Forgiveness, promise and the call to remember.

Abstract
The first aim of this chapter is to investigate the use of biblical figures and narratives in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricoeur and consider didactic potentials of their phenomenological approach to old narratives. A second aim is to unfold how Arendt and Ricoeur picture the interplay between tradition, memory, and religion and compare their views to the sociological analysis of religion as a chain of memory by Danielle Hervieu-Léger (/2006). Her image of religion as a broken and reinvented chain indicates that something has been lost, and her interpretation of the consequences of the broken chain differs from both Arendt and Ricoeur. While Ricoeur characterises the narrative identity of an individual or a people as chains of re-figurations, Arendt interprets the fragmented past through the image a sea bottom rich with pearls and corals. These three different images are considered in relation to current challenges for Religious Education through the pedagogical philosophy of Dietrich Benner (2005) and Gert Biesta (2021). The conclusion is that the phenomenological and hermeneutic approach to biblical figures and narratives found in the works of Arendt and Ricoeur can stimulate didactic development, especially through a conceptual focus and in connection to existential issues. The discussion of old narratives in new contexts is placed in a framework of a shared European/ Western tradition and in consideration of possible impact on religious in multicultural classrooms in a Nordic context.