With Counter-Apologies

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Dan Beecher (0:49)

Why do you hate the Bible, Dan?

Dan McClellan (0:51)

Well, it's because I hate God. Can't you tell?

Dan Beecher (0:54)

It's all that Satan worship you've been doing.

Dan McClellan (0:57)

Hey, once you pop, you can't stop. Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:07)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:08)

And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of that ever present. I forget.

Dan Beecher (1:21)

Misinformation is the word you're looking for.

Dan McClellan (1:23)

Misinformation of the same.

Dan Beecher (1:26)

It's amazing that you would forget that particular word, because today is all about misinformation.

Dan McClellan (1:32)

It's a veritable smorgasb, smorgasb. I don't know what the word is. It's a cornucopia of misinformation.

Dan Beecher (1:43)

All right. This is going to be a fun episode if Dan doesn't know how to word today. That'll be this is going to be a tricky one. But yeah, we're doing a bit of a grab bag of apologetics.

I'm going to call it, I don't know, something along the lines of my apologies. What do you think of that?

Dan McClellan (2:00)

Ah, yes, that works. My apologies.

Dan Beecher (2:03)

Yeah, because we're going to be talking about a lot. Look, there are plenty of fine apologetics out there. There are plenty of ways of looking at, you know, the stories of the Bible and harmonizing them with your world view and whatever. There are also some really, really bad ways of trying to take what's in the Bible and mold it to what we actually know about the world around us, and it doesn't always work.

Dan McClellan (2:36)

Yeah, it's highly problematic, and mostly because we, and a friend of mine on Facebook was, a scholar friend of mine was talking about this yesterday. You've heard the term exegesis, and then we also talk about isogesis. One is...

Dan Beecher (2:51)

Explain them both.

Dan McClellan (2:53)

Okay, so exegesis, the idea would be interpretation out of. You're reading from, you're basically trying to figure out what the text means. Isogesis would be reading into, you're putting stuff into the text, and the concern that my scholar friend was expressing was the notion that these were a strict dichotomy, because there's not, because there's no such thing as pure exegesis, because we're not just extracting meaning from a text. You are generating meaning with the text, something that I have harped on many times. And so all interpretation is isogesis to one degree or another. And so when all engagement with the text to one degree or another is remaking the text in our own image, the difference is what are our concerns and our goals and our methodologies. Are we trying to reconstruct the text in a way that we think is going to most closely approximate what the original authors and audiences would have understood, or are we trying to construct meaning in a way that serves our own interests today? And this is something that I point out in the introduction to my forthcoming book, The Bible Says So.

Dan Beecher (4:10)

Gosh, you're good at squeezing that in. That's awesome. Pre-order is available now.

Dan McClellan (4:16)

Yeah. What we get right and wrong about Scripture's most controversial issues coming out April 29th, 2025

Dan Beecher (4:24)

Link in the show notes, baby. Everybody pre-order. We want this thing on the New York Times bestseller list.

We want to rocket this to start them.

Dan McClellan (4:34)

Yeah, we want it coming out number one. But one of the things I point out is that if you are not willing to let the Bible mean something that you disagree with, then you're not really concerned for the Bible. You're just concerned for the Bible as a proof text. You just want it to be the authorization for your own dogmas. And that's what bad apologetics, that's the foundation of bad apologetics.