Reading through the chapters in this volume with a view to responding to it and looking to the future, I have been immediately struck by two things.

The first is the debt of gratitude owed to Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, for opening up the question of shariʽa in Britain in the way he did. It was courageous to face the issue so squarely in his 2008 lecture; in the media storm that followed, the basis for which is so helpfully described by Robin Griffith-Jones, even greater courage was required to hold his ground and respond so patiently and thoroughly to many critics. In retrospect, it seems the sort of statesmanlike contribution to public debate that few others could have made and that exemplifies a healthy way of addressing issues surrounding religion in the life of the nation. It is not that his way of handling the question of shariʽa in Britain can now, after the misrepresentations have been identified, be seen as uncontroversial; rather, he has placed the question firmly on the table in a way that, if one returns to his original lecture, helps to ensure that it can be debated with appropriate categories and concepts, and without the sorts of misunderstandings (not least about the nature of shariʽa ) that are widespread (even in pronouncements of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)). Not least among the benefits of his lecture has been the impetus for drawing together the distinguished contributors to this volume, producing an expert, multi-faceted approach to the topic that should make it required reading far beyond Britain.

In 1979 Paul Ricoeur published a short article, “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God.” Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, repeats four times the phrase “how much more” (5:9, 10, 15, 17), and Ricoeur takes Paul's rhetoric to indicate the “divine logic” of Jesus. This is a logic not of equality and equivalence but of the excess and superabundance “that one hears in the voices of the prophets, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, and in the Psalms” and also in the teaching of Jesus – as in Matthew 5:39b–42 on turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, and never refusing to lend, or in the extravagance of a parable about the Kingdom of God or the hyperbole of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Ricoeur goes on to argue that “Paul says the same thing as Jesus but at another level of language” but adds something new:

Christian theology requires an engagement with scripture whose primary desire is for the wisdom of God in life now. Interpretation with that desire is what is called here a wisdom interpretation of scripture. It tries to do justice to the various dimensions and senses of scripture; to the disciplines and methods through which it has been studied; to the interpretative traditions and communities engaged with it in the past and the present (Christian, cultural and artistic, political, scholarly, inter-faith, critical/polemical, and so on); to the virtues and practices that help wise interpretation; and to the interplay between conversations around the text and other conversations – for example, around God, worship, community formation, historical events and developments, ethical issues, service to society, spiritual and academic disciplines, religious and secular worldviews, or the shaping and healing of lives.

Any one of those topics could be the subject of more than one book. This chapter is an attempt to do just two things: to sketch in broad strokes what a wisdom interpretation of scripture is, using exegeses of biblical passages and analyses of exemplary wisdom interpreters, and distilling the maxims that guide such interpretation; and, in addition, to explain and support the ways in which scripture enters into the other chapters of this book.

The desirability of this task can be seen from various angles. Within Christian theology, biblical interpretation has always been of vital importance.

Wisdom has on the whole not had an easy time in recent centuries in the West. It has often been associated with old people, the premodern, tradition and conservative caution in a culture of youth, modernisation, innovation and risky exploration. Yet it may be making a comeback. It may be just the heightened alertness that has come from a decade or so spent writing this book, but it has been striking how many references to wisdom I have come upon.

This has been especially evident in areas where knowledge and know-how come up against questions of ethics, values, beauty, the shaping and flourishing of the whole person, the common good, and long-term perspectives. Wisdom is now regularly mentioned in discussions of poverty, the environment, economics, governance, management, leadership, political priorities and policies, education at all levels, family life, the health of our culture, the desire for physical, emotional and mental health, and the resurgence of religion and ‘the spiritual’. In most premodern cultures wisdom or its analogues had immense, pervasive and comprehensive importance. It was taken for granted as the crown of education, and as what is most to be desired in a parent, a leader, a counsellor, a teacher. The critiques and crises that all such traditional figures and wisdoms have undergone in recent centuries have not, however, been able to dispense with the elements that went into them at their best.

It is still necessary to try to combine knowledge, understanding, good judgement and far-sighted decision-making.

Job cries out from the depths of the worst imaginable, the fulfilment of what he has dreaded most. He sits covered with ‘loathsome sores … from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head’ (2:7). He is bereaved of all his children; he has been deprived of all his possessions; he has lost all his social standing and dignity, and is an outcast despised and jeered at even by those who are themselves despised; his friends ‘comfort’ him in ways that rub salt into his wounds; his wife urges him: ‘Curse God, and die’ (2:9); he cannot find any meaning in his life or suffering; and he is convinced that God has turned against him and is an enemy responsible for all that has happened to him.

The wisdom of the book of Job, even in those few parts of it discussed in the previous chapter, is difficult to summarise. This is inherent in its intensive particularity, focussed through one ‘experiment’ on one person, combined with its plurality of voices in dialogue and multiple moods of discourse. Above all it is the cries that cannot be summarised, synthesised or done justice to in prose. The cries ring out again and again, and the poetry imprints them in the heart and memory.

