Jacques Ellul’s Christian Anarchism and the Radical Hermeneutics of John D. Caputo. Call for Heresy in the Pedagogy of Religion

Abstract

The article asks about the conditions and possibilities for moving beyond orthodoxy in traditional pedagogy of religion. These questions generate two separate strategies for hereticalizing, weakening (after Gianni Vattimo) the pedagogy of religion.

First: how to make the pedagogy of religion inclusive? How to creatively, “weaken” it? How, in view of the enormous complexity of religious traditions, significantly exceeding what is canonical, to reach within the sub-discipline to unorthodox, outright heretical concepts, and – which is worth emphasizing – not so much in order to study on their basis various historical aspects of a given religious tradition (which would be a kind of, “history of heresy”), but with the intention of incorporating these contents into permanent pedagogical work, profiled hermeneutically, existentially or personalistically, on principles analogous to the contents sanctioned by religious instances or tradition?

And secondly: how does the field of pedagogy of religion problematize and fundamentally redefine the category of religion in the way that critical religious studies has since at least the 1980s? Critical religious studies, in making such attempts, detaches the category of religion from purely theological entanglements. Rather, it focuses on the anthropologically captured categories of myth, ritual or religious experience. Such, “secularization” of religion results in a wide variety of theories of religion. It links it to such “non-religious” topics as cognitivism, ecologies, ideologies, sports or urban movements. This abundant theoretical potential is still unfortunately not adequately translated into the pedagogy of religion as a space for theoretical or empirical research. Both of the above-mentioned strategies of, “weak” pedagogy of religion trigger thinking about the subdiscipline in two dimensions: in the field of pedagogical-theological normativity – here, however, taking into account the shift from orthodoxy to heresy, as well as in the field of pedagogical-religious normativity, where there is interaction with many different paradigms and theories of religion.

The article briefly recalls selected themes in the thought of French Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul and American radical hermeneuticist John D. Caputo. With their help, the first of the indicated strategies is illustrated: the one by which the boundaries of traditional pedagogy of religion would be shifted INSIDE theology (not outside it, as could be the case with the second, pedagogical-religious reserve). In doing so, the significant pedagogical implications of attempting to abandon pedagogical instrumentalism in the pedagogy of religion will be pointed out.