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Domains, Normativity, and Normativity Across Domains: On Peter Ochs’s Religion Without Violence

Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: How is it possible for members of different and conflicting religious traditions to engage amicably with one another without bracketing their deepest religious commitments? Ochs’s account of the practice and philosophy of Scriptural Reasoning provides an answer to this question in terms of a logic of normative engagement across traditional borders distinct but not separate from the normative decision-making that takes place within particular traditions. Such normative engagement navigates between two extremes: unmediated conflict at one end, and a detached surveying of ‘worldviews’ at the other end. In the former scenario participants can only wield the normativity of their own traditions against others who do not share that normativity; they cannot reason with them. In the latter scenario, participants step back from the traditions they otherwise inhabit in order to view them alongside others as objects for description and comparison, bracketing their normative force. Ochs’s inter-traditional normativity is unknown to either, and a source of repair for both. In this essay I read Ochs’s Religion Without Violence as offering the more general theory of which his previous book, Another Reformation, is a particular case study. In doing so, I hope to show how the latter book clarifies and repairs the earlier one at a crucial point. This is to treat Ochs’s oeuvre as a developing trajectory whose deep reasonings can be traced and extrapolated further. Specifically, following Ochs’s own method of reparative reading (displayed most fully in his close study of the work of C.S. Peirce), I will identify two tendencies in his work that, while potentially complementary, come into conflict precisely when they are not sufficiently distinguished from one another.1 Another Reformation, through its study of a series of postliberal Christian theologians, generates a model for nonsupersessionist Christian theology. In the light of Religion Without Violence, it can be seen as doing two distinct things. On the one hand, it displays a Christian accommodation of Jews inside their Christian vision (what I will call the ‘accommodationist’ tendency). On the other hand, it displays a Christian acknowledgment of the finitude of their vision, and concomitantly the potential rationality and integrity of Jewish thought and practice beyond that vision (what I will call the ‘limiting’ tendency). However, when viewed from the perspective of the later book, Another Reformation can be seen as running into problems insofar as it does not sufficiently distinguish between these tendencies. By bringing into focus the question of normativity across and between traditions, Religion Without Violence emphasises the ‘limiting’ tendency, and invites a definition of nonsupersessionism primarily in those terms: in terms of the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of the Christian vision. To be sure, such a definition is present in Another Reformation, but jostling ambiguously alongside a definition in terms of the ‘accommodationist’ tendency—which emphasises the content of the Christian vision rather than the manner in which that vision is held. In my analysis I implement a conceptuality and terminology developed by Nicholas Adams in his reading of Peter Ochs.2 Adams coins the phrase ‘domains of limited validity’ to denote the conditions under which truth claims are made, and (potentially to be distinguished from the former) the conditions under which they are affirmed or denied. Domains can be local and well-defined, such as the classificatory system in a supermarket, or broad and underdetermining, such as the deep rules and axioms of a whole religious tradition. Scriptural Reasoning, as a practice of engagement across traditions, can be conceived as engagement in which claims are made and received in multiple domains at once. A truth claim made within one domain may make very different, or even no, sense when received within another domain, and the assessment of its truth-value will vary accordingly. In the normal run of things, normativity belongs to domains. I judge what is true or appropriate with respect to domain-specific conditions.3 Scriptural Reasoning, while in some ways operating with rules specific to the practice, and thus in a domain of its own, is at the same time a practice that deliberately brings into focus the relation between diverse domains. The normativity it engages is accordingly of a different kind. It is precisely part of the job of Ochs’s book to uncover its logic. To anticipate, its normativity is less about the content of the claims made, and more about the manner in which they are made: the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’. Using domains language, it is possible elegantly to distinguish between the alternative potential avenues for nonsupersessionist Christian theology outlined above. To accommodate Jews inside one’s Christian vision is to change the claims one makes within one’s Christian-specific domain. To acknowledge the potential rationality of Jewish thought and practice beyond the Christian vision entails acknowledging, on the one hand, the limitedness of the validity of the claims made with a Christian-specific domain, and on the other hand (and by the same token), the existence of other domains in which quite different claims are conceivably valid. As will become clear, ‘validity’ is not to be confused with ‘truth’. For Ochs, the ultimate truth value of competing religious truth claims cannot be settled ‘short of some end time’.4 I will begin by offering an account of Ochs’s logic of Scriptural Reasoning, with reference to the ways in which truth and normativity are figured. I will then draw out the lines of continuity between this logic and the logic of nonsupersessionism articulated in Another Reformation. In this light it will then be possible to trace and articulate the two tendencies present in Another Reformation, and to diagnose and repair their conflation. Finally, I will draw attention to the fact that the dominant tendency in the literature