Strong contrasts have been in play so far. I have tried to specify not only the salient differences between scholarly practices of interpretation and
those of scriptural reasoning, but also to capture something of the offense that scriptural reasoning causes to those who are highly skilled in the academy. And I have suggested that the suspension of expertise in scriptural reasoning, while often perceived as an unwelcome and even unrespectable requirement, is necessary given the goods at which scriptural reasoning aims. These goods are significantly bound up with questions of shared agency, the flow of energy, the generativity of certain temporary insights for other temporary insights. Scriptural reasoning is genuinely odd, when judged from a scholarly perspective. One should thus expect that it might be viewed with a certain suspicion within the academy. And this is indeed what one frequently sees. One judges the quality of scripturally reasoned interpretations according to criteria different from those used to judge conference papers or journal articles.
I want to end, though, with a short note on a surprising outcome of scriptural reasoning for many scholars who suspend their expertise in order to practice it: it aids their scholarship in ways that are relatively easy to specify.
At its simplest, scriptural reasoning sometimes produces undoubtedly interesting and fruitful interpretations that actually can be preserved for posterity and put to use in more scholarly contexts. It is not entirely clear whether such interpretations require scriptural reasoning in order to be produced, however. It seems to me more likely that at least in principle any practice of interpretation could have produced them. It is nonetheless striking that they were produced during the practice of scriptural reasoning and not in one of the myriad other possible practices.
More interestingly, however, scriptural reasoning may attune its practitioners to questions of polyphony, of change, and of contingency.
The practice of scriptural reasoning is, in some ways, a microcosm of what happens to scripture in traditions. There are many voices, which often do not converge; interpretations undergo mutations depending on what texts are on the table; their meanings are to a significant extent dependent, at a particular time, on what has just been. It is quite possible that scriptural reasoning produces interpreters who are particularly sensitive to these kinds of issues.
Most significantly, however, scriptural reasoning may generate models of collaborative interpretation that are otherwise difficult to find in the academy. There are publications in which members of different traditions address an issue of common concern, each interpreting their own tradition’s texts, with a view to shedding light onto contemporary problems and potential ways to address them. This is not scriptural reasoning, but it is one possible product of scriptural reasoning. But this kind of approach is not restricted to scriptural texts. Anver Emon, of the University of Toronto,
published a collection of essays by scholars of Islamic law and Jewish law, proceedings of a series of meetings where scholars from two traditions read and interpreted legal texts from two traditions, and discovered in the process that this approach cast a new and unexpected light on familiar texts.2 These workshops did not require any suspension of expertise, but their very existence was suggested by the practice of scriptural reasoning.
Had its editor not participated in scriptural reasoning, it is unlikely that his project would have taken the form it did.
There are many other examples of scholarly practices which are transformed by the practice of scriptural reasoning. These include what Peter Ochs calls the cure of “binarism” and what I have referred to as the sustaining of long-term disagreements.3
What is the significance of all this? I have offered an hypothesis to account for the uncertain position that scriptural reasoning occupies in the academy: it requires the suspension of expertise, and this requirement is offensive in various ways. It also contravenes other scholarly rules in its emphatic lack of commitment to agreement, consensus and enduring forms of transmission. These might appear somehow less serious and less worthy of one’s time, from a scholarly perspective. But I have also tried to draw attention to the necessity of these alternative disciplines if one is to do justice to certain kinds of shared agency and certain forms of collegiality.
Of course it is quite possible that the university is the problem, and that the practice of scriptural reasoning throws its deficiencies into sharp relief. But that is a battle for another day.
2 Anver Emon (ed.), Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning: Encountering Our Legal Other (London: Oneworld, 2016).
3 See Ochs, op. cit. (note 1); Nicholas Adams, “Long–Term Disagreement: Philosophical Models in Scriptural Reasoning and Receptive Ecumenism,” in the same issue of Modern Theology.
On the Way Towards a Dialogical Theology
Katja Drechsler and Thorsten Knauth
4Introduction
How a religious text is adequately and legitimately interpreted and understood is of great importance to all religious traditions. Theological efforts to interpret religious diversity outside dominant schemes of mission, confrontation, hierarchy and ignorance have intensified over recent decades.
How can adherents of different religious traditions encounter each other in an open and appreciative way? And what do the sacred sources tell us about the encounter with the religious “other”? How do they describe the relation with other religions? A relationship between the understanding of one’s own religious tradition and an attitude towards others is obvious:
if my religion is the only legitimate way to truth and to salvation, there is not much left for the other.
The reconstruction and rereading of one’s own texts while being aware of other religions also claiming to be ways to truth and salvation
4 This article is based on collective work of Thorsten Knauth, Carola Roloff, Andreas Markowsky and Florian Jäckel and a lecture held by Katja Drechsler and Thorsten Knauth, “Interreligiöse Hermeneutik und neue Ansätze in islamischer Theologie,”
November 2015, University of Hamburg. For full coverage of the multi-perspective hermeneutical experiment, see Thorsten Knauth, Carola Roloff, Katja Drechsler, Florian Jäckel and Andreas Markowsky, “Auf dem Weg zu einer dialogisch- interreligiösen Hermeneutik,” in Katajun Amirpur et al. (eds), Perspektiven dialogischer Theologie. Offenheit in den Religionen und eine Hermeneutik des interreligiösen Dialogs (Münster/New York: Waxmann, 2016), 207–315.
constitute only a first step that might be taken without talking to the other.
It is important to go further: if one’s own and the other religious tradition are mutually and collectively interpreted, the other can become a partner in a joint effort to understand religion. Understanding becomes dialogical.
This article provides some insights into current research within the international and interdisciplinary project “Religions and Dialogue in Modern Societies” (ReDi). After introducing the Academy of World Religions at the University of Hamburg and the ReDi-project in general, the development, aims and outcomes of this multi-perspective hermeneutical experiment and our, preliminary, understanding of a dialogical theology will be discussed in greater detail.