ABSTRACT
In a number of his writings, John Hull (e.g., Hull 1989, 1991a, b, 1998) has striven to make religious education (RE) relevant to children’s and young people’s experience whilst at the same time preserving the integrity of religion. Seen from my perspective, what stands out in this regard is John Hull’s interest in the results of research in developmental psychology and their relevance for RE. This led to our collaboration and the publication of several articles in the British Journal of Religious Education (e.g., Reich 1989, 1994). However, our exchanges were no one-way street. John Hull (1999) opened at least one door for me: how children learn ‘spontaneously’ about money and its value, going through various knowledge and competence stages between the ages, say, of three and eleven years. The first message resulting from this for RE is to have confidence in children’s ‘self-learning’ capacity and to build on it. The second message is more subtle: a parallelism between the development just indicated and the stages of Religious Judgement (RJ) according to Fritz Oser and Paul Gmünder (1991; Oser and Reich 1996), in particular regarding RJ stage 2, the ‘bargaining’ [with God] stage as Hull calls it.