on Christian nonsupersessionism is the ‘accommodationist’. Against that background, Ochs’s emphasis on the ‘limiting’ tendency becomes all the more significant. Ochs distinguishes between three different types of scenario according to the way in which they differently configure ‘truth’ (or, in other words, according to their different modes of normativity). The first type of scenario is a conventional setting in which the language (and other) conventions in operation are not in question. They are assumed by all participants and thus remain largely implicit and even unacknowledged. Ochs calls these ‘constative claims’ and gives, as an example of a common-sense claim of this kind: ‘The salt shaker is on the small cabinet’, said by someone at a dinner table in their home. The assumption is ‘that everyone at the table knows exactly where to look’.5 This would not be the time to exploit ambiguities in the language, for example by asking whether the speaker means the (very) small cabinet in the dolls’ house upstairs. To get anything done, conversation partners must work with many assumptions that remain unarticulated and undisputed. In such a scenario (in which conventions remain undisputedly at work) constative claims are either true or false (they cannot be both true and false, nor can they be neither true nor false). To get a better handle on this type of scenario, I will offer another, more complex, theological example. In the context of Christian catechetical instruction in which orthodox (Nicene) trinitarian theology is being taught, suppose the catechist asks the catechumens: ‘When Jesus says to his disciples in the Farewell Discourses, “For the Father is greater than I”, does that mean that the person of the Father is of higher divinity than the Son, and thus that the Son is subordinate to the Father?’ In such a context, the answer ‘yes’ is false, while the answer ‘no’ is true. It is clear from this example that what is meant by ‘true’ is ‘to be affirmed under the conditions of orthodox trinitarianism’. If the question were asked without regard to those conditions, such a (subordinationist) reading of the passage could by no means be ruled out. What Ochs calls ‘the plain sense’6 is vague or polyvalent,7 its meaning only being determined according to the conventions that operate for particular communities of interpretation. The second type of scenario is one in which ‘[r]eparative or contested claims are offered to change or repair specific conventions for formulating [constative] claims’.8 To offer a reparative reading of a scriptural verse is another way to ‘determine’ the vagueness of its plain sense than according to a conventional reading. The difference is that the reading is offered not according to conventions that are already in place, but so as in some respects (but not in others) to propose new conventions. It is reparative only if it continues to work with many (or most) of the conventions of a community of readers, its new proposals being offered to repair rather than replace the full set. Such a reading, unlike a wholly conventional reading, does not abide by a two-valued logic (according to which it is either true or false). It may turn out to be true or false, but it may also be a third value (such as ‘neither’ or ‘maybe’)—in keeping with what Ochs names a three-valued logic.9 The reason for this is that truth and falsity are judged according to conventions. If the conventions are in the process of being altered, the truth of the reparative claim is bound up with its success (or not) in establishing new conventions that repair the old ones. In the meantime, and as a recommendation for reparative change, it is neither true nor false but, rather, ‘strong, weak, or probable’.10 As an example of a reparative reading, Ochs (elsewhere) gives a derashah (interpretive reading) from the Mishnah on Isaiah 60:21: ‘“All Israel have a portion in the world-to-come, as it is written, ‘your people shall all be righteous, they shall possess the land forever . . .’ (Isaiah 60:21)” [Mishnah Sanhedrin X:1]’.11 Ochs hypothesises that this is being written in the context of the destroyed temple in Jerusalem in the early second century. In order to make sense of Israel’s ‘possession of the land forever’ amidst this ruin, the Isaianic promise is referred to ‘the world-to-come’. The rabbinic reading involves the proposal of a new convention—reference of biblical promises to the world-to-come—in repair of conventions operative within Second Temple Judaism that have failed in the wake of the destruction of the temple. Whether the new convention will succeed only time will tell. The emergence of Rabbinic Judaism, in the context of which this once innovative convention becomes established, is the proof of the derashah’s ‘truth’—its ability to repair the plain sense for the emerging community of readers. What sort of truth are we dealing with here? Ochs distinguishes, in rabbinic terms, between the ‘will of the absolute’ as displayed in the plain sense of scripture, but only indeterminately, and the determinate meanings that are arrived at by historically-specific communities of readers.12 For finite creatures, only the latter have ‘truth-values’. In Another Reformation, he clarifies: ‘We may declare: we have heard directly from the One whose Word is true universally. Yes indeed. But we are not the ones to articulate the universality of this Word’.13 In other words, truth-inquiry is context-bound, and while we may articulate universal truths, we cannot pretend to do so in an unconditioned manner, but only from our finite, context-bound vantage points. Adams’s domains-language can helpfully be drawn upon to illuminate the logic of these scenarios. Both conventional and reparative truth-claims are to be affirmed, denied or tested under certain conditions—they have domains of limited validity. Conventional claims are to be affirmed or denied under the conditions of assumed conventions; reparative claims are offered (for example) under the conditions of a problem in the plain sense of scripture for a historically-located community, and they invite testing by those who receive them. The problem Ochs is responding to is a (modern) tendency to utter and/or receive such claims as if they were