The Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant - Softcover

Vitor Westhelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0800663322 ISBN 13: 9780800663322

Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2009

Synopsis

Often nowadays one hears affirmations of spirituality and even religious life but rarely of institutional religion. Is the church dying?

Noted theologian Vtor 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.

About this title

About the Author

Until his untimely death in 2018, Vitor Westhelle was professor of systematic theology at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. A prolific writer and teacher, he was author of several books, including The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross (Fortress, 2006), and co-editor of several others.

Edition details

• Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0800663322
• ISBN 13: 9780800663322
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192