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The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions is a complex multi-disciplinary composition engaging its subject from many angles. In the light of the Handbook, this Epilogue attempts to look to the future by asking: in which institutional settings, along which lines of theological and other thinking and imagining, through which practices, and in which practical directions specifically Christian perspectives on the Abrahamic religions might best be developed in the twenty-first century. It no more assumes a single agreed Christian perspective to be possible than the Handbook assumes a single disciplinary perspective. Rather, this Epilogue has four concerns.
The first is to enquire into the ‘where’ of the institutional settings within which Christian perspectives on the Abrahamic religions can be best worked out. After considering the main settings represented in the Handbook, the conclusion will be that, whilst a diversity of settings is healthy and desirable, as regards developing Christian perspectives on the Abrahamic faiths, the balance of advantage lies with those places where Christian and other theologies can be studied and developed critically and constructively alongside, and in dialogue with, a full range of other academic disciplines that engage with the religions. These ‘theology and religious studies’ or ‘religion and theology’ academic settings are, it is argued, the optimal ones, not only for furthering academic Christian thought about Christianity and other traditions, but also for others (whether religious or not) who are engaged in analogous enterprises. Such settings, usually located within universities, at their best enable the types of disciplined study, conversation, critique, constructive thinking, and debate among diverse participants that are needed by pluralist twenty-first-century societies which are complexly and simultaneously both multi-religious and ‘multi-secular’.
The second concern is for well-educated, critical, and constructive academic Christian thought, in theology and other disciplines. If Christian thought is to engage well with its own and other traditions, what is required of it? This leads to identifying four elements at the heart of contemporary Christian theology: retrieval of the past (scriptures, traditions, history of many types); engagement with God, church, and world; rigorous, thoughtful, and imaginative thinking in many fields; and communication in many genres, modes, and media. With regard to the Abrahamic traditions, each of these needs to be pursued in dialogue with Judaism and Islam, and especially with those Jews and Muslims who are concerned academically with analogous elements in their own traditions.
The third concern is for the practices that can help such Abrahamic dialogue be as fruitful as possible. Thorough scholarship in many fields, as exemplified in this Handbook, is assumed; so too are other staples of wise dialogical practice, such as diverse conversations, mutual hospitality, cooperation in many activities and spheres of society, and joint projects for the good of humanity. The main focus here is on Scriptural Reasoning, a practice that has historical analogies but has largely developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, originating in ‘theology and religious studies’ academic settings, and spreading into other educational and non-academic contexts. It is seen as a paradigm case of engagement among the Abrahamic traditions that is not dependent on a particular construal of ‘Abrahamic’ (it could accommodate the full range of suggestions in this Handbook) and can embrace both religious and academic diversity.
The fourth concern is for the wider public sphere beyond both the academy and the religious traditions. In each of the Abrahamic religions the God who has created and sustains all things and all people, and who has love and compassion for all, is worshipped. Within this horizon, what might be the main challenges of the twenty-first century? Five are identified as the most urgent: increasing religious literacy; the wise formation of those who carry leadership and other major responsibilities in each tradition; justice and compassion for those who are poor, oppressed, sick, elderly, disabled, or otherwise vulnerable; peace and reconciliation amidst many conflicts and divisions; and care for our planet—its ecosystems, its climate, air, soil, and water, its many forms of life, culture, beauty, and civilization.
The contributors to this Handbook are unevenly divided among the types of academic institutional setting in which religions are studied today.
The majority are based in ‘study of religion’ or ‘religious studies’ settings in colleges and universities in Europe, North America, or Israel. These are places where such modern academic disciplines as history (intellectual, cultural, political, scientific, economic, legal, and more), archaeology, the natural, human, and social sciences, phenomenology of religion, philology, textual, literary, and aesthetic studies, medicine, law, politics, ethics, hermeneutics, and philosophy are brought to bear on the religions of the world.
A small minority of the Handbook’s contributors work in places where the central focus is on one religion in its thought and practice—in Christian terms this is often called a theological college, seminary, Bible college, or theology department.
A larger minority are based in institutions where there are ‘theology and religious studies’ or ‘religion and theology’ settings (all three of the Epilogues, for example, are written from such). Here, study of the theologies and practices of one or more traditions can be pursued, critically and constructively as well as historically, together with the study of religions through a range of other disciplines.
There are many variations on these three basic types, and in each country different formative influences, pressures, and conflicts have led to the current institutional arrangements. This is not the place for detailed description or analysis, but I want to make a constructive proposal for the future of the field along broad lines that can be analogously applied to many settings.
