Part One: the hermeneutics of modern religious education

Hermeneutical reflection on the nature, process, and scope of understanding tends to flourish whenever standard procedures of interpretation begin to falter. The contemporary study of religion is a case in point: conflicting results reflect a lack of consensus regarding appropriate methods of investigation. As a result, hermeneutics enjoys an increasingly significant role in religious and theological exploration. The discipline of religious education, despite constant wrestling with the ambiguity of religion, has not followed suit: it possesses no developed and sustained tradition of hermeneutical deliberation. This attempt to open up hermeneutical debate within the field of religious education begins by identifying romanticism, post‐modernism and critical realism as three key perspectives within contemporary hermeneutical theory (Bleicher, 1982; Jeanrond, 1994; Mueller‐Vollmer, 1986; Palmer, 1969; Thiselton, 1980, 1992). This article offers an account of the hermeneutics implicit in religious education from 1960 to the present, arguing that the subject has—at considerable cost to its integrity—drawn uncritically on the traditions of romanticism and post‐modernism. A second article will propose a critical theory for religious education rooted in the hermeneutics of critical realism.