What is Scriptural Reasoning?

Scriptural Reasoning is the shared study by Jews, Christians, Muslims and others of their sacred texts, drawing upon each other's wealth of ancient scholarship and interpretative tradition. SR offers the remarkable opportunity for people of each of the faiths to see their particular scriptures read and reflected back to them by believers of the other traditions, offering new hues and spectra of meaning to familiar intra-religious ways of reading. Scriptural Reasoning is a broad and loose term for an evolving and diverse range of different practices of shared study by people of different faiths of their sacred texts.

As an academic practice originating in the United States and developed in universities in Britain, Scriptural Reasoning is now developing as a community and civic practice among faith communities in London, Oxford and beyond, offering the hope of promoting a deeper understanding and respect for each other's differences of belief - not aiming to overlook or undermine those differences for mere sake of consensus. Through these authentically Jewish, authentically Christian and authentically Islamic conversations around our precious scriptures, we aim to build new models of civil cooperation and engagement in our plural society.

A distinctive feature of all the various forms of Scriptural Reasoning is their emphasis on the particularity, distinctiveness and integrity of each of the participating faith traditions.  This is expressed in a strong respect for the cherished differences between Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other faiths, a high regard for each faith’s heritage of scholarship and tradition (ie. “Scriptural-Traditional-Reasoning”), and the fostering of good quality disagreements between participants which are concurrently to be contained within relationships of collegiality and friendship.

The Scriptural Reasoning Society is one independent “School” of Scriptural Reasoning (colloquially known as “The Oxford School”) within the broader family of different independent SR Schools in communication.  We share important commonalities with other practitioners of Scriptural Reasoning, both in relation to the way we think about and do SR, and at the same time we also hold to some distinctive and fundamental differences in our approach to Scriptural Reasoning vis à vis other SR groups.  We uphold these, our unique and distinctive characteristics, in a spirit of conversation, friendly disagreement and healthy academic collaboration between differing opinions with other practitioners of Scriptural Reasoning – true to the promise that SR is about “not consensus but friendship”.

As this website is developed under the rabbinical and imamate supervision of the London Beth Din and the Fatwa Committee of Regent's Park Mosque (click to download the official fatwa of the Shari'a Court in English or in Arabic), we hope to offer resources and materials, as we develop Scriptural Reasoning in full cooperation with the most authoritative and devout institutions of religious law within the Jewish and Muslim communities, as well as the Christian churches.

We warmly welcome you to share in the respectful and exciting experience of our Scriptural Reading reading meetings, as well as in the hospitality of our Community Tables where we eat together - all levels of kashrut, halal and vegetarian observance are respected. Please click to download a copy of our Community Ethic, the Oxford Ethic.