The proposal, whose rationale and main elements have been described in greater detail elsewhere,1 takes for granted the value of the three types, sees limitations in each, and advocates a paradigm that is nearer to the third as the one that, with special regard for the Abrahamic religions, can best serve universities, societies, and religious traditions in the twenty-first century. This is not to advocate that all settings should conform to this, but rather that in their development all should, in ways outlined below, pay attention to this inclusive paradigm.
The study of religion, or the religious studies approach (hereafter called religious studies), has the obvious strengths of each of its disciplines, and the added attractiveness of the possibility of cross-disciplinarity. Its limitations are largely self-imposed, due to the properly limited aims of each discipline. The main exclusion is of theology in the sense of an academic discipline through which a particular tradition seeks to articulate, debate, and develop further its wisdom, meaning, truth, norms, and practice.
There is no unanimity among those in religious studies about how to regard their relationship to theology in this sense. They range from a very negative view, seeing their field as having its origins in liberation from the domination by theology of the study of religions in universities, and regarding theology as having very dubious academic credentials, to a very positive view (the one taken by this Epilogue) of theology as a complementary discipline with which there can be fruitful interaction. The latter position sees it as appropriate for the field of religion to be somewhat analogous to economics, which has its historical, analytical, theoretical, and statistical side but also has applied and normative sides (for example, in applied economics and in business schools), in which there can be various constructive and contentious proposals about how to understand and run economies and businesses, about what policies governments should pursue, and about what ethics and values are to be preferred. The living religions likewise can benefit from academically mediated normative discourse alongside other academic studies.
If the strengths of academic theology are as suggested in the previous paragraph—studying, debating, and developing the wisdom, meaning, truth, norms, and practices of a particular tradition—its possible limitations are most evident where it is pursued in settings where it is out of touch with other disciplines and where the theology of one tradition is not in conversation with theologies of other traditions. If Christian theology is about God and all reality in relation to God, the horizon within which Christian theological thinking should be conducted embraces all fields of knowledge, understanding, and practice. This is greatly facilitated if those fields are represented in the same institution. But worldwide, by far the majority of institutions where Christian theology is pursued have a solely Christian allegiance (the same is true of the theology or religious thought of other religious traditions too). This is appropriate: for example, the theological higher educational, scholarly, and research needs of a billion or so Roman Catholics are largely met within Catholic colleges, seminaries, and universities; likewise those who teach and lead the hundreds of millions of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians mostly receive their theological education and develop their academic thinking in Bible colleges, seminaries, and (increasingly) universities that owe allegiance to their own traditions. Such institutions are essential to the educational needs of their traditions, and are always likely to make up the great majority of places where their theology, doctrine, and ethics are studied, debated, and worked out further. But their limitations, or challenges, with regard both to the broad horizon of theological thought and to engagement with the Abrahamic religions, are evident. Most are not universities with a full range of academic disciplines with which theological thought can be in dialogue; and even when this is the case in tradition-specific universities (which are multiplying in some parts of the world) these rarely have full collegiality with the theological thinkers of other religious traditions.
There are various ways of addressing these challenges. The options (all of which are becoming more common) include: seminaries developing associations with universities, and tradition-specific elements complemented by university courses in a range of academic religious studies disciplines and by courses in the theologies of other traditions; or the seminaries of different traditions (both within and beyond Christianity) linking up with one another through shared courses, staff or student exchanges and collaborations; or teachers from other faith traditions being added to the staff of a seminary or tradition-specific university.
Such arrangements are always likely to be the most common ways for Christian institutions to create spaces in which their staff and students engage with Judaism and Islam alongside and in dialogue with Christianity. But there are other settings in which Christian engagement with and perspectives on the Abrahamic religions can be worked out: those where theologies of different traditions and the disciplines of religious studies are combined in a university context. These university ‘theology and religious studies’ or ‘religion and theology’ settings too have been multiplying in recent decades. Sometimes they result from a tradition-specific university becoming more pluralist within itself (e.g. the University of Notre Dame), sometimes from a non-religious foundation developing its tradition-specific theological staffing and curriculum alongside religious studies (e.g. the University of Virginia), and often from a long period of gradual evolution. In the United Kingdom the study of theology and religion has gradually become the norm. The national organization representing the study and teaching of theology and religious studies in higher education has since 2013 been called ‘Theology and Religious Studies UK’ (TRS UK). It concerns itself with promoting and supporting (as it states in the TRS UK constitution): ‘all academic disciplines concerned with the significance and meaning of religion and religions, incorporating fields of study such as theology, divinity and religious studies, in addition to sub-fields applying different theories and methods to the study of religions, such as the sociology or psychology of religion.’
