Current projects

I. No salvation outside of religion? Towards a performative theology of secularity in the face of the challenge of religious indifference
For a long time, the theological view of people who are not part of the Christian or Catholic Church was determined by the question of whether there could also be "traces of salvation" and "rays of truth" in other religions - or whether eternal salvation could only be achieved in and through the (Catholic) Church. Against the backdrop of a society that is now largely secular, distanced from religion or even areligious, this question arises today not only with regard to other religions, but almost more urgently with regard to people who go through life without any religion at all.
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Publications, lectures and courses
More than fits into sentences. Revelation as a performative event, in: MThZ, 75th year, issue 3 (2024), 385-400.

Love of the finite. Soundings on Absurdity and the Absolute in Camus and Hegel, to appear in the series "Transformation Transdisziplinär. Schriften des KU Zentrums Religion, Kirche, Gesellschaft im Wandel" by Nomos-Verlag (expected 2025)

An omen that changes everything. Or: why the truth of religion cannot be understood without love. Theological thoughts on Christoph Menke's theory of liberation, in: GEORG. Magazine of the Hochschule Sankt Georgen, issue WiSe 2023, 32-37.
Complete list

II Between identitarian temptation and hospitable love. Political theologies in contested liberalism
The project examines the contribution that political theology can make in the face of an increasing questioning of liberal forms of government. The focus is on contrasting political claims to religion that are actually represented: particular identitarian on the one hand and universalistically hospitable on the other.
More

Publications, lectures and courses
"And if I had not love" (1Cor13). Thoughts on the fundamental political dimension of love, in: philosophie in debate(https://philosophie-indebate.de/und-haette-ich-die-liebe-nicht-1kor13-gedanken-zur-fundamentalpolitischen-dimension-der-liebe/)

Recognition as a gift of freedom. Explorations around a Hegelian fundamental figure with theological intent, in: Rosenhauer, Sarah/Lerch, Magnus/Essen, Georg (eds.), Das Andere der Freiheit. Christoph Menke's Philosophy of Liberation in the Discourse of Theology (ratio fidei), Regensburg 2024, 65-120.

An omen that changes everything. Or: why the truth of religion cannot be understood without love. Theological thoughts on Christoph Menke's theory of liberation, in: GEORG. Magazin der Hochschule Sankt Georgen, issue WiSe 2023, 32-37.
Complete list

III Pneumatic materialism (RO 6364/2-1)
(DFG, own position, HU-Berlin, currently on leave, remaining term 01.10.2025-01.10.2026)
One of the achievements of modernity is to confront religion with the demand for freedom. The question is of socio-political as well as systematic-theological relevance, because only if a religion can justify the value and validity of human freedom from its own normative foundations can it support a liberal social order on the one hand and criticize its abridgements on the other.
More

Publications, lectures and teaching events
Contours of a postmodern pneumatology, Habil.masch., Frankfurt a.M. 2023.

Recognition as a gift of freedom. Streifzüge um eine hegelianische Grundfigur in theologischer Absicht, in: Rosenhauer, Sarah/Lerch, Magnus/Essen, Georg (eds.), Das Andere der Freiheit. Christoph Menke's Philosophy of Liberation in the Discourse of Theology (ratio fidei), Regensburg 2024, 65-120.

Free in truth. Contours of an indicative understanding of revelation, in: Wendel, Saskia/Werner, Gunda (eds.), Ewig wahr? Zur Genese von Glaubensüberzeugungen und ihrem Anspruch auf Wahrheit und Unveränderlichkeit, AGENDA Jubiläumsband (QD 331), Freiburg i.Br. 2023, 334-347.
Complete list

IV. Series "4 Perspectives on"
(Publication project with Prof. Dr. Martin Breul, Prof. Dr. Aaron Langenfeld and Dr. Fana Schiefen)
Although the binding power of the churches may be steadily declining, this does not mean that theological questions have lost their existential-practical and world-exploring significance. The aim of the book series is to deal with fundamental questions of theology in the face of contemporary social and conceptual challenges and on the basis of "young", innovative theorizing in such a way that the arguments are made accessible to a broad readership that goes beyond the internal church and theological circle.
More

