Wrestling with Scripture and Avoiding Violence in the University Classroom

This chapter challenges faced in classroom: students who approach scripture with a limited hermeneutics that leads them to engage in what could be considered a form of conversational and relational violence against people who read and interpret scriptures in other ways. As someone educating both Christian and Muslim theologians as well as academic scholars of religion, the question that occupies in mind is how to counter such closed-off approaches. The chapter seeks to avert it with a differential and dialogical hermeneutics that does justice to both the poly-valence of scripture and the multiplicity of readers. Furthermore, neither approach seems to reckon with how meaning results from the dynamic interaction between text and reader. Students who have these stances tend to think that the “meaning” of a text should not depend in any way on who is reading. For closed-off religious readers, understanding a text means only one thing: “reading it literally.”.