China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture

12. The Possibilities and Values of "Scriptural Reasoning" between China and the West

163 CHAPTER TWELVE the possibilities and values of “sCriptural reasoning” between China and the west The term “scriptural reasoning,” originating from the term “textual reasoning ,” was first introduced in the early 1990s by a group of Jewish scholars who followed the examples of Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas, and attempted to reread the Christian Bible and the Jewish Tanakh and later on also the Muslim Quran, from the perspectives of transculturalism and comparative studies. After establishing the Journal of Textual Reasoning in 1991,1 Peter Ochs and his colleagues started the Scriptural Reasoning Society in 1995 and started to publish the Journal of Scriptural Reasoning in 2001. They gradually compiled a series of primary texts, including Comparative Biblical and Quranic Narratives and Biblical Verses Cited in the Quran and in Their Biblical Context.2 In “The Rules of Scriptural Reasoning,” Ochs defines scriptural reasoning as “a kind of depth-historiography” and claims that it distinguished itself from both “secular modernism” and “anti-modern Jewish orthodoxy” so as to “transform polar opposites into dialogical pairs.”3 The Cambridge Inter-Faith Program was in step with them and produced several works like Bound by the Bible (2005), Christian Wisdom (2007), and Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning (2009).4 One thing worthy of special attention is chapter 8 of David Ford’s Christian Wisdom, “An 164 China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture Inter-Faith Wisdom: Scriptural Reasoning between Jews, Christians and Muslims,” which might contain the primary concern and value of scriptural reasoning. Put briefly, “scriptural reasoning” is an open-to-all wisdom-seeking engagement without authoritative overviews or native speakers, and nobody exclusively owns the final meaning of the scripture . Therefore, this will definitely result in a “dialogue” rather than a “monologue,” confirming that “the presence of the similar perfectness might be variously identified”5 and dissolving any self-enclosure, selfexplanation , or pre-assurance.6 The “reasoning” of those interconnected, overlapping, yet varying “scriptures” in different religious traditions obviously requires thorough self-examination. Nowadays, it is of vital importance to the contemporary world to promote mutual understanding between different religious traditions, and for these religious traditions to reunderstand themselves upon the basis of such a mutual understanding. However, it may be nothing special to conduct scriptural reasoning merely among the three religions mentioned above, for they, originating from the same “Abrahamic tradition,” are in essence naturally connected. Since the scriptural reasoning is “open to all people, religions, cultures, . . . media and spheres of life,”7 could it also be applied to Chinese and other Western scriptures ? If the answer is in the affirmative, then how? The questions that have arisen among Western scholars should also be faced by Chinese scholars. Possibly, an unintentional scriptural reasoning started quite early when Chinese culture and ideology began to come in contact and collide with those of the West. For instance, The Sacred Books of the East, edited by Max Müller, includes many English versions of Buddhist classics as well as pre-Qin Chinese texts. Often hailed as the Western “father of religious studies,” Müller appropriated Goethe’s famous line about linguistics, “He who knows one knows none,” as his own motto for religious studies. This spirit is exactly a form of scriptural reasoning. The fact that Western missionaries translated Chinese classics and introduced them to the Western world manifested two mutually prompting intellectual movements—that is, “the Eastward dissemination of Western learning” and “the dissemination of Chinese culture to the West.” A case in point is Robert Morrison’s translation both of the Bible into Chinese and of some Chinese ancient classics into English—that is, The Three-Character Classic and The Great Science. Examples also include Joachim Bouvet’s translation of I Ching and Richard Wilhelm’s The Possibilities and Values of “Scriptural Reasoning” 165 study of the “Chinese mind.” As comprehension and interpretation are but two aspects of the same process, Western missionaries’ translation activities fall inevitably into the category of scriptural reasoning due to their special identity and cultural background. Their best representative is James Legge, who, during his thirty years of life in Hong Kong and twenty-one years at Oxford University as a professor of Chinese, treated Chinese and Western “sacred books” as mutually inclusive and illustrative . His core principle of scriptural interpretation, yi yi ni zhi (以意逆 志, to meet the intention or the scope of the author with a sympathetic understanding), serves as a bridge...