The UK universities represented by two of the Epilogues in this Handbook exemplify the trend. In the University of Oxford a lengthy process that developed its department from Christian theology into theology and religious studies (including a professorship in Abrahamic Religions) culminated in a change of name to the ‘Faculty of Theology and Religion’ in 2012; complementing this, various other faculties and institutes also contribute to the field. The University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity changed the names of its degree courses from ‘theology’ to ‘theology and religious studies’ in 1979, and since then has added more posts and courses in other faiths and their theologies (including a professorship in Abrahamic Faiths) alongside Christian theology.2 Some other western universities, such as Aberdeen, Chicago, Duke, Durham, Edinburgh, Exeter, the Free University of Amsterdam, Harvard, Heidelberg, Kings College London, Leuven, Lund, McGill, Toronto, Tübingen, and Yale, have worked out their own ways of seeking to do justice both to the multi-disciplinary study of the religions and tradition-engaged, academically mediated theological thinking. Others have stayed committed to either religious studies or theology, and in some countries, such as France, universities are not permitted by the state to include theology.
Where the main direction of development in the UK has been towards departments of theology and religious studies, the difficulty from a Christian standpoint (matched by analogous difficulties experienced by those of other traditions) has often been that of maintaining in-depth distinctively Christian theological thinking, teaching, and research in the new context. In response to this, current developments in some German universities stand out as an alternative to those in most other countries. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Germany had what was probably the world’s leading tradition of academic, university-based Protestant and Catholic theology. It is now complementing that strongly Christian tradition with Islamic theology through setting up posts and departments in selected universities, such as Tübingen. These allow for tradition-specific, academically mediated Islamic thought to be accommodated alongside Christian theology. It has been a controversial innovation that is still in the experimental phase, with much ongoing debate about it.
That German innovation and the growth of theology and religious studies in other countries can be seen as ways in which higher education has tried to respond to increasing religious pluralism. Without any implication that either religion-specific theology or non-theological religious studies are unacceptable, there has been a growing recognition that in a pluralist society there is also a need for spaces where those of all faiths and none can come together to learn, teach, research, discuss, and debate questions relating to the religions. Moreover, attempts to limit the pursuit of such questions—for example, ruling out the exploration of controversial doctrinal, ethical, and political issues by students or academics seeking to offer critical or constructive responses to them in tradition-related ways—may be seen as arbitrary or in the service of a particular religious or secular ideology. There are vigorous disputes around these matters, but in principle they are no different from analogous ongoing debates in other fields where the inseparability of normative discourse from academic enquiry is recognized.
If, as I propose, the ‘ideal type’ of academically mediated engagement with the religions in the universities of pluralist societies is that of theology and religious studies, this would suggest certain guidelines for those with institutional responsibility to bear in mind as they work out policies and take decisions. The intention of the guidelines is to offer maxims that might enable each type of setting (theology, religious studies, theology and religious studies) to be more open to the others and to interaction for the good of each tradition and the wider society.3
From a Christian perspective, these allow both for distinctively Christian settings and for places where there can be collegiality and theological engagement with those of other faiths and none. With regard to the Abrahamic religions, the built-in specificity allows for both bilateral and trilateral engagements and studies, such as the practice of Scriptural Reasoning, which will be discussed further below.
One further extremely important dimension of academically mediated theology and religion has already been introduced in the assumption that the horizon of Christian thought is as broad and all-embracing as God and all reality in relation to God, and therefore has implications for all academic fields. This means that, besides a ‘focused’ concentration on the religions in specialist departments of theology, religious studies, or theology and religious studies, there is also required a ‘distributed’ engagement of Christian thought across other fields. Christian thought is far more than Christian theology. Most Christian thought in universities is not done in departments of theology, religious studies, or theology and religious studies, but by Christians in the other departments. As regards the Abrahamic religions, here too it is likely that there is much to be learnt through study, enquiry, conversation, and debate with Jews and Muslims who are facing analogous issues about how, for example, their faith and practice relate to history, philosophy, media studies, education, the social, human or natural sciences, music, or medicine.
