A HERMENEUTICAL PROPOSAL
Keywords:
Aristotle, Biblical Ethics, Character Formation, Community, Context, Culture, Ethical Theory, Exemplars, Habits, Hermeneutics, Scripture, Telos, Thomas Aquinas, Virtue EthicsAbstract
This article argues that virtue ethics among all ethical systems is the most able to translate exegetical insight into contemporary moral guidance and shows why virtue ethics needs to be appropriated. After offering a brief history of the influence of virtue ethics, the article turns to five of its common characteristics. Following this, it discusses the four dimensions of virtue ethics as categories for understanding the full yield that virtue ethics offers biblical ethics: Dispositions and character formation; practices and habits; exemplar; and, community and communal identity. These four categories allow us to see how virtue is teachable and formative, not only for persons but for societies. Next, the article turns to three issues concerning cultural and theological adaptation and raises the question of whether virtues are themselves too culturally relative and argues that though virtues are context sensitive, they are not ultimately relative to a limited context or culture but remain open to revision in light of new circumstances. It is centred on this view that the undertaking of bringing a virtue-based reading of Scripture into other cultural and religious systems becomes possible and shows that “Scripture not only reveals moral virtues, values and vision, it actually promotes them.” The article attempts to demonstrate the superiority of virtue ethics as the hermeneutical method for bridging a scriptural text to the contemporary world.
This article first appeared as a chapter in: Yiu Sing Lúcás Chan, Biblical Ethics in the Twenty-first Century: Developments, Emerging Consensus, and Future Directions, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2013. It was reprinted with permission in A Lúcás Chan Reader: Pioneering Essays on Biblical and Asian Theological Ethics, ed. George Griener and James F. Keenan, Bengaluru: Dharmaram Publications, 2017. Reprinted with permission.
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