Yesterday a few colleagues were sitting around debating whatever it is that we debate when one piped up with "I'm engaged in an eisegesis..."  To which I commented "and who thought they'd hear that word today?"

With that in mind, I post Mark Alexander's article on Constitutional Eisegesis, which you will find, once you get through the biblical examples, actually is about the Constituion and is worth the read.

Mark Alexander:

"Judge not, lest ye be judged." It's notable that this text from the Bible has replaced John 3:16 as Americans' favorite scriptural quotation -- but what does it actually mean? Is this ageless admonition really a call to unmitigated tolerance over discernment between right and wrong? Is it really a biblical nod of the head to the virtues of postmodern morality and multicultural society?

Of course not. As Christ's imperative against judgment appears in the Gospel accounts, a different picture emerges. With the Pharisees clearly in view, in the Sermon on the Mount account of Matthew 7, and again in Luke 6, "judge not" appears in the context of the proverbial man who perceives the speck that is in his brother's eye, but not the log that is in his own. The context, then, suggests a warning against hypocrisy, not moral discernment. Indeed, the full imperative of the passage encourages righteous judgment: "first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye."

Then, in John 7:24, taking aim at the Pharisees once again, Jesus makes another extraordinary statement: "Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment." So, does Jesus really call his followers to "judge not"? Not really. In the vocabulary of theologians, this practice of isolating and thereby misinterpreting a phrase or passage from its context is called eisegesis. 

Other common examples of eisegesis -- which we'll leave to your own exegesis -- include the imperative "care for orphans and widows" (James 1) to sanction a social, and thereby governmental, responsibility; "Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man" (I Corinthians 11) as an affirmation of male chauvinism; and "Love keeps no record of wrongs" (I Corinthians 13) as a get-out-of-jail-free card for habitual sin.

But what, you ask, does this Bible lesson have to do with the Constitution? In truth, the same fallacies that affect biblical interpretation also affect our interpretation of the Constitution.

Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States pose for a 2006 class photo inside the Supreme Court in Washington March 3, 2006. In a major blow for President George W. Bush's war on terrorism, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 29, 2006 that the military tribunal system set up to try Guantanamo prisoners violates the Geneva Conventions and U.S. military rules.  REUTERS/Larry Downing/Files (UNITED STATES)

The belief in a Constitution subject to the evolving interpretation of the judiciary has as its origin the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, where Chief Justice John Marshall ruled, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." All well and good if the courts would continue to interpret the law exegetically, but as history would soon show, constitutional eisegesis was lurking just around the corner.

In fact, by the early 20th century the eisegetical interpretation of the Constitution had been given a name, courtesy of Howard McBain's 1927 book, The Living Constitution. In the decades that followed, this notion of a "living" Constitution, one subject to all manner of judicial interpretation, took hold in the federal courts. Judicial activists, who legislate from the bench by issuing rulings based on their personal interpretation of the Constitution, or at the behest of like-minded special-interest constituencies, were nominated for the federal bench and confirmed in droves.

This degradation of law was codified by the Warren Court, under the influence of Justice William Brennan, Jr., in Trop v. Dulles (1958). In that ruling, the High Court noted that the Constitution should comport with "evolving standards...that mark the progress of a maturing society." In other words, it had now become a fully pliable document -- one that Jefferson had warned us would be a "mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please."

By 1987, living constitutionalism had become such the norm that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall delivered a lecture, "The Constitution: A Living Document," in which he argued that the Constitution must be interpreted to the age in which it existed, given prevailing political, moral and cultural norms.