Scripture

Scripture as a Relational Category

The relational approach to the study of scripture advocated by historians of religions provides a model that challenges in significant ways the dominant paradigms of scriptural study advocated by biblical studies scholars. The paradigms of biblical studies are “nonscriptural” in their respective approaches, in that they treat the biblical texts not as religious documents but rather as historical documents, in the case of historical criticism; or as literary creations, in the case of literary criticism; or as sociocultural products, in the case of socio-cultural criticism and ideological criticism. Such approaches, as Wilfred Cantwell Smith has emphasized, are primarily concerned with the biblical texts in their “prescriptural phase” or “postscriptural phase” and consequently give little emphasis to the functions of the Hebrew Bible or Christian Bible as scripture. The relational approach to the study of scripture, in contrast, focuses on the concept and functions of scripture as a religious category and a relational category and is concerned with the question of what it means for a text such as the Hebrew Bible to be regarded as scripture by a religious community. What does it mean for religious communities to “scripturalize”?

The study of scripture as a relational category focuses on a number of important issues, including issues of canonical authority, modes of oral and written transmission, reception histories of particular scriptures, and cultural modes of appropriation. The history with which this approach is concerned is not a history of origins (Entstehungsgeschichte) but rather a history of effects (Wirkungsgeschichte) understood as the tradition of interpretations and appropriations of a sacred text in the cumulative histories of the various communities that revere the text as scripture. In the study of scripture qua scripture, the primary concern is not to determine the sociohistorical conditions that produced a religious text but rather to excavate the multilayered and multivocal reception histories that the text itself has produced in the ongoing lives of religious communities in different historical periods, in different cultural contexts, and in different social locations. Such an approach is concerned with the ways in which a sacred text has been appropriated, engaged, experienced, embodied, and performed by the religious communities that cherish it as scripture, transforming it from a fixed, bounded text into a fluid, open-ended language world that finds expression in a variety of cultural forms—in ritual performances and liturgies; in sermons, orations, and exhortations; in songs, devotional hymns, and ritual recitations; in dance, drama, and film; in music, literature, and the visual arts; in educational initiatives and social reforms; in political movements and ideologies; and in various forms of popular culture.

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