Here’s a sneak peek at a book review I wrote for a future issue of Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture. The summer 06 issue is just out. Hassle your library to subscribe!
This book, Sigurd Bergmann’s Creation Set Free, is interesting, but I can only recommend it in the qualified ways I describe in the review. I got to hear Bergmann speak at the American Academy of Religion meeting last year, and watched him in conversation with some American theologians. Bergmann is proud to be in the first wave of “ecotheologians of liberation” (which he swears with a straight face is not just a trendy title). But when a more excitable, more reckless American theologian took his book’s ideas in strange new directions (”GOD IS A BIRD! WORSHIP THE AVIAN DIVINITY!), Bergmann back-pedaled hard. Partly to distance himself from the BIRD GOD guy, Bergmann emphasized the fact that it’s been ten years since the first edition of Creation Set Free, and he’s moved to new conversations in fields like “aesth/ethics” (which he swears with a straight face is not just a trendy title).
Creation Set Free is a pretty hard read, partly because the material is difficult, but partly because the author’s style makes undue demands on the reader. For all that, I’m glad I read it and will be keeping an eye on Bergmann’s future work.
Sigurd Bergmann, Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature (Eerdmans, 2005).
Sigurd Bergmann is a theologian who teaches at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Creation Set Free, a volume in Eerdman’s Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age series, is Bergmann’s first major publication in English. It will seem to most of the Anglophone theological world that a new voice has just made itself heard in Christian doctrine, but Bergmann has in fact already authored a number of other books and essays, and it has been a full ten years since the publication of the original German edition on which this revised English translation is based.
The cosmos is enslaved by its alienation from God’s life of triune communion, and it is the work of the Holy Spirit to bring the world out of that enslavement and into relationship. That is probably the central idea of the book. I say “probably” because Creation Set Free is really not about a central idea, and readers who look here for something so straightforward will inevitably be frustrated a few dozen pages into this wide-ranging (nearly 400 pages) book. The book is about connections, conversations, and whole constellations of ideas interacting with each other in dynamic complexes. The actual proposals emerge only as Bergmann moves around among the many influences and projects which are simultaneously at work in this book.