IV. b) Is death the end? Motives of Christian hope before the challenges of naturalism, transhumanism and biopolitics. A debate
(together with Dr. Fana Schiefen, Dr. Aurica Jax and Dr. Gregor Taxacher, publication in the series "4 Perspectives on")
It is an undeniable, albeit often suppressed, fact that we are mortal. At some point, the lives of our loved ones and our own will come to an end. And it is a central content - for some even the ultimate driving force of Christian hope - that inevitable death is not the end, but a beginning.
More

Complete texts and publication lists:

I. No salvation outside of religion? Towards a performative theology of secularity in the face of the challenge of religious indifference

For a long time, the theological view of people who are not part of the Christian or Catholic Church was determined by the question of whether there could also be "traces of salvation" and "rays of truth" in other religions - or whether one could only attain eternal salvation in and through the (Catholic) Church. Against the backdrop of a society that is now predominantly secular, distanced from religion or even areligious, this question arises today not only with regard to other religions, but almost more urgently with regard to people who go through life without any religion at all. The phenomenon of a steady increase in religious indifference presents theology with the conceptual and pastoral challenge of reflecting on the relationship between Christian claims to truth and validity and areligious concepts of life and self. The long-cherished, inclusivist idea of a natural, but not self-aware religiosity of areligious people is proving to be problematic, not least in pastoral terms, as it assumes that areligious people have a deficiency of (self-)perception that can only be clarified from the superior standpoint of Christian truth.

Against the background of an expansion of the religious-theological matrix to include the option of secularity, the project will examine theological approaches that invite a theological appreciation of secularity and an understanding of Christian faith that is not practiced in opposition to secularity, but in dialogical relation to it. Particular attention is paid to a performative concept of religion. According to this, the essence of religion does not consist in the belief in certain divine truths and the observance of certain religious commandments, but in the new performative realization of a modality of existence (Bruno Latour) - a style of inhabiting the world (Christoph Theobald), which is based in transformative experiences and makes them present. If it is not propositional truth that is the identity-forming center of Judeo-Christian religion, but faithfulness to a transformative relational experience, this opens up possibilities for dialogue with areligious people. Instead of starting from theological precepts whose truth we have to convince our counterpart of, we can - in the sense of an "experiential hermeneutics" (Veronika Hoffmann) - start with analogous transformative, saving or liberating experiences that people have and that can be interpreted with the help of religious language, but also with non-religious categories. These experiences can form a common starting point for religious and non-religious people, in which one perspective (the religious one) does not have to be assumed from the outset as the superior, only appropriate one and the other (the non-religious one) as a self-recognizing, deficient one. Starting from experience makes it possible to hold on to the universal relevance of revelation without having to dismiss non-religious or other-religious perspectives as self-identifying because they are actually Christian and/or deficient.

Publications, lectures and courses
Publications:
More than fits into sentences. Revelation as a performative event, in: MThZ, 75th year, issue 3 (2024), 385-400.

Love of the finite. Explorations of Absurdity and the Absolute in Camus and Hegel, to appear in the series "Transformation Transdisziplinär. Schriften des KU Zentrums Religion, Kirche, Gesellschaft im Wandel" by Nomos-Verlag (expected 2025)

An omen that changes everything. Or: why the truth of religion cannot be understood without love. Theological thoughts on Christoph Menke's theory of liberation, in: GEORG. Magazin der Hochschule Sankt Georgen, issue WiSe 2023, 32-37.

Why faith?, in: Knowledge and faith. On the Reality of Transcendence, Schriften der Evangelischen Forschungsakademie. With contributions from the 151st conference, January 5-7 in the Festsaal der Berliner Stadtmission (probably 2024).

