collegium emmaus
coordinated by the center for faith & society
Who we are
The Collegium Emmaus is a community of theological researchers who are committed to an in-depth collaboration on a research programme as friends from various ecclesial backgrounds.
The community wishes to model and encourage a renewed kind of academic culture: dialogical, ecumenical, communal. We believe that theology is fruitfully done in the interplay between academic, ecclesial and social perspectives; therefore, members of the Collegium are engaged in dialogue with partners from academia, the church, and the wider society.
Beyond their research, they are open to participating, where possible, in activities and events that foster the renewal of the church and serve the common good.
We are a voluntary association of researchers, both professors and doctoral/post-doctoral researchers, from Switzerland and beyond.
Our aims
- Fostering a theological learning community that is intellectually stimulating and spiritually sustaining.
- Wholistically forming people for future leadership in church and society.
- Conducting theological research (and teaching) that serves the renewal of the church and society.
God and the good life
What constitutes the good life? The research programme “God and the Good Life” brings scholars together from across theological disciplines to explore what distinctive insights theology offers to this question. Specifically, it investigates the ways in which human beings may flourish in communities centred on the Triune God, and focuses on how these communities contribute to the Common Good.
For Christian theology (taking up the Aristotelian tenet that human beings are ‘political animals’), the good life is relational and human flourishing involves a communality: God created human beings so that they would flourish in communion with him and one another; God made a covenant with Israel, blessing his people so that they would be a blessing. In Jesus Christ, the supreme calling of human beings is revealed. Christ made a way for all human beings to find fullness of life amid suffering and death. In being sent by God’s Spirit and in sending his Spirit, he enabled and commissioned the Church to witness to the hope of God’s coming kingdom even in and through suffering. Far from ignoring broken lives and failing communities, a theological perspective on the good life and human flourishing addresses the brokenness of human existence, the reality of evil and injustice in light of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
