Cite
Inge, John. A Christian Theology of Place. Reprinted. Explorations in Practical, Pastoral, and Empirical Theology. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007.
Jeremy
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Contribution::
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FirstAuthor:: Inge, John
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Title:: A Christian Theology of Place
Year:: 2007
Citekey:: ingeChristianTheologyPlace2007
itemType:: book
Publisher:: Ashgate
Location:: Aldershot, Hampshire
ISBN:: 978-0-7546-3499-7 978-0-7546-3498-0
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PDF.
Abstract
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Notes
Bibliogr. S.145 - 155
Annotations
Imported: 2025-06-25 4:09 pm
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I began to wonder whether this implied that God approves of some places more than others - a proposition I found rather offensive. However, if it was not the case, I had to work out what possible grounds there could be for calling any place holy. For it seemed to me that Ely Cathedral was indeed a holy place.
Pg.2
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Our existence as embodied beings means that place is as necessary to us as the air we breathe but, more than that, it seems to me that our human experience is shaped by place.
Pg.2
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This study confirms that place is a very important category in the Old Testament and that the narrative supports a three-way relationship between God, people and place in which all three are essential. Turning to the New Testament I suggest that, although there is no longer a concentration upon the Holy Land and Jerusalem, the incarnation affirms the importance of the particular, and therefore of place, in God’s dealings with humanity. Seen in an incarnational perspective, places are the seat of relations or the place of meeting between God and the world.
Pg.3
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Sacramental encounters have also an eschatological dimension, since they reveal the reality of things as they will be. This sacramental understanding allows us to steer a middle course between ignoring the importance of the material, and its idolatrous exaltation.
Pg.4
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We might not only agree with this proposition, but paraphrase it to say that the Christian religion is not the religion of salvationfrom places, it is the religion of salvation in and through places.
Pg.5
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Pilgrimage is journey to places where divine human encounter has taken place. It is journey to places where holiness has been apparent in the lives of Christian men and women who have been inspired by such an encounter and have responded to it wholeheartedly in their lives: it is travel to the dwelling places of the saints.
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about roots:
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journey.
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third ingredient of pilgrimage, an eschatological one, which is about destination and the consummation of all things in Christ.
Pg.5
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It might not be so easy as is sometimes suggested to pose a rigid line between the educative and spiritual functions of encounter with place sanctified by Christian history for, as Wilken puts it ‘seeing was more than seeing, it was a metaphor for participation.’11 Visiting ‘holy places’ has always had an impact on people much deeper than any reductionist rationalist explanation will allow.
Pg.6
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Land or place are not, then, as in Judaic dogma, inherently ‘holy’, but can be regarded so by virtue of what has happened in them. The holy aura they then possess is governed by the drama they served to stage or locate. Such, broadly, is the associationism that underlies Christian pilgrimage and its accompanying sense of the sacrament ofgeography. If the land is held holy it is by dint of divine dramas, not divine donation. The significance of a drama may be carried without essential loss across endless territories, none having exclusive prerogative even if one has the sole honour of incidence. Events, in that sense, will not engender a kind of idolatry to which places are vulnerable.15
Pg.7
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What pilgrims understand intuitively is what Kenneth Cragg articulates, that they are holy by association:
Pg.7
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It is difficult for us to overestimate the importance which relics, holy places, the cult of the saints and pilgrimage had in medieval Christianity. We might note, too, that this association of holy places with the cult of the saints mean that the approach to place in medieval pilgrimage was relational. As Peter Brown puts it, pilgrims were ‘not merely going to a place; they were going to a place to meet a person’.21
Pg.7
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There are many today who are suspicious of the notion of pilgrimage. Why is this? Some claim that it has been opposed by many from the earliest times. Gregory of Nyssa is often cited in this regard. After the experience of going to Jerusalem in the year 379, he argued that change from one place to another does not draw one any closer to God and that the altars of his native Cappadocia are no less holy than those in Jerusalem.
Pg.8
- Probably in principle this is correct, but sometimes it is helpful to get away from the familiar.
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Shrines were associated with the life and witness of holy men and women, but with their popularity and the inevitable incentive for financial gain which it presented, it is not surprising that there was abuse. The growth of the system of indulgences whereby a pious act such as a pilgrimage received a reward in the form of remission oftime in purgatory, was an aberration which helped spark the Reformation.
