1. On a descriptive-analytical level, it is important to describe and analyze the processes of transformation we are facing in society, the Church, and academia, and to place them in a larger context. This is done through a learning dialog with other disciplines, by listening to social insights and human experiences, and in a “school of seeing” in conversation with art and cultural studies. The specific theological task lies in “interpreting the signs of the times,” which examines events, insights, and needs of the present in the light of the Gospel in order to “discern what in them are true signs of the present or of God's intention” (GS 4-11).
    
2. On a critical and strategic level, it is a matter of recognizing, naming, and elaborating the requirements, possibilities, and obstacles of social transformation, as well as making their normative implications, criteria, and options transparent and justifiable. In this sense, sustainability research, for example, speaks of the need for a “great transformation.” Social practice, scientific reflection, and political debate are closely interrelated here. The same applies within the Church, for example in the struggle for a synodal form of church. Theologically, the perspectives of integral conversion (conversión integral) and messianic hope open up approaches for conceiving the connection between social, cultural, ecological, economic, political, religious, and spiritual aspects in theological terms and relating them to the pastoral renewal of the Church.
    
3. On an epistemic and methodological level, it is a matter of fundamental transformations of forms of language and thought, of figures of justification and guiding paradigms, as they are connected with the transcendental turn and critique of metaphysics, with the turn to time and space, with the turn to language, practice, corporeality, and performativity. These various “turns” affect science, its forms of justification and methodologies, but also, more fundamentally, the understanding of reality. They lead to the heart of the fundamental theological task of developing a responsible understanding of truth and reality, of science and practice, of history and eschatological hope. At the Second Vatican Council, such a paradigm shift was carried out in the Catholic Church's magisterium. Various contextual and liberation theological approaches concretize and radicalize this learning process.
4. On the narrower theological, soteriological, and spiritual level, the category of transformation refers to the fundamental transformation of reality that results from the encounter between God and human beings and their “undivided and unmixed” interaction. The revelation of God and the faith of human beings become tangible and effective in the historical testimony that people give of them in specific situations and contexts. The revelation and redemption that took place in Christ can be experienced where people allow themselves to be transformed by the Spirit of Christ, repent, and follow him. This is what constitutes the Church as a messianic community of believers. Its essence and self-understanding become tangible in linguistic and symbolic acts: “Word and sacrament” are not to be equated with an objectifiable doctrine or legalistic practice, but refer to the transforming effectiveness of the Word of God in the human response. They are to be understood as performative and transformative. Tradition is therefore not the administration of a static deposit, but the living transmission of faith and the ever-new actualization of the Gospel, which transforms individual human beings, the community of the Church, and human history from within and directs them toward the coming kingdom of God. In remembrance of the past and in orientation toward the future, the present can thus be understood as a possible kairos for a messianic renewal of history. Theology has the task of scientifically reflecting on this event, in which it also participates.
5. The horizon and the condition of possibility for such a messianic transformation of history lies in the hope of eschatological fulfillment as a comprehensive and saving transformation of temporal reality into the eternity of God (1 Cor 15:51f.). The biblical motifs of the Sabbath, of comprehensive shalom, of the wedding of the Lamb, and of the heavenly Jerusalem are images of such fulfillment, which both transcend and enable the intra-historical striving for reconciliation and fulfillment. In non-theological language, this dimension of meaning can be formulated in the form of the future perfect tense: “What will have been (important) in the end?”
    

The questions of a theology in transformation are addressed in the following fields of research at our Chair:

• Fundamentals: Forms of execution, figures of justification, and rationality of discourse about God
• A performative political theology for Europe and a public theology of the names of God
• Transformations of (Catholic) theology in the reception and continuation of the Second Vatican Council
• Social transformation processes as a theological challenge
   
• The ecological and social crisis as an impetus for integral conversion
• Conflicts of transformation within the Church, the loci theologici and the synodality of the Church
• Self-constitution, theological anthropology and the existentiality of discourse about God
• A messianic understanding of time and history