Feminist Hermeneutics

Fiorenza makes it clear that the point of departure is not the bible as normative authority. Rather, women’s experience and their struggle for liberation becomes the locus of authority. The canon is not the Bible but the struggle. The Bible becomes a prototype, or what she calls a formative root model, from which examples and insights are taken that explain one’s struggle to find one’s place and to find solidarity with those women that are recounted in the biblical religion. Fiorenza stresses with power and pointedness the fact that all interpretation of the Bible has come from an advocacy point of view, whether that advocacy happens to be patriarchal or feminist or, I might add, black, Asian, Reformed, Wesleyan, liberal or evangelical. Fiorenza wants to argue in reconstructing her feminist hermeneutic that everyone has an advocacy position in the interpretation of the Bible. She wants to make clear what hers is and challenges all others to do the same.

David M. Scholer, “Feminist Hermeneutics and Evangelical Biblical Interpretation,” Evangelical Review of Theology 1 (January 1991): 309.