It matters a great deal whether the institutional ethos of a university is open to such learning and debate. In the twentieth century in particular the ethos of many universities was ‘default secularist’, in the sense that a non-religious or anti-religious worldview was taken for granted. It was often hard for university-educated secular scholars and thinkers to imagine that those committed within religious traditions could be as intelligently rational, scientific, or scholarly as themselves. The new public prominence of the religions since the end of the twentieth century has led both to sharpened polemics against religion in many regions (since the prominence has often come about through religious involvement in conflict and violence) and also to a wider recognition that the world today is neither simply ‘secular’, nor developing in one direction from being ‘religious’ to ‘secular’, but that it is complexly and simultaneously both multi-religious and ‘multi-secular’, and that there are many forms of twenty-first-century modernity, some more secular and some more religious, with many hybrids. Within universities, one challenge to Jews, Christians, and Muslims is to think through and articulate academically mediated forms of their faith and practice. That leads to the second concern.
The Christian scriptures encourage readers to seek wisdom and truth, to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, to meditate on God’s word and God’s creation, to be able to give an account of their faith, to mature in their understanding, and to do much else that involves thought and imagination. Developing Christian perspectives on their own and with the other Abrahamic religions therefore calls for wise and imaginative thinking by Christians in all spheres of life. I am mainly focusing on the sphere of academic life as represented in universities.
In societies so pervasively shaped by information, knowledge, and learning universities have become crucial to the future of our world: they educate most of those in positions of major responsibility in contemporary societies; they generate, directly or indirectly, much of the scientific and technological knowledge and know-how on which societies depend; they are the home of disciplines that enable society to understand itself better; and they are one of the main channels for the transmission of the sciences, arts, and humanities. In this context the importance of religion mediated academically through theology and religious studies is considerable, and it has been reflected in a global increase in religiously affiliated academic institutions and in the burgeoning academic engagement with the religions through many disciplines.
How might academically mediated Christian perspectives on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam best be generated in the twenty-first century? This is first of all a question about Christian theology proper, in the sense of explicitly Christian interpretation of scriptures, traditions, history, and experience, and Christian thinking about God, creation, sin, providence, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the church, ethics, politics, the future, and related themes. It is also a question about the thinking Christians do, informed consciously or not by such theological thinking, relating to the whole range of disciplines and practices embraced in modern universities.
A first point to make is that the past century has been exceptionally generative of Christian theologies and other Christian thought. My own main education in this has been through editing three editions of a basic textbook on Christian theology since 1918, through which I have come to the conclusion that it has in some ways been a uniquely fruitful period in the history of Christian thought (Ford and Muers 2005). There has been an impressive array of reappropriations of past theologies; there has been fresh thinking and theological renewal within the major Christian traditions, such as Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, diverse strands of Protestantism, and Pentecostalism; many new voices have contributed to theology to an unprecedented extent, including those of women, and those of diverse regions, races, sexual orientations, cultures, and classes; theology has been related to the full range of academic disciplines, literature, the arts, theatre, and film, and there have been vigorous debates about the challenges of western modernity.
A second point is that that abundance of theological discourses and perspectives has been the context in which Judaism and Islam have also been thought about by Christians. To ask about Christian perspectives on them is to open up many of the deepest and most difficult questions of theology and practice: the character of divine revelation, God as Trinity, the authority and interpretation of scriptures, incarnation, law, justice, love and compassion, sin and evil, supersessionism, usury, violence, and many more. Each question calls for rereading scriptures and traditions, engagement with God, church, and world, discernment of contemporary contexts and developments, rigorous and imaginative thinking, and appropriate articulation and dissemination in many genres, modes, and media (Ford 2011). But in addition, if justice is to be done to Judaism and Islam as actually understood and practised today, each of those activities needs to be performed in dialogue, preferably long term, with Jews and Muslims. That is perhaps the most difficult task of all, and one way of attempting it, Scriptural Reasoning, will be the main topic of the next section on practices.
A third point is that Judaism and Islam unsettle even the category of ‘theology’ as understood in Christianity. It could be argued that neither Judaism nor Islam has anything that is straightforwardly equivalent to Christian theology. Any Christian perspective on them will therefore find itself thinking in strange categories, entering into very different intellectual and imaginative worlds, and tentatively exploring how one might even know whether one agrees or disagrees on a topic. Like the previous point, this too leads to recognizing that long-term conversation accompanied by study is vital.
Overall, attempts to understand and assess Judaism and Islam from Christian perspectives commonly lead to the realization that, while texts and other carriers of meaning such as art, architecture, and liturgies are important, the most significant carriers of meaning are Jews and Muslims themselves, and the depth and complexity of religious traditions are such that worthwhile conversation with them takes a great deal of time: again, long-term practices are required.
Which practices might best help generate Christian perspectives that could do justice to the three Abrahamic faiths? I take for granted the full range of scholarly work that is seen in this Handbook, together with all the academic practices that involves. I also assume specifically Christian theological work in many settings, together with all that requires in terms of scholarship, prayer and worship, life in church and world, critical and constructive thought, imagination, discussion and debate, and creative communication.
