Learning to reason scripturally -Nov 24, 2006

By Nick Adams

It is taken for granted in many parts of Western culture that reading Scripture is inevitably an inward-looking activity, and that its results are arbitrary. This view is mistaken. Recent developments in the academy and beyond show that reading Scripture can be a way not only of forming identity within a tradition, but of improving mutual understanding between members of different traditions.

'Scriptural reasoning' names the practice where members of different traditions read and interpret each others’ scriptures together.(1) The reading of scripture has historically been overwhelmingly intra-traditional: members of one tradition meet together to read and interpret sacred texts. This has been, and still is, the focal practice of reading scripture for members of religious traditions, and this is true also for those who do scriptural reasoning.

Scriptural reasoning is thus not a focal practice for its participants, but an extension of that practice in a way that is not necessarily warranted by the theologies of the participants' traditions, and may - on certain interpretations - even be forbidden by them.

At the moment the traditions engaged in scriptural reasoning are various different kinds of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, although it is in principle extendable to others. Scriptural reasoning means, for its participants, acknowledging that their particular traditions do not encourage their joint reading of scripture, but doing it anyway.

What actually goes on? To answer this adequately, we would need an attentive ethnography of a variety of occasions and practices. Lacking such an account, it is nonetheless an important cultural development, and it is worth attempting a preliminary description, however inadequate this might be. (2)

At events of scriptural reasoning, participants meet in small groups in which at least two traditions are represented. (Scriptural reasoning cannot be done by one person alone under any circumstances, nor by two or more if they belong to the same tradition.) The Jewish word for this small group study, sometimes adopted by Christians and Muslims, is chevruta, meaning a group of friends. The normal practice, although others are possible, is to select texts in advance from Tanakh, Qur'an and the New Testament, which participants are encouraged to read beforehand, and then to read and interpret them together. Texts from at least two traditions are chosen. (Scriptural reasoning cannot be done by reading a text from just one tradition.)

There is no fixed rule about how to select texts for study: sometimes a theme will be chosen, and members of different traditions select texts that seem appropriate. There is no prescribed outcome for scriptural reasoning study, nor any prescribed process for how the sessions are to be conducted. In practice, it is common for more experienced participants to show new-comers by example.

There are rules for scriptural reasoning, written by Peter Ochs and commented upon by many participants, available on the scriptural reasoning website, noted above. These are not rules in the sense of a society's or club's rules, which are its constitution, nor rules in the sense of the Rule of St Benedict, which lay down how the practice must be done. Rather they are a response to the desire to describe the practice (and some of the history) of scriptural reasoning in an orderly way. There is also a 'handbook of scriptural reasoning', written by Steven Kepnes. (3)

Scriptural reasoning is a practice which, while theorisable to an extent, cannot theorise what makes it possible. The different scriptures - Qur'an, New Testament, Tanakh - are not chosen because there are good reasons for choosing them, but because it is obvious for Muslims, Christians and Jews to read these texts. No further justification is offered for reading these texts rather than, say, Greek plays or ancient Egyptian poetry.

Members of the traditions might speculate about how it was that certain texts came to be canonical, or about how a certain form came to be taken to be the authoritative version of the text, but this would have no bearing on the treatment of the texts as scripture, i.e. as holy books authoritatively teaching about God and the world.

The principal conditions for participation seem to be membership of one of the traditions allied to the desire to understand members of other traditions' interpretations of their own scripture, and of their interpretations of one's own scripture. This does not rule out those who deny they have affiliation within a tradition, but such people seem to be treated as honoured guests rather than as participants.

Christians, Muslims and Jews freely interpret each other's scriptures, and it is not uncommon to find that a participant from one tradition knows the details of a text from another tradition, and the history of its interpretation in that other tradition, better than a participant who is actually from that other tradition. It is not merely about knowing texts, however.