domain-free—made or heard with no acknowledgment (and even a disguise) of the conditions under which they might be affirmed, denied or tested, and thus as if they can (and must) be received as either true or false by anyone anywhere. On Ochs’s account, while it is possible to offer unlimited or unconditioned claims (such as ‘the divinity of the Son is equal to that of the Father’), it is not possible to do so in an unlimited or unconditioned manner. As finite creatures, we can speak about the (infinite) truth, but we can only do so as finite. To emphasise the conditioned character of all truth claims is not to give up on their truth in a relativist manner.14 Communal conventions are constantly being tested with reference to the flourishing of the communities they serve in the wider world in which they live. As we have seen, a problem experienced by a community may signal a failure in that community’s conventions, calling for reparative claims—and these are tested with respect to their ability to repair the problem. Thus a community’s truth claims, while conditioned, are answerable to the one world the community shares with others, and they accordingly change shape over time. The third type of scenario is exemplified by Scriptural Reasoning. It differs from the first two insofar as its focus is on ‘claims . . . introduced across the borders of religious groups and their hearths’.15 These claims are thus received in multiple domains simultaneously, domains marked by the different conventions operative in the different religious traditions. This is not to discount conventions and commitments specific to SR itself: with local variations and relative degrees of formality, it has well-developed codes of conduct, which tend to go together with (more or less implicit) conceptual commitments on the part of the participants, such as to the vagueness or polyvalence of the plain sense of the scriptures, or to the oneness of the world. Thus, while claims in the context of SR may also be subject to an SR-specific domain of limited validity, SR has its focus on what Ochs calls ‘cross-border adventure[s]’,16 or what, with Adams, we might call ‘dialogue in multiple domains’.17 Specifically, SR involves not just one but a plurality of scriptural canons, ‘each of whose sets of words command equal authority around the SR table’.18 If a scriptural canon is the ultimate source of the conventions of a religious community, then SR has no equivalent, single source of shared conventions. The plurality of canons remains plural, rather than forming a super-canon that generates a set of super-conventions. In other words, SR is not an alternative—or hybrid—religious community. What this means practically, and in terms of type 1 and type 2 scenarios, is that SR does not have its own conventional language according to which conventional or reparative readings of the verses being studied can be arrived at by the group. In other words, scriptural verses are not available to be read for ‘their implications for decision, commitment, or action’, or ‘in order to serve the needs of this-worldly behavior . . . for a given spacetime context’.19 It is in this delimited sense that Ochs draws the conclusion that in SR there are ‘no shared “truths”’.20 On the one hand, there is no super-canon, and thus no harmonised source of normativity shared by all participants. On the other hand, and by the same token, there are no communally-agreed determinate truths. ‘No shared truths’ in this delimited sense does not, however, mean no truth (or indeed no truths). On the one hand, and as we have seen, an SR-specific domain may itself entail conceptual commitments that might also be named truth-claims (even if their content remains either vague or second-order). On the other hand, participants continue in an SR setting to ‘articulat[e] and tes[t] their own truth-claims about individual words and verses of Scripture, [even while] they [do] not worry if others interpre[t] those texts differently’.21 SR study is not about truth or falsity. For SR, truth or falsity is a characteristic only of determinate claims about the interpretive/performative meaning of Scripture, and such claims are available only within traditional circles of scriptural study . . . The Bible identifies a second species of ‘truth’ that can apply to SR study. This is truth as emet, a Hebrew term derived from the root amn, connoting ‘faithfulness’. SR is deeply concerned with this species of truth: the faithfulness that joins each SR reader to the plain sense of Scripture and that, we hope, joins each SR scholar to every other.22 It would be easy to mistake the appeal to truth as faithfulness as a low-level claim about the potential cordiality between those who have left their truth-commitments or normativity at the door. But this would be to divest SR of its normativity, and to reduce the practice to that kind of distanced comparative religion that Ochs is seeking to move beyond. I hypothesise, on the that to get at truth as is precisely to get at the normativity operative in of SR is to one’s for the true meaning of the scriptural whether those of one’s own or of The of SR to the possible meanings of each . . this as a of the previous the truth as is out in terms of the possible of the I the the for the true to to a religious community’s either to articulate a conventional meaning or to at a reparative reading of a particular A (in the is one that is offered a given spacetime a religious the authority of its scriptural canon is in the of determinate meanings for specific this is the shape of the To this traditional normativity in of the possible meanings of the is not to the authority of one’s own but to to that authority in a different on the of the polyvalence or it has determined for specific This is to do two things. in Ochs’s rabbinic it is to focus on the plain sense as that which the will of the . . . and by the same token, it is to acknowledge that this plain sense is to being read by members of other traditions, whose alternative readings may at (and at the very to the conventional a authority is in the conventions it (and for reading its in specific the plain sense that of the do not have a on its As Ochs the one hand, the the between members of one and their