Pg.8
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Early criticism of pilgrimage is often simply protest against abuse
Pg.8
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In fact, comment on pilgrimage by the Church Fathers was generally encouraging, except for the fact that they sometimes saw the need to redress a balance and encourage people to see that it was possible to seek holiness away from holy sites as well as at them. Jerome, writing in the fourth century, was one ofthose most in favour ofpilgrimage but he wrote: ‘access to the court of heaven is as easy from Britain as it is from Jerusalem.’30
Pg.8
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on and with the lives of the holy. These, then, are places which attract pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is a very powerful model which links people, places, and God together in a way which has great potential because it is dynamic and yet it also roots people.
Pg.9
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a place which witnesses (like martyria) to the fact that God has acted in history in Christ and in those who have followed him faithfully in the past; that God is acting in the world in and through the lives of those who dedicate themselves to his will and whose witness is encouraged by sacramental encounters and the witness of holy places; and that God will act in history to consummate all places in Christ. It represents, in one place, all three aspects of the phenomenon of pilgrimage and the Christian commitment which it symbolizes.
Pg.10
- Shrines
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It should be said that pilgrimage is universal in its appeal to humanity, and that our designation of a pilgrimage site as one with which the manifestation of the divine to human beings is associated is by no means confined to Christian sites.
Pg.10
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Shrines root people in their sacred past and the history of the Christian community of which they are a part. Shrines are ‘permanent antennae of the Good news linked to decisive events ofevangelisation or of the life offaith ofpeoples and ofcommunities.
Pg.11
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The Vatican document The Shrine suggests that, as a place of memorial of the powerful action of God in history, the shrine is, in biblical tradition, not simply ‘the fruit of human work, filled with cosmological or anthropological symbolism, but gives witness to God’s initiative in communicating himself to human persons to stipulate with them the pact of salvation. The significant meaning of every shrine is to be a reminder in the faith of the salvific work of the Lord.’47
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As an effective sign, the shrine rekindles Christian hope. The stories told in it and about it speak ofthe God who has made himself known to us in Christ and who comes to us still in the midst of our materiality.
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The shrine is, of course, a place of Eucharistic celebration and therefore a place of repeated sacramental encounter which can be deemed holy as a result of that encounter.
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The Eucharist is bound to place and, by its very particularity, can be a potent prophetic symbol
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the shrine should be: ‘a protest against every worldly presumption, against every political dictatorship, against every ideology that wishes to say everything regarding the human being, because the shrine reminds us that there is another dimension, that of the kingdom of God that must come fully. In the shrine, the Magnificat resounds constantly.’61
Pg.13
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The shrine can, with the help of the narrative of the Eucharist celebrated within it, be a powerful aid to generating and sustaining Christian virtue over and against secular pressures. In this way the shrine should witness not only against the dehumanizing ignoring of place (represented by globalization) which has characterized modernity but also against all dehumanizing aspects of a broken world.
Pg.14
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the pilgrimage shrine speaks to the past, the present and the future and in so doing roots the Christian community associated with it in the Divine scheme of things as revealed in Christ.
Pg.16
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By reducing most of its churches to either ‘local congregation’ or ‘school of religion’ the Church has not done itself or the Christian faith a service. Would not the potential of all church buildings be increased if we were to think of them as shrines? They should be there not just to act as a centre for the worshipping community, but as a sign to them and to all people that God is not to be forgotten.
Pg.16
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If we are to avoid churches becoming museums, they must be allowed to live and
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It has been suggested that all churches could operate as a shrine. This would mean that church buildings would enhance the capability of the Christian community to live out their prophetic and priestly ministry to the secular world. But if they were to be valued and cherished, instead of being viewed as a liability, they would not only help the worshipping community to speak, they would themselves speak as sacramental signs, forthat is what they are. They would be able to increase the sense in which those from outside the tradition are able to question the dominant secular assumptions of late modernity and find openings to faith. It is to dialogue with those who are willing to ask such questions that I now turn in the final chapter.
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breathe by being re-ordered, adapted and changed to reflect the life of the contemporary Christian community.
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it should be admitted that sometimes when churches become museums they do accurately reflect the state of the Christian community in that place. This is when buildings can become idolatrous - attachment is to building as building, rather than building as sign and sacrament - but this is merely derivative of the fact that the Christian community has lost its way and is taking its building with it into the wilderness. Ifchurches were to operate as shrines in the manner I have suggested, their witness could be transformed and renewed.
Pg.20
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