This accounts for many awkward applications of texts, written for culturally sensitive occasions, being applied inappropriately in contemporary settings, such as requiring women to cover their heads in churches. Brian Hebblethwaite warns, "It is not even possible for us to mean what the writers of the Bible and the creeds meant just by saying what they said. We have to embark on the process of interpretation, in the light of our recognition both of their presuppositions and of our own, and struggle to express the truth of God and of God’s acts for our own time."
An equally dangerous approach is when a preacher begins with his own contemporary ethos and approaches the biblical text, looking for material he can take out of context to have the Bible say what he thinks his ethos needs to hear, as in this figure:
The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching is a helpful book for applying Haddon Robinson’s excellent concept of finding the one big idea in the biblical text passage and exposing it to the listeners through preaching. But the preacher must be most careful that his “one big idea” is not in fact his own “one small idea” eisogeted into the text, nor his own rendering of God’s dynamic presence reduced to a mere moral principle or a feel-good, pop-psychology nuance. Rather, what one must do is to listen to the biblical text (the logos) and interpret what its message was to the original audience (biblical ethos) in light of its original context. Then one must take that message and contextualize it for one’s own audience (contemporary ethos), as in this figure:
