The Ethics of Interpreting the Bible

the Rhetoric of Biblical Scholarship - Part 2

In this essay Schüssler Fiorenza suggests all objective, value-free, biblical interpretation is in fact male interpretation. It is interpretation by a certain group for that same group. Scholars who want biblical interpretation to be ethical must be good biblical scholars but they must also,

engage biblical scholarship in a hermeneutic-evaluative discursive practice exploring the power/knowledge relation inscribed in contemporary biblical discourse and in the biblical texts themselves.

Schüssler Fiorenza creates a detailed analytic compass through which she becomes more confident about being able to interpret the biblical text without creating damaging readings. To this end she is deeply invested in uncovering the rhetoric of interpretation in both the present and the past.
Schüssler Fiorenza is very thorough. I believe her work represents one of the best approaches to biblical scholarship yet conceived. Most valuably, she deliberately decenters the objective mooring of biblical scholarship. Biblical scholarship becomes more performative when language and rhetoric are the determining questions rather than the supposedly objective questions of science. Schüssler Fiorenza and those who have followed her have shown what needs to be taken into account regarding the ethics of biblical interpretation. In some ways, this is its own kind of testimony, although it is a testimony to the texts of biblical interpretation rather than to the bible itself. Or is it? Is Schüssler Fiorenza's showing not also a performance? If performance is showing a text to an audience, then Schüssler Fiorenza gives an authentic performance of the biblical text at the same time as she argues how it needs to be appropriated. Does this read of Schüssler Fiorenza connect to earlier questions about Ethics?