Justice-Learning in Christian Religious Instruction: On the Analytical Power of Postcolonial Critique in a Religious Educational Perspective

This article examines the question of under what conditions justice-learning in German-language Christian religious education (CRE), and thus in religious instruction (CRI)—both as content and as form—can live up to its normative self-image as a language school of freedom. The thesis pursued here is that this requires a self-enlightened approach to justice that critically receives the analytical power of postcolonial theories, but resists their epistemological relativism and remains anchored in the biblical heritage of God’s universal and at the same time preferential justice. After exploring the philosophical and theological heritage of reflections on justice and the resulting aporias in the theory and practice of CRE, postcolonial theories are examined in terms of their potential and their own theoretical limitations. This makes it possible to outline orientations for a self-enlightened, difference-sensitive, and at the same time universally-oriented reflection on justice that productively integrates postcolonial insights without abandoning the constitutive subject-orientation of CRE.