On the grammar of religious discourse and education

Abstract

If it is generally true that skewed educational policies and practices often follow from more fundamental epistemic or semantic misconstruals of the logical character of particular forms of human enquiry, this would seem to be especially true of religious education. This paper sets out to identify and expose some of the dubious philosophical assumptions underlying latter day conceptions of religious discourse and education — as apparent, for example, in tensions between literalist and expressivist readings of religious discourse and confessional and non-confessional approaches to religious education. In short, whilst this paper rejects literalist interpretations of religious discourse (and any consequent religious fundamentalism) in favour of a non-literalist conception of religious narratives as epistemically continuous with forms of imaginative human art and literature, it also rejects idealist, social constructivist and relativist interpretations of story in favour of a realist account of religious and other serious cultural literature as truth-focused forms of objective human enquiry, knowledge and understanding. On this view, although the language of religious narrative is no less metaphorical, analogical and/or figurative than that of great poetry, it is — no less than great poetry — concerned to disclose quite objective aspects or dimensions of spiritual, moral and metaphysical reality. The paper concludes with some observations on contemporary challenges of religious education.