Systematic Theology

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My work is rooted in systematic theology. I am interested in the internal relationships among Christian doctrines and in how those doctrines can be developed through sustained encounters with philosophy, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and contemporary accounts of human existence.

Much of this research takes modern German theology as its point of departure, particularly Eberhard Jüngel, alongside figures including Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Christoph Schwöbel. But my interest in these theologians is ultimately constructive rather than primarily historical. I turn to them because of the possibilities they create for thinking again about revelation, God, creation, anthropology, Christology, and eschatology.

A recurring problem throughout my work concerns the relationship between God and the world.

Christian theology claims both that God is radically distinct from creation and that God genuinely makes himself present within it. Revelation consequently raises questions about presence and absence, transcendence and immanence, perception and concealment. My work asks how theology can maintain these tensions without resolving one side into the other.

These questions began in my research on Jüngel but increasingly belong to a broader constructive project. Slightly Disguised for the Journey: Perception, Art and the Aesthetics of Revelation develops the doctrine of revelation around the question of how God becomes perceptible within creaturely reality without becoming reducible to what is perceived.

A second trajectory concerns the doctrine of creation and theological anthropology.

What does it mean for human beings to be creatures while also possessing the capacity to act upon, interpret, and transform the world they inhabit? I am particularly interested in human agency and exocentricity: our capacity to gain distance from what is immediately given, imagine possibilities that do not yet exist, and intentionally bring some of those possibilities into being.

This question reaches from theological anthropology into creation, ecology, technology, art, and architecture. Exocentric Architecture develops one part of this larger project by asking what the human act of building reveals about creatureliness, freedom, and responsibility.

Underlying these projects is an interest in what it means to do systematic theology.

Doctrine is inherited, but systematic theology cannot consist simply in repeating inherited formulations. It continually asks how the claims of Christian faith belong together, what follows from them, and what happens when they encounter questions their original formulations did not anticipate.

For that reason, my work moves deliberately across disciplinary boundaries. Philosophy, architecture, painting, music, literature, and material culture are not alternatives to systematic theology. They provide encounters through which systematic theology can test its concepts, discover overlooked problems, and construct new possibilities from within the Christian theological tradition.

The aim is not to make theology more culturally relevant by attaching it to contemporary subjects. It is to ask whether those encounters might help theology think more adequately about its own subject matter.