226 Chapter 7 To practice the art of living together in a modern, fragmented society, subjectifying education is a necessary condition. It guides students in developing a self that does not turn away from society’s diversity and complexity, instead responding to the challenges that come with them. In Christian education, the shalom idea provides an inspiring guiding principle but, as was made clear in the preceding chapter, never comes without tension. This chapter pays specific attention to the tension between the previously mentioned elements of critical openness and critical faithfulness. The conversational community phrased the following question: If both are believed to be crucial, how should the experienced tension between the two be handled? More concretely, how should DCU students be trained to sustainably connect critical openness and critical faithfulness in super-diverse classrooms? The conversational community formulated this latter question as central to the second of three main topics it identified during its 14th meeting. It is the topic of epistemological formation—that is, of how students handle truth knowing and truth claims. This chapter presents the conversational community’s findings and conclusions regarding the question on epistemological formation. These can be qualified as an acceptance and, at the same time, an application of Beech’s (2021) plea for a relational epistemology (see Chapter 1.3.3) to DCU’s teacher training. The first part of the chapter spends some time clarifying the problem found by the conversational community during its interactions with DCU students—namely, conflicting allegiances when handling a diversity of perspectives on absolute truth (Section 1). As in the previous chapter, what follows is a part that listens carefully to each of the four theological voices as they were heard in the meetings of the conversational community (Section 2). As this part of the research also involves informing the teacher training curriculum, concrete elaborations for the curriculum renewal process are again discussed and modified (Section 3). The conclusions of the separate sections will be brought together in the description of what a relational epistemology for Christian teacher training nowadays should represent. 7.1 CONFLICTING ALLEGIANCES: BETWEEN FAITHFULNESS AND OPENNESS As the baseline survey results showed (Chapter 5.2), DCU students tend to come from what is known as the Dutch Bible belt. They could be identified as the youngest and freshest children of the famous Dutch system of pillarisation. Where the major pillars of Dutch society (protestant, catholic, socialist and
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