Yet adequate Christian perspectives on the Abrahamic faiths today cannot simply be taken over from the chapters of this Handbook or from other scholarly exercises, essential though these are. Nor can Christian thinkers adequately work out just among themselves their understanding of Judaism and Islam. Scholarly practices and in-house theological enquiry and debate need to go together with engagement among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. One reason why settings where religious studies and theology come together are so important for our pluralist world is that they facilitate the working out of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim perspectives in dialogue with each other. The further question is: which practices can enable this dialogue to be more fruitful?
Interreligious dialogical practices are flourishing in the early twenty-first century. Mutual hospitality is perhaps the most fundamental of all, and is open to endless variation in a multitude of contexts, from next-door neighbours to representatives of national or international bodies. It is often at the heart of the best conversations across religious differences, and these too are endlessly diverse, occurring in all spheres of society. A great number of centres, organizations, and networks now bring people of different faiths together, and social and other media have added to the range of interactions. The ‘face to face’ of conversation is often most fruitful when accompanied by the ‘side by side’ of collaboration in practical projects, on which more will be said under ‘Tasks’ below.
My focus here will be on one practice, that of Scriptural Reasoning (Ford and Clemson 2013; Higton and Muers 2012; Ford and Pecknold 2006). Its roots were in Textual Reasoning (Ochs and Levene 2002), a practice that began in the early 1990s through a gathering of North American Jewish text scholars and philosophers who met as a fringe group at the American Academy of Religion. They studied and argued around Talmud and texts by Jewish philosophers such as Hermann Cohen, Emmanuel Levinas, and Franz Rosenzweig. They brought together contemporary issues with a variety of forms of rabbinic Judaism, using textual exegesis, hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethics, and theology.
A basic concern of Textual Reasoning was how to be Jewish in the aftermath of the Shoah and within the powerful structures of modernity. In this, several key concerns came together.
The first concern of the group was to reread their classic texts, especially Tanakh and Talmud, in the aftermath of the trauma. Just as, during and after the exile in Babylon and the destruction of the First Temple, there was large-scale editing, reworking, and prophetic reinterpretation of the tradition, and after the fall of the Second Temple in 70 ce rabbinic Judaism was developed, so after the Shoah the Textual Reasoners discerned a similar imperative to reread, argue, rethink, and reimagine.
The second concern was to rethink western modernity. The Shoah was conceived and carried out by a western nation that prided itself on its modern science, technology, industry, business, education and research universities, culture, bureaucracy, philosophy, and theology. It might in its aftermath be tempting simply to reject modernity and try to be pre-modern or anti-modern. Many forms of religion attempt this. For Textual Reasoning the challenge was to combine a critical and constructive approach to modernity with rabbinic wisdom.
The third concern of Textual Reasoning was to engage with others who were following analogous paths in different religious traditions, especially Judaism’s younger siblings, Christianity and Islam. It made sense that much could be learned and shared with others who were trying to reread their own scriptures and pre-modern classics while also coping with the complexities and challenges of modernity.
There was also a fourth concern related especially to the academic setting of North America. They were reacting against what they saw as the atomization of the different disciplines of Jewish studies, the unwarranted competition among these disciplines, and the isolation of many Jewish academics within the Jewish religious communities, a world that they perceived to have in many ways turned inward and away from modernity and its challenges. They wished to complement a view of Jewish philosophy as a subset of Jewish intellectual history with a view of it as engaged both with Judaism’s evolving commentarial tradition and with the immediate conditions of Jewish life in our epoch (including intellectual life across all disciplines, such as mathematics, logic, and the sciences). In his Epilogue to this Handbook, Peter Ochs gives a fuller account of Textual Reasoning as it relates both to Jewish Studies and to studies of the Abrahamic religions.
Scriptural Reasoning began when some Christian academics from the UK and the USA joined with members of Textual Reasoning, and soon after with Muslim academics. Scriptural Reasoning’s central practice is studying and discussing together texts from Tanakh, Bible, and Quran in small groups. It spread first in academic settings in North America and the UK, and then to other parts of the world. It has also spread beyond the academy to local congregations in synagogues, churches, and mosques, to civic settings, to schools, prisons, hospitals, reconciliation and peacemaking initiatives, and religious leadership programmes. There have also been variations, for example: studying scriptural texts alongside texts from commentary traditions; studying Abrahamic scriptures alongside texts from Asian religious traditions (especially in Minzu University’s Institute for Comparative Scripture and Interreligious Dialogue in Beijing); and other sessions using logic, music, poetry, and liturgy.
