What is SR?
Scriptural Reasoning as a Form of Friendship
Excerpted from David F. Ford, "Faith in the Third Millennium: Reading Scriptures Together," address at the Inauguration of Dr Iain Torrance as President of Princeton Theological Seminary and Professor of Patristics, Thursday 10th March 2005: "Faith in the Third Millenium: Reading Scriptures Together."
The core identities of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have always been inseparable from their scriptures and accompanying traditions of study, interpretation, argument, doctrine, ethics and worship; and this is unlikely to change in the third millennium. It makes deep sense for these rich and widely influential reading traditions to engage as thoroughly as possible with each other. They are already complexly related in content, and also with regard to issues of transmission, translation, normativity, methods of interpretation, contemporary relevance, and so on. Both historically and in many parts of the world today communities that look to these scriptures have lived and are living together, often with considerable tensions. But whereas both the academic and the ecclesial intensities of scripture reading are served by many forms of collegiality, the interfaith intensity has almost a complete lack of collegiality. Where in our world do Muslims, Jews and Christians gather to read our scriptures together in mutual hospitality and attentiveness? I believe that a crucial challenge for faith in the third millennium is to create new forms of collegiality gathered around our scriptures and their accompanying traditions of interpretation and application.
The practice of Scriptural Reasoning is to spend some time in plenary discussion but most time in small groups studying passages of the three scriptures that in some way relate to each other. We have focused on texts concerning revelation, law, economics, teaching and learning, prayer, love and much else. Last month a group in Cambridge was joined by Rowan Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury for a two-hour session on Joseph and Potiphar's wife in the Qur'an and Tanakh, and, from the New Testament, the woman who anointed Jesus' feet. Hebrew, Arabic and Greek flew around the room; the Hadith, the Talmud and patristic and medieval interpretations were drawn in; and all sorts of contemporary issues raised.
In the phrase coined by Dr Aref Nayed, each of us brings to the table our 'internal library'. When all these libraries are resourcing the reading of three texts at the same time, the result can be a dazzling intensity that combines the premodern, modern and postmodern, that can produce startling surprises, that defies overview, systematizing or adequate reproduction in print, but yet - for those of us with academic vocations -has an intrinsic impulsion towards a theorizing, a doing of philosophy and theology, and a writing that can never do anything like full justice to what is going on but still tries to approximate to it as well as possible. What happens at best in such sessions is close engagement with each other's texts in a spirit simultaneously of academic study, of being true to one's own convictions and community, and of truth-seeking and peace-seeking conversation wherever that might lead. It does not usually lead to consensus - the differences between us often emerge more sharply, and at these points there is often a deepening awareness of the meaning of one's own faith. It does often lead to friendship. The mutual hospitality of each being both host and guest in relation to the others is at the heart of this collegiality. Each tradition needs to offer its best food, drink and cuisine.
For me that means preparing and offering those academic and ecclesial intensities in co-inherence. In particular, that involves striving to embody and communicate something of what I have tried to describe through my account of the best practices of interpretation in the Anglican Communion in recent years. All of the strands in that wisdom interpretation cry out to be worked through appropriately in Abrahamic, interfaith reading of scripture: the intensive, respectful conversation in community, focused on both scripture and the issues of church and world; the abundance of meaning in scripture and the consequently varied modes of interpretation in the academy, in the tradition and in the contemporary church, synagogue and mosque; the value of imagination and compassion in understanding and assessing each others' interpretations; recognition of immersion in messy history; the need to resist the temptation to reach for the security and satisfaction of clear, decisive answers to questions in dispute among Jews, Christians and Muslims, and to value mutual questioning and exploration; the willingness, on the one hand, to enter into dispute for the sake of God's truth and love, and, on the other hand, to recognize the strength of our bonds in the family of Abraham and the call to live patiently with our deep differences; and throughout to conduct our reading according to an ethics, and even politics, of justice, love and forgiveness.
Yet, as in the Anglican Communion, so in each of the Abrahamic faiths: such practices of wise reading are extremely vulnerable. The politics of scriptural interpretation can be crude, manipulative, and literally violent. I do not think that Scriptural Reasoning, or any other peace-loving practices among Jews, Christians and Muslims, can flourish without building up of forms of dedicated collegiality and collaboration that are prepared to meet strong opposition within each community and in the secular world. Our world needs such signs of hope, and it needs the resources for peacemaking that each of these traditions can offer. And among these resources is one that is incomparable.
