THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH is faced with new responsibilities and challenges in our postmodern culture. This ecumenical series, sponsored by the Christian
Theological Research Fellowship, reaps the wisdom of Christian tradition and Scripture
to propose fresh insights for today’s church. Grounded in sound scholarship, it will appeal
to thoughtful pastors, educated laypeople, theological students, and scholars in a quest for
faithful understanding of the Christian message.

In view of the destruction of the sources of life, ecology is no longer a marginal issue. In Creation Set Free Sigurd Bergmann creatively rethinks the discipline of theology in light of the global environmental crisis. He opens up an extraordinary dialogue between pre¬vious ecological theologies and church father Gregory of Nazianzus. Through the ne¬glected topics of sociality, motion, suffering, and the Spirit, Bergmann brings to light Gregory’s thought on the liberation of creation. Finally, Bergmann connects ecological issues and patristic theology with contemporary liberation theology, concerned through¬out to reaffirm the cosmos as something involved in redemption rather than merely a stage for the human salvific drama.
An astonishingly wide-ranging study, Creation Set Free should interest all those concerned with the history of theology and the future of the earth.
SIGURD BERGMANN is professor of religious studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. The author and editor of numerous books, he is also a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Letters and Sciences and an ordained minister in the Church of Sweden.

Contents
Foreword -- p..vii
Preface to the English Edition -- p..x
Abbreviations -- p..xvii
Introduction -- p..і
I: The Altered Understanding
of Nature in Modernity: The Situation
1. The Ecological Challenge to Theology -- p..19
II: The Trinitarian Cosmology
of Gregory of Nazianzus: A Tradition
2. The Context of Cappadocian -- p..Theology -- p..57
3. Gregory’s Theological Interpretation of Creation Set Free -- p..71
III: Cosmology as Soteriology —
a Constructive Correlation
4. Correlating the Interpretations of Late Antiquity
and Late Modernity -- p..175

5. Considerations from -- p..the -- p..Perspective of Liberation Theology -- p..269
6. Methodological Considerations -- p..323
Summary Theses -- p..353
Works Cited -- p..360
Index -- p..384