The process of 'reasoning' is not just the teasing out of interpretative issues, but also the making explicit of 'deep reasonings'.(4) By deep reasonings, I mean patterns of argumentation, handed down, perhaps including minority positions that did not win the day, but which have been preserved. Philosophers in the Anglo-American traditions are in the habit of distinguishing between (a) definitions, axioms and presuppositions, (b) logics and rules for reasoning and (c) actual chains of reasoning, argumentation and conclusions.

This is immensely useful. The religious traditions do not encounter each other with different initial (a)s and shared procedural (b)s, but with long histories of (c)s, where communal identities are expressed at a profound level. It is not just the exposure of (a)s that needs to happen in argumentation; it is the rehearsal of (c)s as expressions of a community’s identity.

An example of such a specific chain of reasoning in the Christian tradition might be the documents relating to the council of Nicaea in AD 325. The Nicene Creed preserves the settlement of that council; the surviving documents - which can be studied - form part of the deep reasonings that led to its formulation and permit, to an extent, the rehearsal of the debates for and against Arius. Scriptural reasoning is a practice of 'publicising' deep reasonings, so that others may learn to understand them and discover why particular trains of reasoning, and not just particular assumptions, are attractive or problematic. Scriptural reasoning makes deep reasonings public. It sees them not as particularistic obstacles to debate, but as conditions for conversation, friendship and mutual understanding.

Without deep reasonings, there are no religious traditions to speak of. Depth is not obscurity, however: the acknowledgement of depth is a recognition that it takes time to plumb. Scriptural reasoning models the discovery that making deep reasoning public is not only risky - because one makes oneself vulnerable when revealing what one loves - but time-consuming. It is a non-hasty practice.

This is a very brief and minimal description of what scriptural reasoning is: scriptural texts from at least two traditions being read by members of at least two traditions. It is minimal because scriptural reasoning is resistant to overviews, especially overviews from just one member of just one tradition. Each of the three Abrahamic traditions has its own rules for interpreting scripture (and internal disagreement about these rules), and even if there is overlap between them, it may not be the overlap that makes scriptural reasoning possible. The significant point of contact is a shared desire to study scriptural texts.

The goal of scriptural reasoning is striking: it aims less at consensus and more at friendship. To use the word chevruta to describe the meeting of Muslims, Jews and Christians is itself surprising, and the actual friendships that are formed through such study do not lessen that surprise. Consensus can be measured and managed, at least to an extent. Friendship is altogether more confusing, and even the most sophisticated philosophical accounts of it somehow repeat the absurdity of the hopeless lover who tries to persuade the other to love him by using arguments.

Abstract description of friendship is perhaps like thirstily trying to make sense of water. Friendship is nonetheless the true ground of scriptural reasoning, and who can give a good overview of that? The traditions have different understandings of friendship with God, friendship with members of one's own family, one's own tradition, and with strangers. Somehow, the recognition that each worships the one true God moves scriptural reasoning beyond an interaction determined by conventions for showing strangers hospitality.

Showing strangers hospitality is a significant enough miracle. Yet scriptural reasoning does not quite mean this kind of hospitality: when members of three traditions meet together to study shared scripture, who is the guest and who is the host? In a way that is difficult to be clear about, the participants in scriptural reasoning all find themselves invited, not by each other, but by an agency that is not theirs to command or shape. There is an 'other' to the three traditions, and that seems in an obscure way to make friendships possible.

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NOTES

1. For a description of this project, which is well supported by online resources, see the website for The Society of Scriptural Reasoning. My description of scriptural reasoning is not normative, but is an attempt at description arising from participation.

2. For essays on scriptural reasoning see The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning, edited by David F. Ford and Chad C. Pecknold (Blackwell, Oxford 2006)

3. See The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning, chapter 2.

4. The sentiment is Jeffrey Stout's; the phrasing is Chad Pecknold's. See also Nicholas Adams ‘Making Deep Reasonings Public’ in The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning, chapter 3.

Nicholas Adams is Lecturer in Systematic Theology and Theological Ethics at New College, the divinity faculty of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His latest book is Habermas and Theology (Cambridge, 2006).