Article in Pannenberg Studies, December 2024

Article in ZTP thematic issue on religious indifference, May 2025

Lectures:
"Love of the finite. Soundings on Absurdity and the Absolute in Camus and Hegel" (Keynote Lecture at the Annual Conference of the German Section of the European Society for Theology, Catholic Academy Berlin, 30.09.-02.10.2024)

Why does man need faith? (Lecture at the anniversary conference of the Protestant Research Academy, Berlin 03.01.2024)

Lecture at the research symposium "Endlichkeit, Geschöpflichkeit und Offenbarung" of the Chair of Fundamental Theology (LMU), the Graduate Funding of the Cusanuswerk and the Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift, from 11-13.04.2025 at Schloss Fürstenried.

Lectures:
Lecture "Concepts of God" (RWTh-Aachen, summer semester 2024)

Lecture "Without God! Philosophical-theological forays" (TU Dresden, winter semester 2024/25)

Lecture "No salvation outside of religion? Towards a theology of secularity" (TU Dresden, summer semester 2025)

II Between identitarian temptation and hospitable love. Political theologies in contested liberalism

The project examines the contribution that political theology can make in the face of an increasing questioning of the liberal form of government. The focus is on contrasting political claims to religion that are actually represented: particular identitarian on the one hand and universalistically hospitable on the other. The project is divided into three parts: an analysis from the perspective of political theory, a critical analysis of identitarian, new-right political theologies and the outline of a fundamental political theology of loving hospitality.

1) Contested liberalism

The first part of the project is a philosophical and social-theoretical analysis of the aporias of liberal forms of government, which forms the common starting point for contrary approaches to political theology. The starting point is the question of the pre-state preconditions of liberal societies, which political theory has been aware of at least since Böckenförde's analysis of the aporias of liberalism and its resumption by Jürgen Habermas as a fundamental problem of liberal forms of government. The liberal constitutional state, which endows citizens with subjective rights of freedom, cannot guarantee from its own constitution that citizens will make use of their legally guaranteed freedom in a way that is oriented towards the common good rather than guided solely by self-interest. This question also points to the political significance of religions as a pre-state source of coexistence. What exactly the socio-political function of religion can and should be, however, is highly controversial in political theory, theology and society.

The question will first be considered from the perspective of political theory. In doing so, the classical fronts of the debates - liberalism vs. communitarianism, transcendental-validation-theoretical vs. practical-emancipative political theologies - legitimation of rule vs. criticism of rule) are to be innovatively integrated by taking the communitarian criticism of liberalism, that it cannot guarantee its own preconditions by its own means, as a starting point for reflecting on the socio-political significance of religion. At the same time, the fundamental criticism of liberal thinkers of the communitarian idea that the solution to the problem lies in shared substantial values and virtues - and the function of religion accordingly in making a contribution to pre-state morality in the form of Christian-based convictions and values - is integrated. For such a substantial understanding of morality runs the risk of being exclusionary, repressive and ahistorical and cannot catch up with the universalistic dimension of justice without naturalizing contingencies. If a communitarian political theology goes too far by prescribing substantive values, a purely liberal political theology, which limits itself to justifying the principle of freedom from its own sources, falls short. For it has no ear for the real entanglements and forces that run counter to the realization of the ideal principle of freedom. This conflict situation gives rise to the desideratum of a political theology that does not primarily ask on a programmatic level about the substantive contribution of Christian theology and religion to social value orientation, nor does it take a purely validity-theoretical-critical approach, but rather, upstream of this, asks about its contribution to the practical formation of the foundations of political judgment and action.

2) Political theologies of new right-wing movements

The question of resources for social solidarity in the face of the centrifugal forces of capitalism, globalization, the effects of the climate crisis etc. is not only an urgent political and ethical question, it is also the subject of political theologies. Political theology is particularly popular among the New Right. It is based on the idea that a sufficiently ethnically and culturally homogeneous community is required to ensure civic solidarity, which is inspired by Carl Schmitt's project of a homogeneous democracy: We only feel connected to the one and the one who is like us. Solidarity arises through homogeneity: through a we that defines its homogeneous identity according to the friend-foe scheme through basic operations of exclusion, the distinction between us and the others. The political-theological function of Christianity then consists in (co-)establishing the cultural and ethnic homogeneity of a community as an identitarian religion. It is internally united by an ethos of charity and sets itself apart from the outside world - militantly if necessary. The aim of the sub-project is to critically analyze and theologically classify the concepts of identitarian and new-right political theology.

