Global Hermeneutics? - International Voices in Biblical Studies ...

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concern is expressed most clearly in the SBL series “Global Perspectives on
Biblical Scholarship”. Biblical interpretation is no innocent activity. The ethical
concern raised by Schüssler Fiorenza about a decentering of biblical scholarship
requests interpreters that come from different social locations. Ukpong and Dube
follow this up; Ukpong, when he points at Western biblical scholarship as part of a
unidirectional globalization, and Dube, when she requests a biblical scholarship
that includes gender, race, and class as interpretative experiences.
I started this essay with an anecdote from Nairobi. My students were not
overly enthusiastic about my focus on traditional East African culture and religion
as interpretative resources for Old Testament interpretation. The mistake was of
course mine. I had an outdated and too romantic concept of their immediate
context. Nevertheless, I still think I had a point, that of the contextual emphasis, the
willingness to make use of the students’ contextual experiences and concerns as
interpretative resources vis-à-vis the biblical texts. The Bible is today interpreted all
over the globe by people who consciously make use of their context as
interpretative resources. As an irony of fate, it is this global presence of contextual
interpretations that is able to balance or even counteract the traditionally Western
hegemony on biblical interpretation caused by the modern globalization.