Steve is on (to) something

As an undergraduate, I find that being required to do an exegesis of Scripture is futile. At its most basic, exegesis requires the student to have a grasp of the culture depicted in Scripture, and by necessity, the language too in which the texts in question are written. Such skills are in all probability lacking in the average undergraduate, and it would be unreasonably demanding to require the student to acquire such knowledge. Of course professors understand this, and I suppose that is the reason why instead of tasking students to actually discover the extratextuality of the texts, students are referred to exegetical literature.

In essence, since we do not have the necessary expertise required to do an original exegesis of the text, we read the exegesis done by theologians and then duplicate their work, avoiding being labeled as plagiarists by feebly paraphrasing and summarizing their ideas. This is not necessarily wrong, for is this not what we do when we report on a certain topic? We read about the subject and then communicate the information we have obtained in a personal way. This is an important exercise, because it develops our ability to process and present information.

However, a distinction must be made between actually doing an exegesis of a text, in which one obtains an original (not necessarily unique) output, and making a factual report, in which information is merely synthesized. It is important to note the difference because the student may come to believe that he is making an exegesis when actually he is not. Moreover, by trying to pass off fact-finding as exegesis, the importance of creating new knowledge as an aspect of research is ignored, creating students who are pathetically unoriginal.

In effect, contrary to the desired outcome of the student becoming more critical, we only end up with students who are disheartened by having to trawl through highly specialized literature to extract insights the wordings of which they can manipulate and then half-heartedly pass off as their own. This is why I deem being asked to do an exegesis futile. The time could have been more fruitfully spent carefully studying an established exegetical work and then relating it to our experience.