model example for “clinically-informed counseling.”
The characters stop being themselves and become symbols for our contemporary tribes.
That is allegorizing, not interpretation.
- Shifting the text away from its main point.
The book of Job is wisdom literature dealing with suffering, divine sovereignty, and faithful endurance. It is not a counseling manual on methodology.
When we force Scripture to neatly answer every modern debate, we flatten the beauty and complexity of the text.
- Presenting the application as if it were the interpretation.
A legitimate application might be:
“Job cautions us against speaking too quickly and carelessly to sufferers.”
That is good application!
An illegitimate interpretation would be:
“Job teaches trauma-informed counseling theories based on clinical observation is biblically valid.”
That is not what the text says at all. That is imported into the text.
- Selective emphasis.
Notice what was highlighted: compassion, suffering, embodiment, and common grace.
Now notice what was minimized: God’s sovereignty, divine mystery, Job’s repentance, and the wisdom genre itself.
That is selective reading. The text is being mined for usable parts rather than understood as a whole.
- Weaponizing the text.
No one wants to be Job’s friends. That is why this is rhetorically effective.
- One camp becomes “the bad guys.”
- The other becomes “the good guys.”
- My side is represented by the faithful character.
- Your side is represented by the rebuked character.
How convenient.
When Scripture always seems to validate my tribe and condemn yours, something may be wrong with my method.
- Category confusion.
“God uses creation” does not mean, “God endorses clinical tools.” That is a leap in logic. A true doctrine, common grace, is being stretched beyond what the text actually teaches.
How to Spot Eisegesis
Among several other means, a few easy questions to help spot eisegesis:
- Could someone reverse the categories and make the opposite case just as convincingly?
If yes, the problem is probably not first with what is being argued or the conclusion. It is the hermeneutic. In this case, with a little bit of creativity, we could reasonably make Job’s friends into the clinically-informed and God into the faithful classical biblical counselor.
- Would the original audience have recognized this conclusion?
Would those who have read the book of Job throughout time have said, “Ah yes, this settles debates over counseling methodology”? Of course not.
- Has the original context faded into the background?
If the ancient setting, genre, and authorial intent disappear while your modern controversy dominates the page, that is another warning sign.
- Is the argument working mainly by analogy rather than interpretation?
If Job’s friends simply “resemble” a modern group, but the text never identifies them as such, you may be reading similarity as meaning. Resemblance is not exegesis.
- Has the moral reaction replaced the textual argument?
If the force of the conclusion depends more on urgency, emotion, or perceived danger than on careful textual flow, the argument may be operating rhetorically by trying to inflame readers rather than exegetically seeking biblical understanding.
- Has the modern controversy become the center of gravity?
If the passage is no longer primarily about learning from its historical and literary context, but instead functions as a commentary on a present debate, the axis has shifted to eisegesis.
Why This Matters
The text can only mean what it has always meant. Our task is not to insert meaning into the text but to draw meaning out of it.
My concern here is not merely to defend one counseling camp over another, though truth does require defense (Deuteronomy 19:16-21; Proverbs 18:17; John 7:51-52). There are real theological and methodological disagreements in the biblical counseling debate, but the temptation and the danger of eisegesis is worth exposing no matter what the conflict.
This is not unique to the current biblical counseling controversy. It is simply one more example of an old pattern.
I have watched selective proof-texting used to justify division, enforce conformity, and sanctify and propel factional voices to the front. It usually arrives dressed in biblical language, moral urgency, the rhetoric of faithfulness, and calls for separation. It justifies harshness and cruel slander by the same eisegetical hermeneutic that justified the division in the first place.
That is what makes it dangerous and why I am not going to simply stay silent when I see it happening in the discipline of biblical counsel that I love.
When our exegesis conveniently confirms that our side is righteous and the other side is dangerous, compromised, or worthy of rebuke, we should slow down and ask harder questions of ourselves.
Are we faithfully interpreting Scripture, or are we misusing Scripture to sanctify our own tribe?
Those are not the same thing.
When we defend Scripture with eisegesis and fallacious argumentation, we employ the very interpretive practices we reject in theological liberalism. This is ultimately self-defeating.
Our goal of interpretation is to not win the latest argument. It is to listen and obey the Word and will of God. How we faithfully handle Scripture should always be our first concern. We are, after all, biblical counselors.