From a Christian perspective it is striking that the leading concerns of Textual Reasoning (as noted above and in Ochs’s Epilogue) have analogies in contemporary Christian traditions. For example, one of the twentieth century’s major religious events, the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic church, has at its core three practices: ressourcement (going back to the deepest sources of the tradition); aggiornamento (engaging with the modern world and bringing the church up to date, including taking into account the full range of academic disciplines); and conversazione (conversation, not only within the Catholic church but across its boundaries with other churches, other religions, and secular people and worldviews) (Ford 2013a).
This, indeed, might be seen as a Christian form of the common sense of many non-extremist religious groups in our world: they want to be true to their roots and core identity, hence the renewed engagement with scriptures and traditions; they do not want simply to assimilate to modernity or simply to reject it, so must constantly discern what to accept, what to oppose, and what to work on in order to transform it for the better; and they recognize that in a plural, interconnected world it makes sense to be in communication and even collaboration with people of other traditions, especially those with shared roots.
A crucial further element in both Textual Reasoning and Scriptural Reasoning is their mode of discussion inspired by the rabbinic practice of havruta (or chevrutah). Its features include being a learner and a teacher simultaneously, reading the text aloud, constantly revisiting it to test ideas, listening attentively to fellow readers, being willing to probe, challenge, and argue for and against interpretations, not needing to come to a consensus, taking risks in offering interpretations, developing shared norms for how to conduct sessions, and becoming more self-aware about one’s own presuppositions (Holzer and Kent 2013: 219–20).
Peter Ochs, who was more responsible for the development of Textual Reasoning and Scriptural Reasoning than anyone else, describes as follows the basic practice of formational Scriptural Reasoning:
Formational Scriptural Reasoning refers to the simplest practice of Scriptural Reasoning: symbolized by study around a small table, with three or more chairs, one small selection from each of the three Abrahamic scriptural canons, and three or more persons of any age eager to enter into a conversational fellowship with one another and, as it were, with these three text selections. This practice is the basis for all training in Scriptural Reasoning and it is also what we might call the ‘mode of welcome’ that initiates all Scriptural Reasoning-related encounters. (Ochs 2013: 207)
He goes on to describe some of the features of this practice, giving special emphasis to three.
First, studying together texts that participants feel most deeply about he sees as a ‘hearth-to-hearth’ engagement, each sharing from the place of warmth at the heart of their tradition, and in this way generating a mutual appreciation and feeling that often leads into friendship. A sense of collegiality without consensus on some very important matters is a characteristic of Scriptural Reasoning. ‘Hearth-to-hearth’ relationships enable participants not only to find areas of agreement but also to improve the quality of their long-term disagreements, which is essential to realistic Abrahamic interaction.
Second, this study can ‘open unexpected levels of textual and hermeneutical discovery’ (Ochs 2013). There have in fact been very few settings in the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam where members of the three traditions have been able to meet face to face (especially without one or other being in a position of dominance) and study texts from their scriptures or commentary traditions. So a session of Scriptural Reasoning may well be the first occasion in history on which the particular texts on the table have been explored in this way. It is not surprising, therefore, that fresh insights can be generated, especially when participants bring together diverse religious formations, linguistic skills, reading habits, contemporary contexts, imaginative resources, practical interests, and academic trainings.
Ochs emphasizes that there is no need to make any normative claim for the readings that result—to make such a claim would require going through the usual processes that each tradition has for assessing new interpretations. It is enough that, as in personal reading of these rich texts, deeper engagement with the texts can happen, with fresh illumination. Each of the three traditions recognizes the desirability of exploring interpretations that may never become normative parts of the tradition but may yet have value in a specific context or engagement. In Jewish interpretation, for example, midrash can mean an interpretation that does not claim to be the plain sense of the text in its original context but attempts to interpret it in relation to other texts, different circumstances, or new issues. Such improvisation on texts is inevitable if they are ongoing parts of a living tradition that is continually facing the questions that are raised by new encounters, events, cultures, medical and other scientific discoveries, and so on. Giving sermons, teaching the next generation, and working out in changed circumstances what to reject, what to accept, and how to transform what is only partly acceptable: these are among the main settings for improvisation in each of the traditions and their subdivisions. Of course, how these are gone about varies enormously, but each can be enriched by learning from the others, and often key insights can be sparked by engaging with those who are very different, and with whom one continues to disagree.
