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Scriptural Reasoning (SR) is one of the most distinctive developments in interfaith practice of the last thirty years. Rather than debating doctrines or negotiating a shared creed, it brings Jews, Christians and Muslims to a table to read short passages of one another's scriptures together — the Tanakh, the Bible and the Qur'an — not to reach agreement, not to convert anyone, and not to dissolve their differences into a lowest common denominator, but to deepen understanding, build friendships, and discover both unexpected resonances and genuinely instructive disagreements. It is, in David Ford's phrase, a practice rather than a theory: you learn what it is by doing it. This lesson examines the origins of SR in the work of Peter Ochs and David Ford and the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, the method of reading across traditions, the idea of the hermeneutical community and the "tent of meeting," the hermeneutical issues the practice raises, its close cousin Francis Clooney's comparative theology, and the criticisms it must answer.
Key term: Scriptural Reasoning — a practice in which small groups of Jews, Christians and Muslims read and discuss short passages of each other's scriptures together, around a shared theme, in a spirit of hospitality and without any aim of agreement or conversion.
Scriptural Reasoning grew out of the collaboration of a Jewish philosopher and a Christian theologian, with Muslim partners soon central to the practice.
Behind the practice lies a simple observation with large consequences: Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all, in their different ways, "religions of the book" for which the interpretation of scripture is the beating heart of communal life. If these traditions could learn to read their scriptures in one another's company — each hosting the others at its own text — something might happen that neither comparison-at-a-distance nor doctrinal negotiation can achieve.
It helps to see that SR is not merely a friendly activity but rests on a considered philosophical stance, largely Ochs's. Against the Enlightenment dream of a single, universal reason that could stand above all traditions and adjudicate between them, Ochs (drawing on Peirce and on the later Wittgenstein's picture of meaning-in-use) holds that reasoning is always situated: it happens within communities, in response to particular problems, and grows through dialogue rather than arriving at timeless conclusions. On this view there is no neutral "view from nowhere" from which to grade the religions — which is exactly why a practice of reading together, in which understanding emerges from the encounter, is more appropriate than a theory imposed in advance. This is also why SR is content to leave the big metaphysical questions (is there one ultimate reality behind the traditions?) unanswered: it does not need them settled in order to begin, and it suspects that any attempt to settle them in advance will quietly privilege one tradition's categories over the others'. The practice is, in this sense, deliberately postliberal — it takes the particularity and integrity of each tradition with full seriousness rather than treating them as local instances of a universal religious essence.
A typical SR session has a deliberately simple shape, designed to keep the encounter concrete and to prevent it sliding into abstraction.
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Choosing texts | Short passages from the Tanakh, the New Testament and the Qur'an are gathered around a shared theme — hospitality, the stranger, creation, justice, light |
| Small groups | Participants sit in small groups (typically six to ten) around a table, every text in front of everyone |
| Reading aloud | Each passage is read aloud, ideally in its original language and then in translation, so its strangeness and music are felt |
| Questioning | Participants ask about one another's texts — "What does this word carry in your tradition?" "How do your commentators read this?" "Does this connect to our passage?" |
| No conclusion | There is no attempt to agree, to harmonise the texts, or to issue a joint statement; the fruit is deepened understanding and real encounter |
Several principles distinguish SR from other models of dialogue:
Text-centred. SR is not a forum for trading personal opinions or pronouncing on doctrine in the abstract. The conversation is always tethered to a specific passage in front of everyone, which keeps it concrete and accountable.
Hospitable. Each tradition acts as host when its own scripture is read, welcoming the others into its textual home, and as guest when it engages another's text. This rhythm of hosting and being hosted — modelled on Abraham's welcome of the three strangers in Genesis 18 — creates a dynamic of mutual vulnerability and generosity.
Non-reductive. SR explicitly refuses to boil the three traditions down to a shared essence or a "perennial philosophy." Differences are not smoothed over; they are read closely and valued as openings for deeper reflection.
No conversion. SR is not a setting for proselytising. Because no one is trying to win, participants can afford to be genuinely open, and disagreement can be honest rather than defensive.
Friendship. The small group, the intimacy of shared reading, and (ideally) regular meeting over time build real friendships across lines that politics and theology usually keep apart.
At the centre of SR is the disciplined art of asking good questions about a text that is not your own. Instead of asserting an interpretation, participants are drawn to ask: What does this word mean in your tradition? How do your scholars read this passage — is there one dominant reading or many? I notice something like this in our text; do you see a connection? This puzzles me — can you help me? Such questions enact a stance toward difference that is neither defensive nor aggressive: one neither imposes one's own reading nor passively swallows the other's, but stays genuinely curious. The discipline is harder than it sounds, because the reflex to defend or to score points is strong.
What the practice reliably surfaces is a double discovery. On one hand there are resonances — striking parallels of theme, image and ethical demand across the three scriptures, which give participants a felt sense of shared heritage. On the other hand there are differences — places where the texts diverge, unsettle or directly contradict one another. SR treats these differences not as problems to be solved but as the most interesting thing in the room. A recurring experience is that having one's own scripture read aloud by, and questioned by, a person from another tradition makes the familiar text strange again and reveals facets that years of insider reading had rendered invisible.
