Lessons in Ethical Interpretation of Scripture

I recently submitted a final paper for a biblical studies seminar on the book of Ezekiel, as part of my seminary studies. I wrote about chapter 16 of Ezekiel, which is one of the book of Ezekiel's (and the Hebrew Bible as a whole) more problematic texts. The city of Jerusalem is portrayed in Ezekiel's metaphor as a God's wife, described as "playing the harlot" with other cities. This text--like many (or perhaps any) others--cannot be taken out of its historical context, in which women were the property of their husbands. Its language and the rhetoric that encases the marriage metaphor must be closely examined and read critically. 

As I was finishing my paper, I snapped a photo on my iPhone of the title and posted it on Instagram. I included the hashtag, #ezekiel16. I pressed the hashtag on Instagram to browse the other photos posted under that topic. What I saw made me laugh, shocked me, and even disturbed me. Photos attached to the #ezekiel16 tag included selfies of young women, sunsets, and lots of photos of mothers and daughters together, tagging Ezekiel 16:44 (which basically says that mothers and daughters are alike). What such cherry-picking of scripture does not take into account are the verses that immediately follow this singularly hand-picked verse, in which the daughter and mother are deemed worthy of public shaming and abuse. 

I'm not sure a selfie professing self-empowerment really connects to what Ezekiel is actually saying here. 

I share all of this for one purpose: to say that I have learned that ethical interpretation matters. Speaking as a Christian living in contemporary Western American culture, I think our general treatment of scripture outside of progressive circles largely fails to treat texts through lenses that pay attention to narratives as stories that aim to shape us. Ministers, religious leaders, and people of faith must hold in tension both our desire to apply sacred texts like the Bible to our own lives, and our attention to how histories, rhetoric, and contexts have shaped them. Furthermore, we cannot deny that we bring ourselves to any text we read.