Scriptural Reasoning

A form of discussion between the Abrahamic faiths, rooted in the practice of discussing Scripture together.

Scriptural Reasoning (hereafter SR) is a form of inter-faith discussion based on the shared reading of Scripture. SR builds upon the foundation of Scripture and traditions that the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have in common. Fundamental to SR is the presupposition that reasoning can only take place adequately in the light of scriptural revelation.

Although SR appears to be a neo-conservative practice appealing to the special revelation in Scripture, there are many features of SR which are quite radical, or have radical implications. It is implicit in SR that those of some other faiths have an equally valid claim to religious truth and that, at some stage in the future, some kind of reconciliation of the faiths will be possible. SR also implicitly rejects dogmatic ideas of truth in favour of truths which emerge in specific human contexts, within historically located human conversations, and within interpretive communities. So truth is dynamic, rather than static, and unfolds in many forms as Scripture is read and re-read.

The idea of a form of reason that operates in communal discussion plugs into a wider contemporary debate about the nature of reason. Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher, has argued against the post-modern assumption that there are no norms of reason and that one idea of reason is as good as any other. Habermas argues that there is what he calls a ‘systems rationality’: a form of reason that arises from human conversation about the truth. For Habermas, reason is not the activity of a solitary mind (as the Enlightenment tradition from Descartes had presumed) but takes place in community as people talk with each other about what is valuable, true and real.

SR owes something to Habermas’ social theory of reason, because it sees reason disclosing itself in dialogue. But whereas Habermas sees reason as a purely human activity, SR believes that reason has been revealed by God both in Scripture and in traditions of human science and thinking. In asserting that the discussion of scriptural revelation can be a form of reason, SR sets itself against the secular model of reason as an individual mental activity that requires no religious revelation.

Indeed SR is a self-conscious response to what it sees as the restrictive and dogmatic understanding of reason bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment. SR poses the possibility that there are many different forms of logic and that the narrow logic of scientific reasoning is not deep or broad enough to deal with the complex reality of human existence. This is not such a strange idea: we speak about ‘reasons of the heart’ and ‘poetic reasoning’ as legitimate forms of human reasoning. The difference with SR is the priority that it gives to specific scriptures in the understanding of reasoning.

SR also sets itself at a distance from the liberal understanding of reason as a universal human activity. By making reason the subject of a special scriptural revelation, SR restricts the full disclosure of reason to those inside the closed circle of scriptural reasoners.

THINKERS

Jürgen Habermas (1929– ) argues that the norm of reason is a form of conversation that he calls the ‘ideal speech situation’, an imaginary state of affairs in which all the parties to a conversation would have equal, unrestricted opportunity of participation. Habermas has provided an important counter-voice to the often fashionable ‘post-modern’ consensus that it is no longer possible to disentangle truth from fiction.

Peter Ochs (1950– ): a Jewish theologian who is the leading figure in Scriptural Reasoning: ‘The purpose of SR is to recover the practice of listening for the speech of God that both preceded and still provides the terms for modern thinking.’

IDEAS

Hypothesis formation: the idea (from C. S. Peirce, the American pragmatist philosopher) that the exploration of likely hypotheses is a form of logical reasoning. SR sees its task as not so much to disprove what it sees as the flawed rationality of the secular world, as to hypothecate theological alternatives to secular modernity.

BOOKS

David Ford and C. C. Pecknold (eds.), The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning (Blackwell, 2006)

Nicholas Adams, Habermas and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Peter Ochs, ‘Returning to Scripture: Trends in Postcritical Interpretation’, Crosscurrents, Winter 1994/95, Vol. 44, Issue 4