3) Contours of a fundamental political theology of hospitable love

Building on the critical analyses of new-right political theologies, the third part of the project will examine approaches to political theologies that assert Christian universalism against the identitarian particularization of Christian ethics and see the political role of Christianity in a liberal and pluralistic society not in the stabilization of identity, but in opening up to others in solidarity. Against this background, the approach of a fundamental political theology of hospitable love is developed, which combines a pneumatological concept of recognition with a performative understanding of the transformative effectiveness of divine action and a radically democratic concept of the political and a "politics of hospitality" (Jacques Derrida), in order to reflect on the role of theology for the preservation of social solidarity in the face of the aporias of liberalism.

Publications, lectures and courses
Publications:
"And if I had not love" (1Cor13). Thoughts on the fundamental political dimension of love, in: philosophie in debate(https://philosophie-indebate.de/und-haette-ich-die-liebe-nicht-1kor13-gedanken-zur-fundamentalpolitischen-dimension-der-liebe/)

An omen that changes everything. Or: why the truth of religion cannot be understood without love. Theological thoughts on Christoph Menke's theory of liberation, in: GEORG. Magazin der Hochschule Sankt Georgen, issue WiSe 2023, 32-37.

What makes us free? Theological thoughts on Christoph Menke's theory of liberation, in: feinschwarz.net. theologisches Feuilleton, 2023 (What makes us free? Theological thoughts on Christoph Menke's theory of liberation - feinschwarz.net)

Der nahe Gott - das Argument aus religiöser Erfahrung, in: Breul, Martin/Langenfeld, Aaron/Rosenhauer, Sarah/Schiefen, Fana, Gibt es Gott wirklich? Reasons for faith. An argument, Freiburg i. Br., 2022, 113-149.

Excess and Event. The transgressive sources of (r)evolution, in: Breul, Martin/Helmus, Caroline (eds.), The Philosophical and Theological Relevance of Evolutionary Anthropology. Engagements with Michael Tomasello (Science and Religion), Routledge-Verlag 2023, 178-188.

Lectures:
"Contested Identity - Fragile Sovereignty - Real Liberation. Political theologies in the face of identitarian temptation" (seminar at TU Dresden, winter semester 2024/25)

"Political theologies in the face of identitarian temptation. Theologische Antwortversuche" (Seminar, TU Dresden summer semester 2025 in cooperation with the Chair of Religious Education)

III Pneumatic Materialism (RO 6364/2-1)
(DFG, own position, HU-Berlin, currently on leave, remaining term 01.10.2025-01.10.2026)

One of the achievements of modernity is to confront religion with the demand for freedom. The question is of socio-political and systematic theological relevance, because only if a religion can justify the value and validity of human freedom from its own normative foundations can it support a liberal social order on the one hand and criticize its shortcomings on the other. The aim of this project is to develop such a reflection on justification within the framework of the Christian concept of God.

The systematic challenge here lies in respecting both the unconditionality of human freedom, which is central to the modern awareness of freedom, and in thinking about the efficacy of God within human freedom, which is associated with the Christian idea of God, as it is thematized above all in pneumatology. At the same time, pneumatology extends the freedom-theoretical-anthropological problem to its ontological and (trinity) theological implications by demanding that God be thought of ontologically as transcendent to the world and at the same time immanent to it, and that God be thought of in himself both as a person and as a relation.