The third feature of Scriptural Reasoning mentioned by Ochs is its reparative potential (see also his Epilogue in this volume). Studying together can help address conflicts, divisions, and disagreements. As Steven Kepnes, another founder of both Textual Reasoning and Scriptural Reasoning, argues in his influential ‘A Handbook for Scriptural Reasoning’, there is a ‘scriptural sense that the human world is broken, in exile, off the straight path, filled with corruption, sickness, war and genocide. Scriptural Reasoning practitioners come together out of a sense of impoverishment, suffering, and conflict to seek resources for healing’ (Kepnes 2006: 28). But as Jews, Christians, and Muslims they come together convinced that their own tradition is not only part of the problem (which it is) but also does have resources for healing and repair, and that these are enhanced if they share them together. This is especially relevant to the tasks to be considered in the next section.
Participants from each of the three religions, and from each of the traditions within each of the three, are free to come up with their own rationales for taking part in Scriptural Reasoning, and these do not have to agree with each other. There can be diverse and even conflicting reasons for engaging in the same practice. There does not have to be prior agreement on how the three scriptures are to be regarded, or on how to interpret them: this is a practice in which differences on such matters can be part of the conversation, with no consensus expected. Perhaps the most helpful Christian introduction to and exploration of Scriptural Reasoning have been given from two perspectives, Quaker and Anglican (Higton and Muers 2012), and a variety of Catholic understandings of it have been offered elsewhere (Ford and Clemson 2013).
Perhaps the most distinctive overall characteristic of Scriptural Reasoning is what I have described elsewhere (Ford 2013a) as its ability, at its best, to enable multiple deepening: one is enabled to go deeper into the scriptures of one’s own tradition and of the traditions of the other Abrahamic religions; to go deeper into the common good of our world, including but going beyond these three religions; to go deeper into disagreements as well as agreements; and to deepen the quality of collegiality and community among those who share the first four deepenings. All this above all takes time, and the two decades of Scriptural Reasoning are, one suspects, only a taster for what might be possible as scriptures that carry with them centuries of recitation, reading, and interpretation are brought into conversation with each other.
Finally, it is no accident that the academic practice of Scriptural Reasoning has been especially associated with places where theology and religious studies go together, such as the Universities of Virginia and Cambridge. It is a practice that welcomes the whole range of religious studies disciplines, but, by its living engagement between members of three religions,4 and by its freedom to engage with questions of truth and practice, it also crosses the usual religious studies boundaries. In doing so it enters the field of theology or critical and constructive religious thought, while also challenging that field to be open to considering theologies (or their analogues) within more than one tradition. It is a long-term practice within the field of theology and religious studies that symbolizes the raison d’être of the field.
As Tariq Ramadan and Peter Ochs argue in their Epilogues, concern for the wider public sphere beyond both the academy and the religious traditions is also essential to each of the Abrahamic religions. The traditions may vary in their ways of identifying God as creator and sustainer of all things and all people, understanding how God expresses love and compassion for all, and fulfilling responsibilities towards all creation; but they agree on the need to discern such ways. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing them now is how to collaborate with each other and with those of other religions and none in order to serve the common good of humanity and the whole of creation.
What might the agenda be? I would identify five tasks as the most important, each large enough to require many initiatives, and each controversial enough to require spaces for conversation, debate, and deliberation among all concerned.
One is the need for a broad religious literacy. The problem-centred way of putting this is that in a plural world, in which the religions are directly involved in many tensions, divisions, and conflicts, it is dangerous to have societies in which, with regard to the religions, there is ignorance, misunderstanding, prejudice, stereotyping, distortion, and misrepresentation of many sorts, all reinforced by a lamentable quality of public conversation about religion. The required response to the problem is multi-faceted: it involves schools, universities, media, and every major sphere of life where religion is relevant—which is every major sphere of life. There are many initiatives in this expanding field, ranging from efforts to improve the ways universities and schools relate to the religions and their members (including the quality of religious education) or raising the awareness of healthcare professionals about religious matters connected with their work, to programmes in spheres such as politics, the media, the civil service, business, the arts, and culture. These are not a luxury for pluralist societies, which need broad public understanding that includes religious literacy.
Yet religion is not just a problem. It is one of the strongest motivators of billions of people; it is a key to understanding a good deal of the past and the present; it leads into fascinating questions of meaning, truth, beauty, goodness and how to live well; and it shapes visions, ideals, acts of compassion, vocations of dedicated service, works of art, music, and architecture, and the values and beliefs that individuals, families, and whole communities live by. Religious literacy is about appreciating all that too. Not to appreciate it is to miss out on something that is not only important but also enriching and gripping. It is the combination of the richness and the problems that frequently leads beyond religious literacy into something deeper, such as the types of practice discussed in the previous section.
