In the last chapter I explored how, in the work of three distinguished modern exponents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the interpretation of one monotheistic tradition can take place in the context of “dialogue” and “translation” between one or more different ones. At the end of the chapter we saw, in Forster’s imaginative vision, how the attempt at dialogue and translation between faiths can be both real and unreal—the touchstone of truth, or the index of inauthenticity—in a real historical environment: in this case the racially, culturally, and spiritually divided world of British India.

Forster shows us, among many other things, how dialogue and translation might happen, or fail to happen, in the interstices of a complex human world in which many forces other than the intention to make them happen are at play. That is because Forster is writing a work of realist imaginative fiction, not philosophical hermeneutics or a manifesto for a particular kind of cultural or intellectual practice. As Alasdair Macintyre shows, the narration of an imagined human life is analogous to the course of a real one because both are at once contingent and yet partially teleological.To be an embodied person is to be the same person throughout one’s life and yet constantly to be exposed to unpredictable influence and circumstance and so constantly and unpredictably to change. If the realist novelist’s narration is to be credible, he or she must do justice to this dual characteristic in their narrative. As Ben Quash shows, the movement known as Scriptural Reasoning must also reflect and embody this duality if it is to be a living dialogue and not just a second-hand report of one. But Scriptural Reasoning (even if it resists institutionalization and abjures any preconceived end) is also an activity that is intentionally initiated and directed. In this chapter I will examine in detail the practice of Scriptural Reasoning (hereafter referred to as SR) and argue that it is this apparent paradox that makes SR into a powerful medium of communication between faiths and links it to a Humboldtian understanding of dialogue and translation.