Abstract
What is required in current encounters between Islam and the West? This is a question that inevitably has many answers according to participants, situations, issues, and spheres of life. Scriptural Reasoning, in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims study and discuss their scriptures together, is one response.1 I see it as a wisdom-seeking practice that has so far proved adaptable to varied participants, situations, issues, and spheres of life, and just because of this is facing challenges about its future shape. At its heart is conversation around the scriptures, but that cannot be performed in print. The next best thing to an actual conversation centered around the scriptures is to have a dialogue in written format between those who have studied together, as have many of the contributors to this volume. In what follows the main aim is not to recount the story and elements of Scriptural Reasoning (which are covered in detail elsewhere, especially in a recent issue of the journal Modern Theology to which six of the authors of this volume contributed) 2 but to focus on the following question: how might Scriptural Reasoning be developed further so that it might play a constructive role in the engagement between the Abrahamic faiths in a Western context and also between the faiths and secular understandings and forces?
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Notes
Modern Theology 22/3 (July 2006) also to be published as The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning, ed. David F. Ford and Chad C. Pecknold (Blackwell, Oxford 2006).
Cf. Steven Kepnes, “A Handbook for Scriptural Reasoning” Modern Theology 22/3 (July 2006): 367–383.
Cf. David F. Ford, “An Inter-Faith Wisdom: Scriptural Reasoning between Jews, Christians and Muslims” Modern Theology 22/3 (July 2006): 345–366, especially pp. 348–351.
For my own application of Ephesians to the question of Jesus as Messiah and relations between Jews and Christians see David F. Ford, “A Messiah for the Third Millennium” Modern Theology, 16/1 (January 2000): 75–90; also in Theology and Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. James Buckley and L. Gregory Jones (Blackwell, Oxford 2001), pp. 73–88.
A good example of a secular thinker who is proposing for the United States a polity that takes seriously the religions in the public sphere (and also explores key texts in the secular democratic tradition which might be considered candidates for potential scriptural-and-secular reasoning groups) is Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004); cf. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992). For my interpretation of him in this regard see Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
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© 2007 Basit Bilal Koshul and Steven Kepnes
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Ford, D.F. (2007). Developing Scriptural Reasoning Further. In: Koshul, B.B., Kepnes, S. (eds) Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605626_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605626_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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