Scriptural reasoning


Scriptural Reasoning is one type of interdisciplinary, interfaith scriptural reading. It is an evolving practice of diverse methodologies in which Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Baháʼís, and members of other faiths, meet in groups to study their sacred scriptures and oral traditions together, and to explore the ways in which such study can help them understand and respond to particular contemporary issues. Originally developed by theologians and religious philosophers as a means of fostering post-critical and postliberal corrections to patterns of modern reasoning, it has now spread beyond academic circles.
Theologians of different faiths have strongly challenged the claims made by some of Scriptural Reasoning's founder practitioners that they have requisite knowledge of ancient traditions of Islamic, Jewish and Christian exegesis and, on that basis, "not only the capacity, but also the authority to correct" or "repair" modernist binarist or fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible or Quran. Published articles by academics have also criticised some Scriptural Reasoning projects in the United Kingdom for alleged lack of parity between participating religions and instrumentalising of sacred texts for political agendas and money, while other scholars have alleged a history in Scriptural Reasoning from earlier SR conferences in the United States of exclusion and bullying of Christian theologian critics, and in later SR projects in the UK of victimisation of Muslim theologian whistleblowers.

Method

Scriptural Reasoning involves participants from multiple religious traditions meeting, very often in small groups, to read and discuss passages from their sacred texts and oral traditions. The texts will often relate to a common topic — say, the figure of Abraham, or consideration of legal and moral issues of property-holding. Participants discuss the content of the texts, and will often explore the variety of ways in which their religious communities have worked with them and continue to work with them, and the ways in which those texts might shape their understanding of and engagement with a range of contemporary issues.
A participant from any one religious tradition might therefore:
  • Discuss with the other participants his or her own readings of the texts from his or her own tradition
  • Discuss with them their attempts to make sense of the texts from his or her own tradition and
  • In turn discuss with them the texts from their own traditions.

    Features

Most forms of SR exhibit the following basic features:
  • SR does not ask participants from different faith traditions to focus upon areas in which they are most nearly in agreement, or to bracket their commitments to the deepest sources of their traditions' distinct identities. SR allows participants to remain faithful to the deepest identity-forming practices and allegiances of their religious communities.
  • SR provides a context in which the participants can discuss those commitments, and perhaps even become more self-aware about them. SR sessions therefore often highlight and explore differences and disagreements between religious tradition, and give rise to serious argument — in order to promote what has been called 'better quality disagreement'.
  • SR does not assume any consensus between the participants as to how they understand the nature, authority or proper interpretation of the texts in front of them. Participants do not have to assume, for instance, that the Bible fulfills the same role for Christians as does the Qur'an for Muslims or the Tanakh for Jews.
  • SR is said to rely upon the existence of honesty, openness and trust amongst the participants, and more generally upon the growth of friendship among the participants in order to provide an appropriate context for disagreement. It is therefore sometimes said that the key to SR is 'not consensus but friendship'.
  • In order to encourage these relationships, the practice of Scriptural Reasoning is often located geographically with a view to engendering mutual hospitality — for example, by meeting in neutral academic spaces such as universities, or by peripatetically rotating between the houses of worship of different faiths. SR groups try to preserve an ethos of mutual hospitality with each participant being both host and guest, and to ensure parity of leadership, oversight or ownership.

    Metaphors

To leave space for the variety of ways in which Scriptural Reasoning may be practiced and developed, SR practitioners often find it more fruitful to characterize SR open-endedly in terms of metaphors, often drawn from the Abrahamic traditions themselves.

Tent of meeting

Scriptural Reasoning has sometimes been described as a "tent of meeting" — a Biblical mishkan — a reference to the story of Genesis 18. Steven Kepnes, a Jewish philosopher, writes:
Participants in SR practice come to it as both representatives of academic institutions and particular "houses" of worship. SR meets, however, outside of these institutions and houses in special times and in separate spaces that are likened to Biblical "tents of meeting". Practitioners come together in these tents of meeting to read and reason with scriptures. They then return to their academic and religious institutions and to the world with renewed energy and wisdom for these institutions and the world.