The project aims to meet these challenges by adding an innovative mediating (spiritual-theoretical or dialectical) position to the theoretical setting of the current theological debate, which is strongly characterized by the opposition of difference and unity models of the God-human, God-world and God-God relationship, and by making it fruitful for the freedom-theoretical, ontological and theological tasks of pneumatology. Such a position can be taken up by two current materialist and political-theological theories of freedom: Christoph Menke's negativity-theoretical materialism and Eric L. Santner's messianic materialism. Based on (a materialist reading of) Hegel's concept of spirit and psychoanalytical and biopolitical theories of subjectivation, they develop an innovative concept of freedom that does not ground freedom primarily in autonomy, i.e. the subject's capacity for self-determination, but in the excess of its vitality over biological nature on the one hand and socially formed spirituality on the other. They combine this materialistic definition of the basis of freedom with a processual-dialectical figure of liberation, which they describe in theological motifs: It is the event of revelation or exodus that liberates the subject to its surplus by enabling its retroactive self-setting. The liberated freedom is realized in the positing of a new social being. They thus provide a concept of freedom that makes its unconditionality conceivable through the act of self-establishment as well as its facilitation through an inner action that is nevertheless not autonomous.

The aim of the project is to develop Menke and Santner's theory of freedom as the basis for a materialist pneumatology, firstly by extending it to the field of (social) ontology into a political ontology of negativity and to the field of the doctrine of God into a negativist doctrine of God, whereby the ontological extension is conceptually linked to political-theological and the trinity-theological to negativist readings of Hegel's absolute spirit. The basic idea is that the threefold materiality of freedom - the surplus vitality as the ground of original freedom, the event of second liberation through the experience of an address and the materialization of liberation in the world-changing act - can be understood pneumatologically as the liberating action of the divine spirit, so that God can be defined not as the negation of human freedom, but as the ground that liberates it first and foremost and again and again.

Publications, lectures, courses
Publications:
Contours of a postmodern pneumatology, Habil.masch., Frankfurt a.M. 2023.

Beyond the determination. Überlegungen zu einer freiheitstheoretischen Grundlegung des Handelns Gottes, in: Essen, Georg/Kopf, Simon (eds.), Vorsehung und Handeln Gottes aus Analytischer und Kontinentaler Perspektive: Versuch eines Brückenschlags in der deutschen Debatte (QD 331), Freiburg i.Br. 2023, 216-246.

Beyond Unity and Difference. Pneumatological Irritations of the Theological Freedom Debate, in: Dahlke, Benjamin/Dockter, Cornelia/Langenfeld, Aaron (eds.), Christologie im Horizont pneumatologischer Neuaufbrüche (QD), Freiburg i.Br. 2022, 136-184.

Negativity and fullness. From the materialist dialectic of the spirit to pneumatic materialism, in: Langenfeld, Aaron/Rosenhauer, Sarah/Steiner, Stephan (eds.), Menschlicher Geist - göttlicher Geist (STEP series), Münster 2021, 375-426.

Art. Freedom - Determination, in: Schulz, Heiko/Wenzel, Knut/Wiese, Christian (eds.), Handbuch Religionsphilosophie. Geschichte - Konzepte - Kontroversen, Stuttgart/Weimar (expected 2024).

Collected volumes:
Rosenhauer, Sarah/Lerch, Magnus/Essen, Georg (eds.), Das Andere der Freiheit. Christoph Menke's Philosophy of Liberation in the Discourse of Theology, Regensburg 2024.

Langenfeld, Aaron/Rosenhauer, Sarah/Steiner, Stephan (eds.), Menschlicher Geist - göttlicher Geist. Contributions to the Theology and Philosophy of the Spirit (STEP 22), Münster 2021.

