공생을 위한 학교종교교육의 패러다임 연구 : 공생의 눈으로 종교적 이야기 다시 읽기

Abstract

Due to the fact that it has not been long since the viewpoint of human rights has been introduced into socio-political issues in the Republic of Korea, the application of the concept of human rights into religious studies or religious education has not been much fruitful or successful. One of the reasons is that our concern on human rights has arose recently, and the other reason is due to the modern separation of the sacred and the secular, in which it is not comfortable for religious people that the secular notion of human rights becomes a criterion to evaluate religious, especially Christian, communities governed by God only. Also, there is another side of this situation. Christianity has its own pride in God-given rights, which has been developed into the modern concept of universal human rights. Indeed, Christianity has played the key role of a pioneer in improving human rights in human civilizations. Ironically, Christian communities, especially Protestant churches, today are regarded as the most aggressive groups against human rights and humanistic values. On the one hand, religion can justify our obsessive drive of survival when selfish instinct of survival and reproduction takes priority over the idea of living together in a society, in which the ideas of the survival for the fittest, infinite competition, and winner-take-all effect prevail. On the other hand, religion can be an only hope for alternative living of symbiosis, a way of living well with others, to a form of life driven by selfish genes. Our world today has wrestled with a problem of living together with humans, the nonhuman, and also machines as well as those of climate change and ecological crisis. At the center of these problems lies the ignorance of human rights in religious education or Christian education. Just as religious education has been reluctant to deal with human rights in its own area due to the modern division of the sacred and the secular, it also hesitates to deal with the global issues in the coming age. One needs to be remind that religion, especially Christianity, is the one that gave birth to the concept of human rights and thus that the latter is not anti-religious or anti-Christian. In this context, there is an urgent need to consider religious education in the eyes of human rights and vice versa. In this context, this paper examines how the issues of human rights and ecological crisis have been dealt with in the school curriculum of religious education. Based upon the diagnosis of the problematics in religious education with regards to the issues, this paper will propose a need for a new paradigm of religious education, in which one can nurture our empathetic capacity for human rights, which enables us to take social responsibility and to live well with others including the nonhumans and extending over machines. Human life, as a matter of fact, is always already a form of living and entangled with others, and human rights does not only mean individual rights to live but also social responsibility to build up the foundation of co-life. Rereading in the eyes of living-together the Christian stories of creation, wealth and labour that have been quoted as the theological justification for the survival for the fittest, the winner-take-all effect and the social feeling that no one backs you up, this paper will try to reinterpret the image of God, the trinitarian God, in which our relationship with God is extended over our relationship with neighbors and further over the nonhumans and machines. In this way, as this paper argues, one can nurture a symbiotic community in terms of religious education.