Between Comparison and Normativity: Scriptural Reasoning and Religious Ethics

Abstract

Scriptural Reasoning (SR) is a form of interfaith dialogue that understands the logic of scriptural interpretation as a process of applying religious insights to their appropriate contexts, a process that is enhanced when members of different faith traditions interpret each other’s sacred texts together. In this chapter, I examine SR in relation to religious ethics, part of a larger project of imagining how scriptural text shapes reflection on morality. I argue that SR provides logical resources whose applications extend beyond the parameters of its own practices. SR provides what I call “logical resources,” which are certain strategies for reading texts. Such strategies not only clarify a text’s content at a surface level; they also navigate seemingly contradictory interpretations, explicate implicit background assumptions that went into the text’s composition or guide its prescriptions, and, above all, identify contexts that mediate between the text and some community of readers. These strategies can be applied to a range of texts, including scholarly works, official social and doctrinal teaching texts, as well as the Bible itself, which is the scriptural foundation for Christian ethics. In broad terms, the logic from SR that I identify can be positioned between comparison and normativity, contributing to a religious ethics that has the capacity to describe moral worlds both within and across communities, compare these worlds, identify their distinct normativities, and apply normativity itself in diagnosing and repairing the problems it uncovers.