A second session might take the theme of hospitality to the stranger. The group could read Leviticus 19:33–34 ("you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt"), the Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) and the closing of the Sermon on the Mount on enemies, and a Qur'anic passage on kindness to neighbours, kin and the wayfarer (such as 4:36). Here the resonances are immediate and moving: all three traditions ground care for the outsider in the character of God and in the memory of one's own vulnerability, and the ethical demand is unmistakably shared. But the close reading also exposes instructive differences — over who counts as the neighbour (the Samaritan parable deliberately scandalises by making the despised outsider the hero), over the relation of love-of-stranger to love-of-enemy, and over how the command is embedded in law, in narrative or in direct exhortation. The session models exactly what SR claims to do: it lets a genuine convergence be felt without pretending the differences away, and it sends each participant back to their own scripture with a sharpened sense of what it does and does not say.
Consider a session built around the figure of Abraham and his son. The group might read Genesis 22 (the binding of Isaac, the Aqedah), in which God commands Abraham to offer Isaac and stays his hand at the last moment; and Qur'an 37:99–113, which narrates Abraham's dream that he should sacrifice his son, the son's willing assent, and God's ransom of him with "a momentous sacrifice." At once the questions multiply, and they are good questions rather than debating points. Which son is it? The Genesis text names Isaac; the Qur'anic passage does not name the son, and the dominant later Islamic tradition identifies him as Ishmael. How does the consent of the son function — silent in Genesis, explicitly voiced in the Qur'an? Christians at the table may hear in the Genesis "only son" and the carried wood a foreshadowing of the cross (a reading neither Jews nor Muslims share), while Jewish participants may locate the passage within the liturgy of the New Year and centuries of midrash on Isaac's age and Abraham's anguish. No one has to resolve who is "right"; the point is that each tradition reads its own scripture in front of the others and is questioned about it, and in doing so all three see their familiar story refracted through unfamiliar eyes. This is SR in miniature — a shared theme, three texts, close questioning, and no concluding vote.
From its beginnings in the 1990s among a small group of academics, SR has spread well beyond the seminar room. It has been taken up in universities across the United Kingdom and North America, adapted for schools and sixth forms, run in synagogues, churches and mosques, hosted by chaplaincies, and carried into settings of tension and post-conflict reconciliation where members of divided communities can meet, at first, over texts rather than over grievances. The Rose Castle Foundation and the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme have trained practitioners and developed materials; an online journal, the Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, gathers reflection on the practice. This spread is itself part of the case for SR: a practice devised by professors has proved unexpectedly portable, precisely because its core — sit down, read a little, ask honestly, listen — needs no apparatus beyond the texts and a willingness to be a guest.
A hermeneutical community is a group that interprets texts together, each member bringing different perspectives, experiences and traditions of reading to bear. In SR the hermeneutical community is deliberately interfaith: Jew, Christian and Muslim each arrive equipped with their own centuries of commentary and their own interpretive instincts, and the reading happens in the friction and illumination between them.
Key term: Hermeneutics — the theory and practice of interpretation, especially of texts. SR is built on the insight that scripture never interprets itself; it is always read within a community and tradition, which is why bringing three communities to one table changes what can be seen in each text.
Ford and others describe the space SR creates as a tent — and the image does real work. The tent is temporary and portable, not a permanent building like a church, synagogue or mosque; participants enter it from their own traditions, study together, and return home enriched. It is a "third space" owned by none of the three and made only by their meeting. The metaphor carries the practice's whole ethos: temporality (SR builds no new religion and no permanent institution — it is a practice, not a creed), hospitality (the echo of Abraham's tent and the welcome of strangers), openness (a tent is open on every side; people come and go freely), and groundedness (one enters without leaving one's own identity at the door).
SR is not a soft activity; it raises hard questions about interpretation that go to the heart of what scripture is in each tradition, and a strong answer will name them.
The first is the status of the text. For a traditional Muslim the Qur'an is the uncreated, verbatim speech of God, ideally encountered in Arabic recitation; for many Jews the Torah is divine revelation read within the authoritative web of rabbinic interpretation; for Christians the Bible is the inspired word mediated through human authors and read in the light of Christ. These are not the same kind of object, and to lay three passages side by side on a table risks tacitly treating them as equivalent specimens — which each tradition, on its own terms, would resist. SR's defenders answer that the practice does not flatten the texts: precisely by letting each tradition host its own scripture and explain its authority, it keeps the differences in view rather than erasing them.
The second is the problem of translation and untranslatability. A Qur'anic term carries a field of resonance in Arabic that no English rendering captures; the same is true of Hebrew. Reading "in translation" can quietly substitute one tradition's categories for another's. SR's insistence on reading in the original language where possible, and on asking native questions about key words, is a deliberate guard against this — but it cannot wholly remove the difficulty.
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