Göttingen-Regensburg Oberseminar 2026: Church art, church theology, and church ontology!

Last Friday, a carload of biblical studies people (and me, a church historian smuggled in amongst them!) took a train and a car up to Göttingen for a wonderful conference hosted by the Evangelisch Theological faculty at Göttingen. The conveners were Professors Susanne Luther (Göttingen) and Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg), though Prof. David Cielonthko (Charles University, Prague) was also present. Unfortunately, Judith König (Regensburg), another organizer, was unable to join at the last minute. Aside from David, all the presenters were post-docs and doctoral students. We were also joined by Dr. Scott Robertson, a fellow DFG PI and my officemate at the Beyond Canon Centre in Regensburg.

We covered a lot of ground: 

1. A "figure analysis" of God's calling of Moses by Stephanie Ortmann (Regensburg)
2. The story of Enoch in the Book of Parables developing the early Jewish development of narrated Messianology by David Cielontko (Prague). A brilliant presentation that developed material from David's recent book on similar topics.
   
3. A truly fascinating and illuminating presentation by Marina Cacic (Regensburg), which explored the intersection of the idea of "skandal" and knowledge in the Gospel according to Matthew. Clearly a lot of hard work went into this presentation, and it's clear that Marina's going to write an excellent dissertation.
4. Benjamin Lensink (Göttingen) gave a talk about ethics and gender in the Acts of Thomas, a paper that I mostly missed because it was the first paper of the day and I mis-set my alarm clock!
5. There was also a paper by the just-starting doctoral student Sarah Hör (Göttingen) in which she explored untraditional family structures in the Clementine Romance.
6. My own paper, "Visions of the End: Depicting and Achieving the Christian Telos in Late Antique Roman Apse Art." I'll describe this here: 

My paper, the first I've given strictly on an art-historical topic, delved into two representations of Jerusalem (the new or heavenly) in two churches in Rome. These depictions are in the apse mosaics of the Basilicas of Santa Pudenziana and Santa Prassede, which are named for two women who according to tradition were both sisters and second-century Roman martyrs. 

When I wrote my DFG application, a large part of the appeal was the fact that I am bringing material culture into the study of my topic. This presentation was the first time I analyzed in great detail the incredible overlaps that existed between the theological literature of late antiquity and the apse art that was being generated in the same regions and in the same theological circles. 

In the first part of the paper, I analyzed the two apse mosaics, pictured just below: 

These images, above all, depict Christ, the apostles, the martyrs, and various apocalyptic personages from the book of Revelation (e.g. four living creatures, 24 elders, the multitude which cannot be numbered, the 144,000 of Rev. 14, etc.). These persons are explicitly set within the context of Jerusalem, at once this-worldly and eschatological. Moreover, the mosaics show these beings in halls created specifically for Christian worship, and indeed located at the east end of these buildings, where the worshippers eyes would be fixed during the eucharistic celebration. By seeing these images during worship, the assembled Christian not only heard what they were and what they were becoming (the church of God in its purest sense), but they saw it in tesserae of gold and glass. They, in the words of Cyprian of Carthage, were to behold and thereby to "imitate what we are to become." (quod futuri sumus) (Cyprian, On the Lord's Prayer §36).

I then juxtaposed these evocative and richly theological images with the likewise evocative and richly theological intellectual and spiritual "images" in the texts of the time, including the texts of Origen, Tyconius, Augustine, and Ambrose Autpert, who between them provide a line of theological reception (each reading the one or ones that came before--Tyconius was inspired by Origen, Augustine acknowledged the value of Tyconius, and Autpert quoted Augustine). My point here was to show how both the mosaics and the theological writings in fact reflect and give depth to each other. As I wrote of the images: 

• Both [images] contain well known apocalyptic imagery
• Both feature Christ at the center of the iconography
• Both focus on the apostles, martyrs, and other saints
• Both center an ideal Jerusalem
• Both happen within, interact with, and contribute to the prevailing theological discourse concerning ultimate human purpose—becoming, or participating, in God or Christ

These images, I argue, function tripley as proclamation, depiction, and injunction to the worshippers gathered in those halls:

• Proclamation of their divinely ordered end (or telos [Gk.])--that is, to become divine.
• Depiction of their divinely ordered end--that is, to illustrate it before their very eyes.
• Injunction of those assembled to in fact achieve their divinely ordered end, and to become divine as members of what Augustine called the totus Christus, caput et corpus--the whole Christ, head and body (Augustine, Tractate on John 1.2). 

Crucially, Augustine's work would have been well known and indeed influential in Rome at the time that the apse mosaics of the Basilica of Saint Pudentiana were being commissioned and competed (410s). Augustine's theological vision is in turn reiterated by Autpert, a late eighth-century cleric who in his Commentary on Revelation reproduced parts of Augustine's exegesis on Revelation 21 (the New Jerusalem pericope) as well as Augustine's totus Christus ecclesiology: 

“Whether Christ then, or the Church the wall, whether Christ the foundation, whether the apostles and teachers the foundations, all things are one, all things through one, all things consist in one, and this whole is one wall, because Christ and the Church, head and members, are not two, but one body.” / Siue ergo Christus, siue Ecclesia murus, siue Christus fundamentum, siue Apostoli atque doctores fundamenta, omnia unum, omnia per unum, omnia constant in uno, et hoc totum unus murus est, quia Christus et Ecclesia, caput et membra, non duo, sed unum sunt corpus. (Autpert, Commentary on Revelation §10 [at Rev. 21.12]). 

Autpert's theological vision, of course, would have been well known in Rome, not least by Pope Pascal I, who was a successor of one of Autpert's great friends and colleagues, Pope Adrian I, and who commissioned the mosaics at Santa Prassede.

In the end, the church (Christ's members--both as worshipping in the nave and as displayed in the apse,) and Christ himself (the head of the Body), both behold and achieve the ultimate human telos or purpose in Christ, which Origen elegantly describes in perhaps the last sermon he ever gave: 

“We shall be taken [spirit, soul, and body] in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall forever be with the Lord,’ having become gods, with a god standing in the middle of our gathering, Jesus Christ.”  (Origen, Homily on Psalm 82 §2)

Overall the presentation was well received, and a lively conversation ensued in which Tobias Nicklas once again proposed the idea of what he has termed a kairotopos, or a kairotopia, in which chronological time (chronos), divine time (kairos), and all of space (topos) coalesce into a single (and here my term) "eternal moment" within time and space--an idea that is also suggested in the work of Erik Thunø and Andrei Lidov, whom I also drew on in my presentation. So a very fruitful discussion, with lots of ideas for the future. 

One way or another, the Göttingen Seminar marks the completion of a draft of a second chapter of my upcoming book. Progress continues apace!