Vanhoozer on Morality and Hermeneutics

Justin Taylor, at Between Two Worlds, interviews professor and author Kevin Vanhoozer about his move to Wheaton. The end of the interview is about the tenth anniversary edition of Is There a Meaning in This Text?, a book about interpretation. Vanhoozer comments on the subtitle of his book, “The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge”:,

Let me begin by saying that my subtitle alludes to Van Harvey's important work, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief. Harvey argues that it is immoral--always, everywhere, and by everyone--to believe something except on the basis of sufficient evidence. This makes criticism more "moral" than faith. So much for the modern morality of knowledge. What I wanted to call attention to was that some postmoderns move in the opposite direction, succumbing not to intellectual pride but sloth by maintaining that it is immoral (they say "violent") to make claims about a text's determinate meaning.

Hermeneutics is a subset of ethics because interpretation aims at a certain kind of good, namely, understanding. In my book I argue for the importance of what I call the interpretative virtues: habits of mind that are more conducive than not to getting understanding. In particular, humility is a key interpretive virtue without which readers cannot do justice to authors as "others." Other interpretive virtues include honesty, openness, and attentiveness. Ultimately, the interpretive virtues are not merely intellectual, nor even moral, but spiritual and theological. For truly to be honest, humble, self-critical, and open is to be a person with certain dispositions, many of which are related to the fruit of the Spirit.