The National Society for Scriptural Reasoning dedicated to the study and interpretation of  the  sacred Scriptures of Abrahamite traditions. The purpose National Society for Scriptural Reasoning (NSSR)  is most aptly expressed by the paragraphs introducing a series in Postcritical Theology from Westview  Press: Radical Traditions: Theology in a  Postcritical Key. 

(1) Radical Traditions cuts new lines of inquiry  across a confused and confusing array of debates  concerning the place of theology in modernity  and, more generally, the status and role of  scriptural faith in contemporary life. Charged with  a rejuvenated confidence, spawned in part by the  rediscovery of reason as inescapably tradition  constituted, a new generation of theologians and  religious scholars is returning to scriptural  traditions with the hope of retrieving resources  long ignored, depreciated, and in many cases  ideologically suppressed by modern habits of  thought. Radical Traditions assembles a  promising matrix of strategies, disciplines, and  lines of thought that invites Jewish, Christian, and  Islamic theologians back to the word, recovering  and articulating modes of scriptural reasoning as  that which always underlies modernist reasoning  and therefore has the capacity--and authority--to  correct it. 

(2) Far from despairing over modernity's failings,  postcritical theologies rediscover resources for  renewal and self-correction within the disciplines  of academic study themselves. Postcritical  theologies open up the possibility of participating  once again in the living relations that binds  together God, text, and community of  interpretation. Radical Traditions thus advocates  a "return to the text," which means a commitment  to displaying the richness and wisdom of  traditions that are at once text based,  hermeneutical, and oriented to communal  practice. 

(3) Books in this series offer the opportunity to  speak openly with practitioners of other faiths or  even with those who profess no (or limited) faith,  both academics and nonacademics, about the  ways religious traditions address pivotal issues of  the day. Unfettered by foundationalist  preoccupations, these books represent a call for  new paradigms of reason--a thinking and  rationality that is more responsive that  originative. By embracing a postcritical posture,  they are able to speak unapologetically out of  scriptural traditions manifest in the practices of  believing communities (Jewish, Christian, and  others); articulate those practices through  disciplines of philosophic, textual, and cultural  criticism; and engage intellectual, social, and  political practices that for too long have been  insulated from theological evaluation. Radical  Traditions is radical not only in its confidence in  nonapologetic theological speech but also in how  the practice of such speech challenges the  current social and political arrangements of  modernity. ( used by permission, paragraph  numbering added )  

Another indication of the key ideas that have  shaped and continue to shape the development of  the NSSR is included in two paragraphs from  Peter Ochs' introduction to the first volume in the Radical Traditions Series:  Revelation Restored by David Weiss Halivni: 

(4)...the task of postcritical theologians is at once  to restore and to reform the foundational  discourses of the Abrahamite traditions--the  sacred Scriptures and the primordial  commentaries that gave them life in the founding  and receiving communities that serve the One  God. The projected goal of postcritical theology is  to retrieve, correct, and restore these  foundational discourses as first principles, not  only of our community-specific theologies, but  also of western academic inquiry. 

(5) As a restorative inquiry, postcritical theology  recognizes, to be sure that these discourses are  also self-reforming. As a reformatory inquiry,  however, postcritical theology also acknowledges  that the humanistic projects of the Renaissance  and Enlightenment were not mere errors. They  were stimulated by legitimate doubts about the  capacities of late medieval or scholastic practices  to meet the challenges of new industrial,  scientific, and political realities. The  uncompromising character of humanistic or  "Cartesian," doubt is in fact an index of the  scriptural traditions' own capacity for infinite  criticism: that searing negation that the wholly  infinite God of Israel, alone, engenders.  Renaissance and Enlightenment humanisms  failed only because they detached this negation  from its source and, thereby, from the traditions of  Scripture and commentary that should have  remained the ever-renewing and renewable  sources rather than the objects of humanistic  criticism. Postcritical theology restores the  Abrahamite resources of western humanism and  then undertakes its critical task of reforming both  academic and theological inquiries form out the  these resources. The postcritical return to  Scripture is, therefore, not triumphalistic, nor is it  antimodern or antiacademic; acknowledging the  failings of both medieval and modern practices of  Abrahamite religion, it reenlists the discourses of  the modern academy as instruments of the  perennial, scriptural reformation of religious as  well as academic inquiry. (Peter Ochs in David  Weiss Halivni, Revelation Restored: Divine Writ  and Critical Responses, (Boulder, Colorado,  Westview Press, 1997) ( used by permission,  paragraph numbering added)