Eisegeomai, to lead into: the interpreter injects ideas and makes the text mean what is wanted. Charles Simeon's eighteenth-century formulation is the canonical pledge: my endeavor is to bring out of Scripture what is there, and not to thrust in what I think might be there; never to speak more or less than I believe to be the mind of the Spirit in the passage. The eisegetical procedure, as its critics diagram it: imagination first, what idea do I want; exploration, which passage seems to fit; application, what does my idea mean. Scripture as prop, never as subject.
The recognizable specimen: the reader who arrives at the same conclusion from every text, predestination from the creation story, self-esteem from the ten spies, the sermon series where every road leads to the series. Barry Cooper's tool metaphor names the bias: Maslow's hammer, one tool, every text a nail. The diagnosis generalizes brutally: the conspiracy researcher who finds the cabal in every document, the debunker who finds a hoax in every anomaly, and this archive's own temptation, finding a pattern in every word. Eisegesis is not a theological error. It is the default setting.
The claim: eisegesis functions less as a diagnosis than as artillery, since no reader can prove they led out rather than in, the charge works against any opponent's reading and never against one's own; the word's real use is not to find bad interpretation but to decommission rivals. Verdict: observe any doctrinal fight, both sides file the charge, neither files it against themselves. The honest counter-technology is the one this archive runs: show the competing readings side by side with their evidence tiers, and let the thrusting-in become visible by comparison. The hammer cannot grade itself. The shelf can.
If everyone condemns eisegesis and everyone does it, what is the word actually for?