Editorial

The intention of this special issue on hermeneutics in religious education (RE) is to pose a question that there is, and always has been, a hermeneutical realisation at the heart of RE waiting to be fully appreciated. Interpretation has long been a central focal point of discussion, and prominently so as a pedagogic tool. As Robert Jackson once wrote,

‘[A] fundamental aim for RE is to develop an understanding of the grammar – the language and wider symbolic patters – of religions and the interpretative skills necessary to gain that understanding’ (Robert Jackson 1997, p.133).

However, mention the word hermeneutics in education circles and a furrowed brow might be the result, and perhaps an honest question about what the word meant. It has been a matter of concern in RE for many years (Andrew Wright, 1997) and remains an area of discussion today. This is part of the motivation for this issue.

Hermeneutics might be construed purely as a polarity point, on a pedagogical plain between essentialist and interpretative approaches to RE, but this fails to see the essential integrative nature of hermeneutics as curriculum, subject, object and pedagogy framing. Religions provide their adherents ways of discerning, as well as multiple dimensions of things to be discerned, before the question of how to teach these things arises. To only teach children what people believe is to skip ahead of the way of living that creates an avenue of understanding to those beliefs. To only teach children what adherents do is to miss the motivation of how those actions provide a search for or towards illumination, or indeed about the illuminating power of the ways adherents act and live.

This issue does not simply contain articles about a way of teaching, but a particular suggestion about the object of study and a different way of understanding what it is to study that object. At the heart of a hermeneutical realisation in RE is the multilayered discovery:

• 1. that all learners are, inevitably, hermeneuts as they are inextricably connected in their own journeys, with their own experiences, working assumptions or commitments;

• 2. that religious traditions offer practices in discernment and are not simply deposits of that which has been found or that which is professed, and these practices of discernment are an essential element of study in the curriculum;

• 3. that teachers and educationalists are, inevitably, hermeneuts in how they represent or even more fundamentally, frame religion and belief, for example as either concepts and cognitive propositions held up by fragments from sacred texts for deployment to win some argument, or as liturgies of life that facilitate a life of search and following.

The hermeneutical realisation might be expressed as the (re)discovery that the subject of RE is the search, how people have searched and search today, and why they do so in the manner of ways that may be encountered. The ‘learner-as-hermeneut’ is central in this process, for, as they study how others search they themselves may consider whether they may find value in living a life of search and the critical issues such a search may present.

The extent of the agency in the process of hermeneutics remains an open question given that learners are interpreting interpretations afforded by teachers, who filter learning resources and lead teaching programmes that are both also, themselves interpretations. This is one reason why representation and framing become such acute matters for RE.

Whether consciously so or not, the human mind is the place where hermeneutics takes place. Didier Pollefeyt in the paper, The Lustre of Life, identifies the nature of the human being as a ‘fragile hermeneutical space’, a radical openness to reality, an essential indeterminateness, and an ability to transcend his or her own reality. He posits that human beings have an inbuilt receptiveness to meaning which he calls, the ‘lustre’ of life:

we discover and we ascribe meaning and we are also capable of recognizing and acknowledging others as people in search of meaning, longing for meaning and absorbers of meaning. One of the tasks of religious education is to allow children and young people to discover this hermeneutical space within themselves and others: to discover the highs and lows of life, beauty and comfort, pain and suffering, mystery and the incomprehensible, the forgiving nature and hard edge of reality, but also: our frail, vulnerable and excluded fellow human beings, the fragility of nature. (Pollefeyt 2013)

Hermeneutics illuminates the relationship between teaching and learning, pedagogy, curriculum and the aims of education in RE. The papers collected in this issue contribute significant insights into this milieu and offer revitalising insights for the subject of RE in whatever context it is found.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert A Bowie

Robert A Bowie (PhD) is Director of the National Institute of Christian Education Research. The centre, a part of Canterbury Christ Church University, investigates Christian schooling and Christian universities, religious education and spiritual and faith development. Dr Bowie was Chair of the Association of University Lecturers in Religion and Education (AULRE) until 2018 and is a board member of the International Seminar on Religion Education and Values (ISREV). He has undertaken research in religious and human rights education, teaching texts in RE classrooms, British values, tolerance of religions and morality in values education policy