scriptural on the other hand, no is the of study as if it to the meanings of each verse within that These meanings with their and they are by all to acknowledge the ultimate authority of one’s own scriptural canon for members of one’s own is to acknowledge the that might be by members of other traditions (for it is not in its possible If traditional normativity is what is the shape of the normativity by a focus on the in their sense in the of from other To make with this question we must the also of other scriptural canons at the SR What does it mean to that they equal On the one hand, it cannot mean that they command no On the other hand, it cannot mean that they together command the authority of a As we have seen, SR does not the authority of a scriptural canon for its However, the focus is on its possible its authority cannot be against that of the other readings of verses from one canon cannot be to readings of verses from another nor as their This would only be possible with determinate meanings that one another (or are in an meanings do not but alongside one another in their they are not in the but and In the authority by the words of the different scriptural canons is not an authority that commitment, or as would determinate but the authority of more that In the of possible no (in the of the words of the different is in To read one’s own alongside the of other traditions and in the of members of those other traditions is potentially to the of one in the plain sense of one’s own such an does not have the normative of determinate it does potentially change the set of available for in specific SR, in other words, with a normativity of and which has implications for the traditional normativity of and In this the of the other traditions, while not being an authority on a with one’s own scriptures, are a in one’s normative engagement with one’s own What this to the members of other traditions and their I that the in the of the oneness of the world. The to which one belongs is the and but finite context within which one makes sense of the world. It alongside and in relation with other such finite within which the world is To to these other (and their domains of limited as of potential into the world is to that they on the same other words, that there is one world to which all are In the to the in new their is by the to to the new and one in the oneness of the It is this to which truth as Ochs of ‘the faithfulness that joins each SR reader to the plain sense of Scripture and that, we hope, joins each SR scholar to every to the plain sense is to the polyvalence in which its authority is the faithfulness of each SR scholar to every other I to their is the shape by to the one world in the SR I to an in the of the as Ochs them within the SR I will to this in the context of my reparative reading of On the one hand, the scriptural canon particular in the vagueness of its plain sense the conventional conditions under which that truth claims are valid. this the plain sense to the not in its own but as the for an series of in of new On the other hand, set alongside the of other traditions, the finitude of a particular scriptural canon to the this perspective a traditional must that claims are limited not only as finite of the plain sense of scriptures, but more as conditioned by an of the authority of these than In other words, vague scriptures, there are truth claims, in quite different that cannot be by them. To up where we have SR a normativity of and in order to into focus a normativity of and be sure, the latter is already at within individual traditions, but it is there to the and are the language of more to specific domains. it one to move more between domains (in it a with specific to a might precisely entail under which conditions (in what it could be In this SR is first and a in the ‘how’ of rather than instruction in the ‘what’. SR participants are to about the limited domains of their truth In with others who receive these claims in different they are to from the of their claims those others to a into whose domains are not They are to the polyvalence of their scriptures, whose authority in the to and as the up may to an in traditional a ‘how’ may to a ‘what’. But it As in Religion Without Violence, a emphasis in Another Reformation is on the polyvalence or vagueness of the This together with the that a particular is only one of many possible offered within and for a finite context, and thus of the potential of other for other finite Such an is in the context of Jews and offer alternative of that are first of of is the scriptural of it the attention from the theological value of the in its many of One is that it no for other of that who its meaning A nonsupersessionist Christian by the as of to the plain sense of Israel’s and every what it means in the light of the of Jesus In doing so, it both the vagueness of the and the context-bound character of its own But by the same token, it the fact that there may be in which a does not make sense or would not be In domains terms by Another Reformation a nonsupersessionist Christian the limited validity of as claims made in Christian-specific domain which the shares with Jews are the of By the same token, the validity of as claims made in domains which the is not in the validity of Jewish as claims made within domains. The Christian is then beyond to and indeed the potential rationality and integrity of Jewish as it under the of domains. However, this ‘limiting’ tendency of Another to which nonsupersessionism is as an acknowledgment of the validity of Jewish claims Christian-specific and thus the potential rationality and integrity of Jewish beyond the of Christian by a second ‘accommodationist’ tendency, according to which nonsupersessionism is as the accommodation of Jews within the Christian by way of an emphasis on the A example of this tendency is the following (in which Ochs is the of the the Christian reader also the place of Israel in This means that the place of Israel is not fully the Christian reader must that is the of no reader knows the of reading there is to about the
DOI: 10.1111/moth.12679
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,500
OpenAlex ID: W3128425499
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