Inter-disciplinary studies are rapidly emerging to meet the insistent demands of the modern age. Nowhere is this more evident than in the two areas that provide the title for this work. Biblical interpretation is itself interdisciplinary, drawing together the biblical disciplines and others to address the problem of interpreting texts. Christian ethics is also multidisciplinary and thus no stranger to this new ethos, although in practice its relationship to biblical interpretation is often problematic.

To bring these two areas together is a potentially creative undertaking. It comes at a time when much attention is being paid to reading texts. Texts are always read in a context. Our task in this book is to consider how biblical texts may be read in the context of moral concern.

Yet, while interdisciplinary studies are mostly of recent origin, one is aware of a series of scholars who did not allow themselves to be narrowly confined within one discipline or who, like Schleiermacher for example, were at home in multidisciplinary endeavour. The direction taken in modern scholarship has been anticipated in some measure in each generation since the rise of critical studies. Hence, if one reads biblical texts in the context of moral concern, one is aware of standing in a tradition of interpretation: one which has had its crises and its fractures and its wrong turnings, but which nevertheless possesses coherence, logic and objectives from which much can be learned.