ABSTRACT
Christian theology should always begin with God and God's relationship with the world in Christ. So, in attempting to establish a Christian theology of place, I have begun with a consideration of the scriptures and religious experience within Christian tradition, and from them constructed a theology of holy places. It is from this perspective that we can now look again at the importance of place in general to human experience. If we look again at some of the writings of those of other disciplines who are protesting against the 'loss of place', we shall want to seek points of convergence, for, as Rowan Williams argues, Christians in general and theologians in particular must be 'involved as best they can in those enterprises in their culture that seek to create or recover a sense of shared discourse and common purpose in human society.'1 It might seem, at first glance, that this will be an uphill struggle. What will geographers, for instance, want with churchpeople or theologians? Jamie Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley point out that 'the study of religion has not been a major domain of human geography, even though the manifestations of religious experience express themselves with spatial variety on the landscape.'2 Their volume, which is an interdisciplinary project in the study of religion and geography, attempts to redress the balance in shedding light on what they term 'the geographies of religion'. But such studies are in their infancy. Chris Park attempts an analysis of why this is the case:
Park attempts to bring the study of geography and religion back onto the geographical agenda in his own work. Scott and Simpson-Housley point to the potential benefit of concentration upon the geographies of religion to interdisciplinary study in revealing the imaginative roles of geographical phenomena in the development of religious self-understanding. Despite an unpromising past, these efforts suggest that the valuing of place is one area where a sense of shared discourse might be possible. There are certainly signs that some scholars would welcome such a sharing. Anne Buttimer, whose work we looked at in Chapter 1, is one:
Buttimer wants a 'renaissance of humanism', which calls for 'an ecumenical rather than a separatist spirit; it calls for excellence in special fields as well as a concern for the whole picture. It encourages sensitivity to what the barbarism of our times might be, and it challenges all to seek ways to heal or overcome it in responsible action fully as much as elegant rhetoric.'5 We may not all want to march under the banner of humanism but we can surely help our contemporaries to discover that one of the barbarisms of today's world is a devaluing of place which is dehumanizing - and help find ways to heal or overcome it. Our study of the Christian scriptures and tradition has led us to the conclusion that a relational view of place emerges from them. I have argued that holy places are those that are associated with divine disclosure or what I have termed 'sacramental encounters'. We might therefore expect that the nature of places other than those designated as holy should be approached from this same relational standpoint as the setting for human encounter. But we have already seen from the work of people like Giddens that if we understand places in this light it will not simply be as an environment, but as something which enters into the very meaning of such encounters. The geographer Michael Godkin insists that 'the places in a person's world are more than entities which provide the physical stage for life's drama. Some are profound centres of meanings and symbols of experience. As such, they lie at the core of human existence.'6
