The Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant

by Westhelle, Vitor

• ISBN13: 9780800663322
• ISBN10: 0800663322
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-09
• Publisher: Fortress Pr

Summary

Often nowadays one hears affirmations of spirituality and even religious life but rarely of institutional religion. Is the church dying? Noted theologian Vítor Westhelle urges an emphatic no and traces the church crisis to an ¿ecclesiological deficit,¿ a lack of serious reflection on the real role of church as an ideal community and an institutional reality. He finds real consensus among the Reformers on what church should mean, and he traces the competing historical notions of church, their relations to the sources of Protestant religious conviction, and the gradual erosion of a sense for what it is the church actually ¿represents.¿ Westhelle advances a new model of church, grounded in Trinitarian thought, social anthropology, and biblical reflection. He then shows how this notion of church well positions Christian communities to deal with the public sphere, religious pluralism, globalization, and communal prayer. In doing so, Westhelle claims a space for Protestant Christianity in today¿s world.

Author Biography

Vtor Westhelle is Professor of Systematic Theology at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. A prolific writer, he is author of several books, including The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross (Fortress Press, 2006), and coeditor of several others.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Church Profiles and the So-Called Ecclesiological Deficit of Protestantism	p. 11
On the Church Ecumenical	p. 11
The New Challenges to the Church in World Christianity	p. 17
Profiles of Church and Ministry	p. 20
In Defense of a Church Protestant	p. 27
The Representative: an Unexamined Question	p. 31
The Church between Economics and Politics	p. 36
The Church's Tempting Vicinities	p. 41
Meanings of Tradition: Give and Take	p. 47
Whose Tradition? Whose Treason?	p. 47
The Open Canon and the Enclosed Silence	p. 49
Irenaeus and Apostolic Succession	p. 52
The Reaction of the Reformers	p. 53
Give and Take	p. 54
Functions That Divide the Church	p. 56
On the Authority of the Scriptures: More Than Enough	p. 59
Sola Scriptura: The Negative Principle	p. 62
Scripture as Interpreter Itself: The Positive Principle	p. 63
More than Enough: Rhetoric and Dialectics	p. 65
The Universal Word Speaks Dialect	p. 66
The Rule of Grammar	p. 68
The Proper Uses of the Law	p. 70
Antinomianism?	p. 73
Church and Trinity: the Promise and Limits of an Analogical Reasoning	p. 75
A Western Reading	p. 79
Trinity: A Contextual Second-Order Discourse	p. 80
Luther and the Material Criterion	p. 84
Tying Ends Together	p. 87
KoinŌnia: Between the Idol of the House and the Demons of the Street	p. 89
The House and the Street	p. 89
Captivities: The Idol and the Demons	p. 94
The Idol	p. 95
The Demon	p. 98
Criteria for Discerning	p. 103
Ecclesial Ends: on the Relation of Church and Society	p. 107
Church and Society	p. 107
Crises in the Church and Society	p. 112
The Theological Loss of the Saeculum	p. 113
The Ends of the World	p. 116
In Crisis, There the Church Is	p. 118
A Copernican Revolution	p. 120
At Ease: Ecclesial Adjacencies	p. 125
The Church and the Kingdom	p. 125
Adjacency	p. 129
Zacchaeus: A Meditation on Adjacency	p. 129
At Ease: Peace Be with You	p. 132
Chrysostom	p. 134
The Place of the Church	p. 137
Tapestry: A Metaphor	p. 137
Metabolism: Space as Gift and Task	p. 139
The Spectrum of Spatial Experiences: Banquet Rooms and Deserts	p. 140
Types of Space: Locales and Places	p. 141
Hybrid Spaces: Thin and Thick	p. 143
The Church as Epiphanic Space	p. 147
Envisioning	p. 152
Church Happening: Speaking the Truth and Liberation	p. 155
Speaking the Truth	p. 155
Freeing the Captives	p. 163
Event	p. 165
In the Offing	p. 168
Acknowledgments	p. 169
Index	p. 171
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.