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?
"Do we ask and teach ... in a disciplined way how our scholarship (interpretation) is conditioned by its social location and how it serves political functions"
In this excerpt from her article Schussler Fiorenza argues that it is crucial - if we are to be ethical - that we be aware of the social location from in which we interpret and for which we interpret. Can good interpretation be apolitical? Schussler Fiorenza seems to answer negatively. But the idea that the bible must be interpreted "politically" would not go over particuarly well in any church that I've ever attended. (Continued "Conservative" (read Republican, Tory, Alliance) interpretations wouldn't wash either but people don't want to admit this).
First, I'm very glad we've moved on from Childs, as although I'm old enough to remember the period of which he was writing, it seems ever so distant to me now!
Second, I have a major problem understanding Schussler Fiorenza, as she writes in that special version of English that is as far as I know exclusive to american academics. I could use a course in the ethics of interpreting academic American English...
But anyway, I do suspect she is addressing the current world in which I live.
What nobody seems to have asked about yet though is the assumptions behind the title of the seminar. Why do we need to have any special "Ethics" for interpreting the Bible, that is special and/or different from the ones that might apply in any other discipline? I'm sorry, but I want to ask this kind of question.
I don't comprehend any of the people (some of whom are very vocal right now) who appear to regard the Bible as possessing some special property that allows them to selectively disregard some of its apparent "rules" but insist that others (well currently one other in particular) are not culturally conditioned and do apply to modern times. To me, as a (retired) professional engineer (I don't like to say scientist) this is indistinguishable from saying that the Bible is "magic".
I hope this is not too unorthodox a view...