The ethics of biblical interpretation

rhetoricizing the foundations

Robert J. Hurley

pp. 45-62

in: Williams Ortiz Gaye, Clara B. Joseph (eds), Theology and literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

Historically, biblical ethics dealt with the question of what the Bible has to say about right living and moral decision making. Given that the same texts yield a variety of ethical stances, the basis upon which ethical conclusions are specifiable has come into question. Text-centred interpretive paradigms understand meaning to be predetermined; the task of interpreters being to recover the meaning embedded in the text. More recently, exegetes have begun to look to the culture, economics, and politics of readers as keys to understanding the ethical dimensions involved in the interpretive act itself. Attention has shifted from the past to the present, from the context of production to the contexts of reception. Scholars have also begun to consider the effects that a given reading may produce, from an ethical perspective, on the historical situation into which it is received.