Newsletter Uni Tübingen aktuell Nr. 2/2023: Forum
Reconciliation of religions through shared scriptural study
Interview with Lucas Prize winner Professor Peter Ochs
At the beginning of May, the American Judaist Peter Ochs was awarded the Dr Leopold Lucas Prize 2023. The prize is awarded annually by the Faculty of Protestant Theology on behalf of the University of Tübingen. With this award, the faculty recognizes Peter Ochs' achievements in the dialogue between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wolfgang Krischke has interviewed him.
Prof. Ochs, you belong to a group of Jewish Studies scholars who established a methodology that has since been known as „Scriptural Reasoning“. A main goal of this approach is to foster reconciliation among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. What does „Scriptural Reasoning“ mean and which are the practical effects you have achieved so far?
PEW research reports indicate that religion-on-religion violence is steadily increasing. Should we infer that intense religiosity is dangerous? In 1994, a society of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars began to test a different set of hypotheses: that modern diplomats do a disservice when they ask religious groups to leave their beliefs at home when they come to the negotiating table; and that the greatest resource for interreligious peacebuilding lies deep within these religious traditions, in their ancient practices of Scriptural study. To test their hypotheses, these scholars developed “Scriptural Reasoning (SR),” a practice of shared scriptural study across the borders of very different religious traditions. In SR, small groups of religious participants comment on scriptural verses from each tradition. No one holds authority in the group, everyone is invited to speak from the heart about verses from each tradition and then to listen to the next person speak from their heart and so on around the study table. SR has generated thousands of study sessions among hundreds of groups around the world. Our records indicate that 10% of participants drop out after one session, but 90% continue: in many cases, for months of bi-weekly sessions. Most report that the experience opened their eyes to greater depth and variety in their own scriptural texts as well in those from different traditions. In the US and UK, dozens of SR groups engage school children as well as congregants from many houses of worship. Several universities in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East have developed programs of research and academic study in SR, including the Muslim theology faculty at the University of Tübingen. SR study groups in China, Indonesia, India, Australia and elsewhere promote study among Asian as well as Abrahamic religions.
Is scriptural reasoning necessarily bound to strengthen the common ground of religions? Or might it also uncover dividing lines?
The goal of scriptural reasoning is not to seek interreligious agreement about elemental beliefs or about the nature of religion. It is to nurture practices of study that honor deep religious difference, enabling participants to voice rather than hide heartfelt ways of reading sacred words. SR challenges conventional modern assumptions that traditionally religious folks cannot tolerate each other and that religious groups can engage each other only with the help of secular mediators. 30 years and thousands of interreligious study sessions have demonstrated that the awe many believers feel before the sacred word provides a better condition for engagement than negotiating tables that are cleansed of religious texts and references to religious values. Over the past 30 years, third-party diplomatic efforts have largely failed to resolve interreligious tensions. SR offers tables of sacred text study rather than of negotiation; the air is filled words of value and belief and, against expectations, that atmosphere has comforted religious participants much more often than it has unsettled them.
Which causal role does religion play regarding Muslim-Christian and Muslim-Jewish conflicts as compared to political, economic and cultural factors involved? To put it differently: Can a religious and scripture-related approach grasp the roots of these conflicts?
In regions of outright conflict today, competing religious groups tend to replace traditional practices of tradition-based deliberation with obedience to the top-down demands of political leaders. Religious spokespersons often justify these demands through peremptory citations from sacred texts. Accompanied by politically charged rhetoric, the citations are sparse and divorced from the complexities of tradition-based jurisprudence or ethics. Because such groups are not candidates for Scriptural Reasoning, we have produced another instrument of peacebuilding derived from SR: an early warning diagnostic tool (“VPA”) that forecasts the near future behavior of religious groups in conflict zones. For each stakeholder, the tool identifies linguistic signals of nine types of likely group behavior: from violent to cautious to prudent (and conversational) to internal disarray. The tool recommends nine corresponding types of inter-group peacebuilding, including recommendations for including representatives of all but the most violent groups within the peace building teams. Drawing on the wisdom of SR, we do not make claims about the “causes” of conflict. We find no evidence that peacebuilders have successfully repaired interreligious violence by seeking to correct what they believe are its causes. Our goal is strictly functional: forecasting actions that each group will most likely take and then recommending best practices for addressing those actions.
Religious fundamentalists refer to holy sciptures in order to dispute scientific findings. A case in point would be creationists’ rejection of evolutionary theory. Is there a contradiction between religious foundations and the insights of modern science that can not ulimately be resolved?
One focus of my Lucas Lecture [held at the Award Ceremony, 9th may 2023] is the relationship between religion and science. I follow the teachings of the rabbinic leader and physicist Hasdai Crescas (1340–1410), according to whom Torah (divine instruction) and natural science (studies of the creation) are correlative. In religious terms this means that God‘s word appears both as the order of creation (maaseh breshit) and as the instruction (Torah) that appears in Scripture. In their commentaries on Scripture, the rabbinic sages read each word of Scripture as having more than one meaning, because the meaning of each word may apply somewhat differently to each situation of earthly life. For the sages, God‘s knowledge is infinite while human knowledge is finite. Examining scriptural words, even the wisest sage asks only „what do these words say to us here in this finite situation right now?“ Crescas taught that faith in God means trusting that we will continue to learn more and more about God‘s word of Torah and about God’s words in creation, where every creature is a word of God. Alongside his rabbinic leadership, Crescas was the leading mathematical physicist of his day, generating a mathematics of infinite space and time that anticipates some of the moves in 20th century particle physics. Crescas taught that the physicist should also trust the creator and therefore trust that that there will always be more to learn about the universe. In his physics, Crescas applied Scripture‘s account of divine infinity to his notion of the infinite character of the universe. In his accounts of rabbinic jurisprudence, Crescas’s applied some of the details of his mathematics to his notion of the infinite character of Torah.
A considerable part of your work is dedicated to Charles S. Peirce, who is primarily known as a founder of modern Sign Theory. How are your studies related to Peirce’s work?
My research team’s public work on inter-religious relations is supported by technical work in logic and philosophy, which generates our models of how reasoning emerges from scriptural reading and how religious language use signals a group‘s future behavior. The technical work draws, for one, on the great American philosopher Charles Peirce (1839-1914), especially his logic of science, pragmatism, and semiotics – that to know is to interpret signs. Applying Peirce’s semiotics to scripture-based reasoning, we are aided by tradition-specific thinkers, like Hasdai Crescas, Augustine, and South Asian thinkers like Shah Wali Allah and ʿUbayd Allāh Sindhī. All these thinkers correlate religion and science, and all read the words of scripture and the subjects of science as displaying not only one but a range of meanings that speak differently to different settings.