A second task is also educational: the formation of those who carry leadership and other major responsibilities (both specifically religious and in other areas) in each tradition. The logic of this Epilogue is that such formation should if possible include time spent together with those of other traditions in study, conversation, and activity. This should not be confined to initial formation: often the capacity and recognition of the need for engagement with those with analogous callings in other traditions only develops gradually through years of experience.
A third task centres on justice and compassion for those who are poor, oppressed, sick, elderly, disabled, refugees, or otherwise vulnerable. There may be more signs of hope in this sphere than any other, yet overall the global picture is still discouraging. A major issue is how to regard the systemic and institutional dimensions of this task: how financial, economic, political, educational, and legal systems work for or against vulnerable groups, and what the responsibilities of the religions are in such areas.
A fourth task is facing the conflicts and divisions of our world. Again, there are many signs of hope in the overlapping areas of peacemaking, peacebuilding, reconciliation, mediation, arbitration, and the resolution or transformation or stabilization of conflicts; but the overall situation is not encouraging. A large number of conflicts have a religious dimension, and this leads some to write off religion. It leads others to mobilize the resources of the religious traditions for peace, and there is a growing recognition, even among non-religious leaders and agencies, that unless this happens the prospects for peace in many conflicts are considerably lessened. There is immense scope for such mobilization, not only through the initiatives of leaders and authorities, but also through grassroots movements and through alliances of religious and non-religious networks, groups, and organizations. The other forms of Abrahamic engagement are, rightly, likely to be judged above all by their contributions to peace.
Finally, there is the increasingly urgent need to appreciate and care better for our planet. Food, eating, and drinking are perhaps the most obvious symbolic and practical focus of this, being interwoven with daily life and ritual, local and global community, fasting and feasting, justice and compassion, nature and culture, air, soil and water, science and technology, ethics and politics, conservation and sustainability (Wirzba 2011). Each of the other four tasks has long-term practical effects here in the ways human civilization relates to creation. Mobilization of the religions for ecological responsibility has hardly begun. This is a practical imperative, and also an imaginative, intellectual, and comprehensively spiritual one. The beauty and wonder of creation, its forms, marvels, intricacy, and capacity to evoke thanks, praise, and blessing are intrinsic to the Abrahamic religions, and can also be a bond between them and many other traditions, both secular and religious.
This Epilogue has concluded with a challenging agenda of tasks, placing the Abrahamic religions in the broadest contemporary context. It has also reflected upon the spheres of scholarship and thought that have helped to generate this Handbook. It has made some specific proposals about where and how Christian perspectives on the Abrahamic religions might best be developed in the twenty-first century. The optimal settings are, it is argued, where theologies (or analogous discourses) of a variety of religious traditions can be pursued in conversation with each other and also with the full range of other academic disciplines that contribute to the study of religions. In such settings, Christian theologies dealing with the Abrahamic religions can be worked out through retrieval of scriptures, traditions, and histories, engagement with God, church, and world, rigorous and imaginative thinking, and many modes of expression, all informed both by dialogue with Jews, Muslims, and others and also by contributions from relevant academic disciplines. Among the many practices that can contribute to such dialogue, special attention has been paid to Scriptural Reasoning, in which study and discussion of the scriptures and interpretative traditions of the three religions takes place. The embracing goal is one that all three Abrahamic religions, together with most other religions and philosophies, desire: a habitable wisdom for our time.
1 Ford 2013b; Ford 2011; Ford 2010; Ford 2007b; Ford, Quash, and Soskice 2005. These also include relevant bibliography.
2 It is worth noting that, in most cases in the UK where there has been a shift in nomenclature it has been one of bringing ‘religion’ into a ‘theology’ department rather than the other way around. That is to say, the UK story is often one—as described in the case of Cambridge in Ford 2007a: 345–7—of increasing breadth and diversity of engagement within a Faculty or Department, growing from, rather than leaving behind, a historic concern with Christian theology. So, bringing in ‘religious studies’ is not about creating a new ‘neutral’ space, but ‘embodying a negotiated and still developing settlement’ (Ford 2007a: 347), bound up with the complex histories of all the disciplines involved, and responsive to the likewise complex and continually negotiated settlements of wider social life in the contemporary era.
3 These are adapted from ch. 8, ‘New Theology and Religious Studies: Shaping, Teaching and Funding a Field’ in Ford 2011, where the points are further developed.
4 It is not necessarily confined to members of these traditions, and participants have been from outside them, sometimes with no particular religious affiliation.