Sacred book club: reading scripture across interfaith lines

ON A BLUSTERY Wednesday evening in central London, about a dozen people from different parts of the city made their way to St. Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace. They included an attorney from a large London law firm, a political lobbyist, a corporate consultant, a Muslim college chaplain, a university professor, a female rabbi and a research scientist. After pouring cups of coffee, the group began a two-hour discussion marked by moments of intense debate as well as laughter. Conversation veered from economics to the nature of citizenship to London politics.

One might think this was a meeting of a neighborhood council or Chamber of Commerce, except for one thing: in front of each participant were selections from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an.

After finishing its discussion of a passage from the Hebrew Bible, the group began focusing on a passage from Matthew's Gospel in which Jesus instructs his questioners to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's."

"I thought most Christians read this as justification for supporting their government's policies," said a Muslim participant, looking up from his text. "I was taught that in my church growing up, actually," said one woman, a bit sheepishly. "I wonder if Jesus isn't saying some thing a bit more subversive than 'be a good citizen,'" suggested a Jewish participant. "Perhaps Jesus is actually making a larger point about an alternative economic system."

This looks like a Bible study. But St. Ethelburga's is a public space, not a church or temple, and the participants are Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Profound religious differences emerge over the course of conversation.

But the participants share one important conviction: they believe that the resolution of religiously rooted political tensions will be attained not by avoiding religion in public, but by initiating more and better religious conversations in public.

Participants in this practice, known as scriptural reasoning, are part of a movement that wants to protect religiously plural societies while simultaneously encouraging religious people to enter more deeply into public discourse. Such aims might appear paradoxical to those who were taught that the emergence in the 17th century of secular liberalism, with its privatization of faith, rescued the West from "wars of religion." Voices on all sides of the religious and political spectrum have begun to recognize--not least because of the increased presence of Islam in Western societies---that a purely secular, liberal approach to public discourse is not sustainable in a world increasingly shaped by religions.

If we can no longer conduct public debates according to the "objective" language of "self-evident truths"--ways of reasoning that purport to cut across religious and cultural distinctions-how will political debate move forward? How can laws be passed if representatives reason differently about the common good? A post-Enlightenment public square sounds positively tribal: it would mean Muslims arguing for Shari'a law and Christians arguing from the Bible about sexual ethics. Can such a society flourish? Can such different groups find ways to talk to each other?

Scriptural reasoning (SR) is an attempt to navigate the diversity. The practice has been central to recent gatherings of political and religious leaders in Qatar, Karachi, Berlin and Washington,

D.C. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Anglican bishop N. T. Wright of Durham (England) have promoted SR as a key to Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations in England. SR groups have been established at universities such as Duke, Virginia, Colgate, Cambridge (England) and Cape Town (South Africa). The American Academy of Religion has been devoting sessions to SR for several years. An introduction to SR was included in the inaugural festivities of Princeton Theological Seminary's new president last spring.

At the local level, groups of clergy and laypeople are beginning to meet under the auspices of the Children of Abraham Institute. Peter Ochs, professor of Judaic studies at the University of Virginia and one of the founders of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning, encourages this trend.

"Often the best people with whom to do SR are not academics, but regular folks who have been raised reading and listening to the Bible, who have received some basic socialization into the world of scripture," says Ochs. All SR participants must represent a house of faith and usually a denomination. "The interfaith nature of SR simply cannot exist if its participants are not deeply rooted and trained within a particular house of Judaism, Christianity or Islam."

WHAT IS SR in practice? Jews, Christians and Muslims (roughly equal numbers of each) gather to read passages from three scriptures that are usually thematically related. Sessions are not held in a synagogue, church or mosque. Instead, SR, invoking the shared "tent of meeting" imagery of Genesis 28, seeks out a neutral space. When SR participants meet outside of a specific house of faith, studying all three scriptures together, they create "a three-way mutual hospitality," says Christian theologian David Ford, another cofounder of the Society. When it is not clear who is the host and who is the guest, "each is host to the others and guest to the others as each welcomes the other two to their 'home' scripture and traditions of interpretation."