A review of   The Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant  by Vitor Westhelle

Hege, Brent A. R.

English

Digital Commons @ Butler University

Butler University Digital Commons @ Butler University Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS College of Liberal Arts & Sciences 10-2012 Review of "The Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant" Brent A. R. Hege Butler University, bhege@butler.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers  Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Hege, Brent A. R., "Review of "The Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant"" Interpretation / (2012): 473-474. Available at https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/264 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more information, please contact digitalscholarship@butler.edu. The Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant By Vítor Westhelle Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2010. ix + 181pp. $20.00. ISBN 978-0800663322   In The Church Event, Vítor Westhelle, a Lutheran theologian at The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, paints a richly textured portrait of the church incorporating multiple perspectives ranging from biblical texts to Patristics to Luther’s theology to contemporary global voices, both secular and theological. Blending biblical exegesis, historical research, sociological analysis and theological investigation, the result is a provocative and challenging invitation to reconsider ecclesiology in a historical moment in which the church’s unique and indispensible witness and mission are desperately needed to speak and embody a word of liberating truth to the world.   More a collection of essays than a seamless monograph, Westhelle’s offering can be divided into two main arguments. First, he proposes that classical social models of the oikonomia (the household, with its overtones of economics) and the politeia (the political realm, or, more broadly conceived, society), while often used either positively or negatively to situate the church in the world, fail to demarcate the space actually occupied by the church, namely the liminal space “between the house and the street” (pp. 89ff.). This means for ecclesiology that the church ought to be conceived as occupying the boundary between the spaces in which we live and move in our daily lives, offering rest and haven from the economic and political travails of modern life while also speaking a word of judgment and redemption (law and gospel) in those places.  Second, Westhelle names the church as an eschatological event that happens on the boundaries and the margins of contemporary life, thereby conceiving the church as both an occupier of space (on the eschata defined as margins) and an occurrence in time (at the eschata as the advent of the end). Church is here construed as an “epiphanic space” where the divine presence is manifest in the trappings, or what Luther called the larvae (masks), of the stuff and rhythms of everyday existence (pp. 145ff.). The church is in fact a “hybrid space” that combines aspects of place, which is a space of dwelling and belonging, and locale, which is a space of transition and not belonging (p. 143). In other words, the church is both “in” the world and “beyond” the world, occupying the liminal spaces between belonging and being on the move, between the familiar and the surprising. As such, the church is marked by its quality of “adjacency,” literally being thrown toward the boundaries and bridging the separations between these spaces of house and street. The church, therefore, does not exist for itself, for the flourishing of the institution. Rather, the church exists for the sake of the pilgrims who make their way through the liminal space of the church on their journeys between house and street. As Westhelle puts it in the final chapter, “It is in this adjacency that church happens; it is an event” (p. 163).  The essays in The Church Event are meditations on these two main themes, each weaving a new pattern into a complex and unfinished tapestry (another of Westhelle’s metaphors for the church). Readers will find a wealth of secondary sources to pursue in their thinking about issues such as the status of Scripture in the Protestant tradition, the Trinitarian grounding of the doctrine of the church, the prophetic mission of the church at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and the role of tradition in a church that confesses itself reformed and ever reforming. The strength of Westhelle’s latest offering is its diverse and ambitious selection of themes and conversation partners, but this strength is also a weakness of the book, as readers hoping to find a straightforward systematic discussion of the doctrine of the church will be disappointed. To borrow a musical metaphor, Westhelle has produced a work of free-flowing jazz and invites readers to listen carefully for various motifs and threads weaving their way through the performance. Some will be familiar and some will be challenging, but readers who are willing to devote themselves to a careful engagement with this text will be richly rewarded.   Brent A. R. Hege Butler University Indianapolis, Indiana  

Review of  The Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant

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Review of The Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant

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