If perspective unsettles authority, and contradiction unsettles coherence, ethics unsettles allegiance.
Few interpretive pressures provoke as much anxiety as scripture’s moral claims — not because they are unclear, but because they are often too clear in ways that clash with contemporary ethical sensibilities.
Violence, exclusion, divine command, punishment, patriarchy, domination — these are not obscure marginalia. They sit at the centre of the canon’s moral imagination.
And they are deeply uncomfortable.
Ethical Discomfort as Interpretive Pressure
Readers rarely encounter ethical difficulty neutrally.
Moral discomfort generates urgency:
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This cannot mean what it appears to mean.
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God would not command this.
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This must belong to a different time.
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This must be symbolic.
The pressure is not simply to understand, but to protect moral coherence — both of scripture and of the reader.
This pressure gives rise to an intolerance.
The Moral Cut
The intolerance of ethics manifests as a cut between:
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what is affirmed as divinely authoritative, and
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what must be distanced, reinterpreted, or disowned.
Common strategies include:
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historical relativisation (“that was then”),
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progressive supersession (“fulfilled” or “overcome”),
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selective emphasis (“the trajectory matters more than the text”),
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divine abstraction (“this reflects human limitation, not God”).
What Is Being Protected?
Ethical intolerance is often framed as moral sensitivity. But structurally, it protects something deeper:
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the intelligibility of God,
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the moral self-understanding of the reader,
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the continuity of religious identity,
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the teachability of scripture.
If scripture’s ethics cannot be reconciled with the reader’s moral world, the entire interpretive system destabilises.
Ethics as Relational, Not Absolute
Biblical ethics do not emerge from a single moral system. They arise from:
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survival pressures,
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covenantal identities,
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imperial resistance,
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communal boundary maintenance,
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ritual and symbolic economies.
Ethical claims are situated responses within relational fields — not timeless moral axioms.
The Cost of Sanitisation
When ethical discomfort is prematurely resolved, something is lost:
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the historical struggle embedded in the text,
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the lived cost of survival under threat,
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the ethical evolution across the canon,
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the unresolved tensions between justice, mercy, power, and fear.
Sanitised scripture is morally safer — and ethically thinner.
Ethical Refusal as Faithful Reading
A relational approach does not demand moral acceptance of everything scripture contains.
It allows — even requires — ethical refusal.
But refusal is not erasure.
To refuse ethically while still attending relationally is to say:
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This claim arose from a real pressure.
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This response made sense within its field.
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I can acknowledge its force without reproducing it.
Ethics becomes engagement, not compliance.
Intolerance Revealed
The intolerance of ethics reveals where interpretation can no longer pretend neutrality.
It marks the point where:
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meaning threatens identity,
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authority threatens conscience,
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tradition threatens responsibility.
At this boundary, interpretation either becomes defensive — or reflexive.
Ethics Beyond Containment
To read it faithfully is not to extract moral certainty, but to remain in relation with that struggle — resisting both blind obedience and facile dismissal.
The ethical difficulty is not an obstacle to interpretation.
It is its condition.
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