Hearth

Scriptural Reasoning has been compared to gathering around the warmth of a hearth, where — Ochs explains — the hearth represents "those dimensions of life that members of a religion turn to in times of crisis, tension, or uncertainty in the hope of drawing nearer to the source of their deepest values and identities." This metaphor builds on the rabbinic notion of Torah as a "fire," drawn from texts like Jeremiah 23:29--"Is not my word like fire, says the LORD?" and Deuteronomy 33:2, as interpreted midrashically by the rabbis. In Sifre Devarim 343, the editor concludes that "the words of Torah are compared to fire" before developing this comparison in various respects. Most relevant to SR is that, "Just as a person that is too close to a fire is burned and if he is too far coldness , so too with the words of the Torah. As long as a person is involved in them, they are life-giving, but when one removes himself from them, they kill him..."
In this vein, James and Rashkover write:
The same sacredness and life that rewards l'shma study can also be the cause of absolutism and violence when a community feels under threat. Scripture is powerful: "Is not my word like fire, says the Lord?". The same fire that warms and gives life can also kill and destroy. Ochs discerns that the impulse to guard the sacredness of scripture, even violently, is often an index of the community's love of their sacred scriptures as a primal source of divine life. Rather than unleashing the destroying fire of scriptural passion, SR is a practice of offering a measure of scripture's warmth to others.
More recently, Ochs has generalized his concept of scripture into that of a hearth, "those dimensions of life that members of a religion turn to in times of crisis, tension, or uncertainty in the hope of drawing nearer to the source of their deepest values and identities." SR, in this view, becomes a prototype of a broader family of "hearth-to-hearth" engagements.

Purposes

It is impossible to give a definitive or authoritative account of the purpose of SR. Scriptural Reasoning is first and foremost a practice, and individuals and communities may engage in a practice for many and various reasons, while furthermore the purposes or agendas in SR of some practitioners have been contested or rejected by others. Moreover, the actual effects of a practice may outstrip the intentions of its practitioners. Thus Scriptural Reasoners frequently emphasize that doing and experimenting with SR as a practice logically precedes theoretical accounts of its grounds or function. According to Nicholas Adams, 'Scriptural reasoning is a practice which can be theorised, not a theory which can be put into practice. More accurately, it is a variety of practices whose interrelations can be theorised to an extent, but not in any strong sense of fully explanatory theory.' Peter Ochs makes the same point with reference to a midrash on Exodus 24:7 in b. Shab. 88a:
In the book of Exodus, when Moses tried to deliver the Ten Commandments for the second time, the Israelites respond with the declaration naaseh v'nishmah! Literally, their declaration means "We shall do it and understand it," but, it was more likely an idiomatic expression for "We are on the job!" or "Consider it done!" The later rabbinic sages offered a homiletic rereading: "We shall first act and then understand"...We have nurtured SR in the same fashion, seeking to experiment with many forms of practice before discovering the one that best fits our goals and working over many years to refine it. We proceeded through experimentation first and only later through theoretical reflection.

Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish three commonly-cited and not mutually-exclusive purposes.

''L'shma:'' For its own sake or for God's sake

According to David Ford, one should practice SR because studying scripture is intrinsically valuable. On this view, one practices SR for the same reasons and in the same spirit that most traditional Abrahamic readers have studied their scriptures. David Ford makes this point using the Hebrew term "l'shma":
This practice of shared reading could be done for its own sake — or, better, for God’s sake. Each of the three traditions has its own ways of valuing the study of its scriptures as something worth doing quite apart from any ulterior motive. Scriptural Reasoning might of course have all sorts of practical implications, but to do it above all for God’s sake — as Jews say, l’shma — encourages purity of intention and discourages the mere instrumentalising of inter-faith engagement.
The term l'shma, which literally means "for the name," is ambiguous, capable of signifying Torah study "for its own sake" or "for God's sake."
Under the heading of SR as study l'shma, we might include those who approach SR as a practice that promotes the development of "wisdom," a central theme of David Ford's work on SR. In the same vein Peter Ochs speaks of SR as "open unexpected levels of textual and hermeneutical inquiry...for its own sake," an opening made possible by the affective warmth of SR study circles. Others frame SR as a kind of ritual practice or even something approaching an act of worship. Marianne Moyaert, for example, argues that SR can be characterized as a formative "ritualized practice."
Study l'shma is motivated by desire, by love for the scriptures and/or for God. For this reason, by inviting participants to share l'shma study together, SR provides what Ochs calls "a venue for members of different traditions or modes of inquiry to share their affection for scripture." This affective aspect of SR, in turn, contributes to SR's capacity to form unexpected interreligious friendships.
The most likely source of these friendships is that the style of Formational Scriptural Reasoning tempts participants to reveal at least a bit of the warmth and ingenuousness they display in intimate settings of scripture study among coreligionists at home.