Language and Experience in the Hermeneutics of Religious Understanding

The category of ‘experience’ forms an important and influential component in the hermeneutical framework of much contemporary religious education. Reflecting an experiential‐expressive model of religion, such an approach seeks to enable the child to transcend the external expressions of religion and achieve an understanding of its experiential core. This framework is inadequate in terms of an emergent post‐liberal view of the nature of selfhood, language, religion and the process of understanding. The possibility of an alternative framework, aiming at linguistic competency rather than experiential capacity, is proposed.