Conferences:
The Other of Freedom? Subject-theoretical and materialistic concepts of freedom in conversation; symposium at the Catholic Academy Berlin 2022 (joint conference chair and organizer with Prof. Dr. Georg Essen and Prof. Dr. Magnus Lerch)

Human Spirit and Divine Spirit, international and interdisciplinary symposium at the Catholic Academy Berlin 2019 (joint conference management and organizer with Dr. Aaron Langenfeld and Dr. Stephan Steiner)

Lectures:
Freedom and its other - a relationship of recognition? (Lecture at the symposium "The Other of Freedom? Subject-theoretical and materialistic concepts of freedom in conversation" at the Kath. Akademie Berlin, 17.-19.06.2022)

Beyond the determination. Reflections on a freedom-theoretical foundation of God's action (Response to the lecture by Prof. Dr. Georg Gasser at the symposium "Providence and God's action from an analytical and continental perspective: An attempt to build bridges in the German debate" at the HU Berlin, 22-23.10.2021)

Freedom as direct proportionality? (Lecture at the research colloquium "Jenseits der Konkurrenzen. Philosophical and theological reflections on the concept of direct proportionality, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Science, Innsbruck, 15.10.2021)

Beyond unity and difference. Pneumatologische Irritationen der theologischen Freiheitsdebatte (Lecture at the symposium "Christologie im Horizont pneumatologischer Neuaufbrüche" at the Kath. Akademie Schwerte, 30.09.-02.10.2021)

The excess of evolution (Response to the lecture by Prof. Dr. Andreas Telser at the symposium "Thomasello and Religion. Perspectives on evolutionary Anthropology" at the Catholic Academy Berlin, 10.-12.06.2021)

IV. Series "4 Perspectives on"
(Publication project with Prof. Dr. Martin Breul, Prof. Dr. Aaron Langenfeld and Dr. Fana Schiefen)

Although the binding power of churches may be steadily declining, this does not mean that theological questions have lost their existential-practical and world-opening significance. The aim of the book series is to negotiate fundamental questions of theology in the face of contemporary social and conceptual challenges and on the basis of "young", innovative theorizing in such a way that the arguments are made accessible to a broad readership that goes beyond the internal church and theological circle. To this end, we work with a discursive format that does not discuss a question monologically, but illuminates it from the perspective of four young theologians. Each individual contribution is followed by a discursive unit of critical-constructive questions from the other authors. Following the book published by Herder in 2022, "Does God really exist? Four reasons for faith. Ein Streitgespräch" published by Herder in 2022, the book "Was ist das gute Leben?" and the book "Ist der Tod das Ende? Reasons for the hope of eternal life" will be published.

It is an undeniable, albeit often suppressed, fact that we are mortal. At some point, the lives of our loved ones and our own will come to an end. And it is a central content - for some even the ultimate driving force of Christian hope - that inevitable death is not the end, but a beginning. This hope is articulated in various hopeful images and motifs: bodily resurrection, redemption, eternal life, judgment and apocalypse(s).

Formed more than two thousand years ago, these images seem both out of date and memorably topical today. On the one hand, an exclusion of finiteness and an invisibilization of dying can be observed through biopolitics and economies of death, which aim for increased, intensified, even transhumanistically un-endowed immanence, combined with a negation of questions about transcendence - the hereafter, eternity, redemption - in naturalistic worldviews/ontologies. And at the same time, there seems to be a manifold return of the question of death, the afterlife and redemption: the awareness of finiteness strikes us in apocalyptic expectations of the end of the world. Desires for transcendence and eternity are channeled in biopolitical regimes of intensification and enhancement and in transhumanist fantasies of infinity and virtual disembodiment. In addition, questions about life and death are transformed into posthumanist theoretical agendas that shift the transcendent into the immanent, the transgressively spiritual into the material, thus remapping our ideas of life, death and eternity.

The book is guided by the question of how Christian motifs can be brought up critically and productively in this mixed situation. At the same time, the aim is to open up Christian resources for dealing with death and to make a contribution to the debates/problem constellations mentioned, which, in their (non-)treatment of death, also make normative statements about life.

The format of the book is designed as a dialog. First, the four authors each present a theological contribution within the field of tension of the overall topic outlined above. Following these four main texts, each contribution is followed by short responses from the other three authors, who enter into a dialog with the main text and seek to explore the opportunities and limitations of the contributions in a debate.

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