Sigurd Bergmann

Theology in built environments : exploring religion, architecture, and design

Built space is both a physical entity as well as a socially and historically constructed place. It constantly interacts with human beings, affecting their behavior, thinking and feeling. Doing religious work in a particular environment implies acknowledging the surroundings to be integral to theology itself. The contributors to this volume view buildings, scriptures, conversations, prayers, preachings, artifacts, music and drama, and built and natural surroundings as contributors to a contextual theology The view of the environment in which religion is practiced as integrated with theology represents not just a new theme but also a necessity if one is to understand religions own depth. Reflections about space and place, and how they reflect and affect religious experience provide a challenge and an urgent necessity for theology. This is particularly important if religious practitioners are to become aware of how theology is given expression in the existential spatiality of life. Can space set theology free? This is a challenging question, one that the editor hopes can be answered, at least in part, in this volume. The diversity of theoretical concepts in aesthetics, cultural theory and architecture are not regarded as a problem to be solved by constructing one overarching dominant theory. Instead, this diversity is viewed in terms of its positive potential to inspire discourse about theology and aesthetics. In this discourse, theology does not need to become fully dependent on one or another theory, but should always clearly present its criteria for choosing this or that theoretical framework. This volume shows clearly how different modes of design in sacred spaces capture a sense of the religious.

Places of Encounter with the Eschata: Accelerating the Spatial Turn in Eschatology

Questions of eschatology have become more and more relevant in times of increasing threats to survival, in science as well as in popular culture, in world politics as well as in religions.

The legacy of Trinitarian cosmology in the Anthropocene

If our perception and concept of nature changes, also our image of God and our beliefs will change. Since the 1970s theology and religious studies have established a dynamic field of studies of religion and the environment, and a mobilisation of ecotheology has taken place in academic and pastoral theology as well as in the ecumenical movement. Ongoing discourses on climatic change and the Anthropocene are catalysing this development further. This article explores how the interpretation of late antiquity Cappadocian theology in this context can produce constructive insights for a contemporary reconstruction of late modern belief in the Creator and the tension of creation and salvation.

Making Oneself at Home in Climate Change: Religion as a Skill of Creative Adaptation

Religions offer substantial cultural skills for the “making-oneself-at-home” of humans as humans locate believers in a world and at places inhabited by the Divine. Landscapes in Aboriginal Australia are shaped by spiritual powers in the dreamtime. Cities in Mayan Yucatan are placed on the edge of subterranean water streams and the stars, both dwelling places for ancestors and gods. Even if Jesus moved around in a quite homeless way and Christian faith transformed the code of a split between profane and holy places by deifying the whole creation, Christian churches also have shaped a specific sacred geography. Current technically and economically driven mobilities seem to catalyze an increasing homelessness in the ongoing globalization, which challenges and changes religious modes of making-oneself-at-home. The mobilization of traditional indigenous spirituality and the emergence of the “global Sacred” can be analyzed in such a horizon. I focus on the ongoing and dangerous climatic change process that accelerates homelessness and causes increasing waves of forced migration and challenges the spiritual skills of making-oneself-at-home. Such change creates a painful theological dilemma: how can one feel oneself at home in a good creation when this is destroyed by humans themselves, which are believed to be images of God the Creator? On a contextual level populations need to experiment with new modes of adaptation to a changing environment with increasing turbulences and disasters. Such adaptation impacts the physical and sociocultural and spiritual dimensions of life. Climate change also changes religion; how can religion contribute to creative climate adaptation? Religious skills are illuminated with short examples from the Kilimanjaro region, Siberia and Indonesia. Concluding remarks about the spatiality and mobility of religion and topics understudied complete the exploration.

Fetishism Revisited: In the Animistic Lens of Eco-pneumatology*

Abstract In the context of ecological destruction and the emergence of numerous eco-spiritualities the challenge for Christian theology is to address the question: Where does the Spirit, who liberates nature, take place today? This is addressed in three sections: In a first section pneumatology is revisioned as ecological soteriology while the Spirit is portrayed as a giver and liberator of life. In a second section it is suggested that the doctrine of the Spirit may be reinterpreted in the context of the spatial turn of theology in terms of faith in the Spirit’s inhabitation. The third and concluding section offers an argument for an ecological pneumatology in synergy with animism, an approach which investigates the critical potentials of resisting and overcoming the fetishism of late modern capitalism.

Trinitarian Cosmology in God’s Liberating Movement: Exploring some Signature Tunes in the Opera of Ecologic Salvation

Reflections about liberation are embedded in contexts of suffering, both among human and other creatures. Opposite to the cynical postmodern who regards and dismantles every postulate about liberation as an ideological attempt to rule over others, salvation matters because there are those who are in the need of it. The essay presents, to begin with, two conceptual tools—the three-step-scheme of soteriology, and Gustaf Aulen’s view of salvation as a drama. These flow into an exploration of the classical Eastern Trinitarian view of creation’s liberation and a discussion about what this means for a contemporary ecumenical approach to an ecological theology of liberation in late modernity. Trinitarian soteriology understands the space of creation within time from the perspective of a movement from the old to the new creation. The drama of salvation takes place as a transfigurating drama of space and place and also of and within time. An ecologic re-reading of Gregory of Nazianz helps us to understand the liberation of creation such that nature, instead of moving from itself toward God, moves together with God in the Spirit toward its consummation in time. In Trinitarian terms: the triune God— Spirit, Son, and Father—moves in qualitatively different but integrated and complementary ways in, through , and with creation. An ecological pneumatology of liberation thus focuses on God’s movement within creation as expressed in the formula In the Spirit through the Son to the Father at the place where creatures are set free . Through the lens of soteriology the synergy of God and his/her creation appears as a plastic process in space and time, which involves space and time in itself as a subject of the Spirit’s versatile synergy in order to set Creation free.