ABSTRACT
One of the reasons why two people reading the same passage of scripture can interpret it in different ways is because they use it differently. A scholar might use the text as a means of understanding the community that produced it, while a layperson might use it to understand their own community. Robert Morgan (1988) pointed out some years ago that what someone gets out of scripture largely depends on their reasons for reading it. The different foci of attention can be thought of as different ‘horizons of interest’: the world of the author, the world of the text and the world of the reader. The notion of such different worlds has been familiar to scholars of hermeneutics for many years and has been developed more recently by philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur. The questions addressed by this chapter are whether ordinary readers are aware of these different horizons, whether they prefer one horizon over others and, if so, why this might be.