Jean Amery in At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities gives a piercingly graphic and thoughtful account of being tortured. ‘Whoever was tortured stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected.’ Amery reflects on the unknown victims and those who are undergoing torture at this minute: ‘From other places the screams penetrated as little into the world as did my own strange and uncanny howls from the vault of Breedonk … Someone, somewhere is crying out under torture. Perhaps in this hour, in this second.’ On 17 October 1978, Jean Amery committed suicide. This was no Joban ending; and his writings and his death insist that, whatever the joys and blessings, the cries of Job continue to be heard, and the analogous cries today continue to be listened for.

Learning to live in the Spirit is the encompassing activity of Christian discipleship after Pentecost.

The first five chapters have so far offered an understanding of Christian wisdom largely through scriptural interpretation. The conception of this wisdom has been as the discernment of cries in the midst of a historical existence summoned towards God's future. Because of that summons, desire for God and God's purposes is wisdom's embracing ‘mood’. Indicatives, imperatives, interrogatives and subjunctives are variously in play both in the texts and in their interpretations, but, in responding to the cries of God and of the world, faith's core mood is optative – and first in the passive voice: we are desired by God. This wisdom's main practice is constantly renewed engagement with scripture as summarised in the nine theses and ten maxims at the end of chapter 2. The rereading of scripture in the Spirit as described there connects with a range of engagements that are in principle unlimited – with other people, spheres of life, disciplines, arts, cultures, religions and so on. The succeeding chapters have attempted to give samples of that wisdom interpretation of scripture, mainly through the books of Job, Luke, Acts and 1 Corinthians. There has been no attempt to be exhaustive, the main aim being to exemplify an approach that not only requires further working out through the other books of the Bible and their intertextuality but also requires constant rereading of Job, Luke, Acts and 1 Corinthians.

The twentieth century saw the greatest expansion of higher education in history. Universities multiplied and expanded around the world. This has accompanied an explosion of knowledge and a multiplication of disciplines and subdisciplines. Academics are part of a global network of teachers, scholars and researchers, linked through books, journals, electronic communications and a great deal of face to face interaction in visits and conferences. University students were estimated to have passed the 100 million mark in 2003, and 2 million of them were studying outside their home country. Universities during the past century have become more involved in the economy, in government, in many areas of civil society and in most professions, and they now educate large numbers of those who are in leadership and other key positions in most societies in the world. As common phrases like ‘information society’, ‘learning culture’ and ‘knowledge economy’ suggest, the role of institutions of higher education, being centrally concerned with information, learning and knowledge, is of increasing importance.

The increases in institutions, disciplines, academics, students and influence have gone along with massive transformations in universities. There are now many types of university, and, even among those with long histories that have sustained some continuity with their past, those that have flourished have also undergone and continue to undergo huge changes. At the same time, there has been considerable differentiation, and universities by no means have a monopoly of the expanded fields of teaching at higher levels or conducting research.

Love, the love of God inextricable from the love of people, is the summit of Jean Vanier's wisdom, shaped especially by scripture and L'Arche. This summit is the most appropriate place to conclude a book on Christian wisdom. It offers both a vantage point from which to look back on the previous chapters and also a site for the culminating scriptural meditation on the Song of Songs.

The descriptions applied to the theology of this book in the introduction included ‘scriptural-expressivist’; postcritical (drawing on the premodern, modern and late modern); a theology of desire and discernment; and a theology of learning in the Spirit.

If Christian theology can fruitfully be seen as seeking wisdom, what about its relationship to other faiths? This chapter addresses that question through a case study of the practice of scriptural reasoning, understood as a wisdom-seeking engagement with Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures. Its origins, practices, understandings and social settings are described and discussed, with some concluding remarks on its possible contribution to the public sphere in the twenty-first century. The Bible has been the main resource for Christian wisdom through the previous seven chapters, where it has also been related to traditions of Christian worship, scholarship and theology, with some attention to Judaism. The thrust of those chapters makes further engagement with Judaism and with other faiths not only unavoidable but desirable and even urgent. In particular it follows from the eighth thesis for the interpretation of scripture, Christians need to read the Bible in dialogue with diverse others outside the church, and by its accompanying maxim and appeal: Let conversations around scripture be open to all people, religions, cultures, arts, disciplines, media and spheres of life. Let us read for the sake of friendship with all! (see p. 87 above).

Core identities in conversation

There are many convergent reasons why it is sensible for inter-faith engagement among Jews, Christians and Muslims to make their scriptures a primary focus. Each tradition's scripture is at the heart of its identity. This is so in rather different ways, but recognising those differences can be a source of illumination to each.