A
TRIBUTE TO VITOR WESTHELLE
Vitor Westhelle, the professor
of systematic theology at Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, is known for
his innovative theological engagements through which he interstices theology,
philosophy, and politics. Being immersed
in the traditions of the church, at the same time allowing it to listen to the
voice of the other and the cries from the margins, Vitor envisions an ‘in-breaking’
within the systematic framework of theology. For Vitor, theological framework has to be
deconstructed and re-constructed in order to attend to the alluring and enigmatic
silences of the subaltern. Traversing through
the formative discourses of Christian doctrines while re-reading them in
dialogue with their own heresies, Vitor re-positions himself as the most
innovative theologian and a visionary poet in the contemporary postcolonial
theological school of thought. It was my
privilege and honor to be his advisee in the PhD program at LSTC and to travel along
with him into the political-poetical world of systematic theology (Thank you
George Zachariah for introducing me to Vitor and to LSTC).
Ordained in the Lutheran Church
in Brazil (IECLB), Westhelle served several congregations and was the
coordinator of the Ecumenical Commission on Land (CPT) in Paraná where he was
an enabler and a companion with those struggling for land and justice.
Westhelle is a highly-acclaimed speaker throughout academic circle and the Church. He has been the advisor to the Executive Council of the Lutheran World
Federation from 1990-97 and lead various committees and programs for LWF.
Westhelle currently serves on the editorial council of Dialog, Lutheran Quarterly, International Editorial Council of Margens: Revista Brasiliera de Estudos sobre
Pós-modernidade, Estudos Teológicos (EST-Brazil), Cuadernos de Teología (ISEDET-Argentina),Numen: Revista de Estudos e
Pesquisa da Religião (UFJDF,
Brazil), Bulletin of Contextual
Theology, South Africa, Bibliografia Bíblica Latino-Americana (São Paulo, Brazil). Westhelle authors many books including The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the
Cross (Fortress, 2007), [in translation, O Deus escandaloso: Usos e Abusos
da Cruz, trans. Geraldo Korndörfer, (Sinodal, 2008]); Word in Words (CSS, 2009), The
Church Event: Call and Challenge of a Church Protestant (Fortress, 2010), After Heresy: Colonial Practices and
Post-Colonial Theologies (Cascade Books, 2010), and Eschatology and Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Theological
Churrasco
Vitor's students define his
theological framework as Churrasco—a Latin
American dish which is a beautiful mix of various ingredients and tastes. Locating
himself in the Liberation-postcolonial-subaltern theological stream, Westhelle
defines history as the ‘place of transcendence’ where God and humanity/
creation collaborate. for him, history is the place
of theopraxis. It is in this theopraxis,
that life in ‘fullness’ is envisaged and the displaced-the disenfranchised- the
colonized experience apocalypse. It is
a liminal place -a non space- of weak epiphany. The God in this weak epiphany
is not a God of power and order; rather, it is a God of vulnerability and
disorder. Meditating on the crucified
God, Westhelle affirms “what the cross does is precisely this re-orientation of
our gaze to this limit, the eschata.
Westhelle emphasizes the
epiphany of God within the historicity and the materiality of bodilyness. God is encountered within, never outside the
complexities of life. Salvation is not
an eruption from outside but within the materiality of life. Historicity is not enclosed within; rather,
it is open and eschatological. History is
the im/possibility of the reign of God that makes the prophetic challenges
against injustices possible today.
Taking his cue from Walter Benjamin’s ‘chips of Messianic time,’
Westhelle’s methodological point of negativity embodies a hope against hope- a
faith that endeavors to allow the rupture of the eschatological moment in
everyday life with its rules, expectations, systems and institutions.
Theology
of Cross
Vitor has written widely on the theology of Luther, and on the
themes of Liberation, Creation, the Apocalyptic and Eschatology. The cross-theme,
in particular, theologia crucis, defines who
Westhelle is as a theologian. For him the theology of the cross is not a
doctrine but that which you live by, a usus passionis. It is the cross-ing that arrests his
attention and through his writings he tries to find categories to name and
cross differences without suppressing them but rather lifting them up:
liminality, chora, stasis,
hybridity, adjacency,eschata,
margin, borderline, chiaroscuro, etc. He strives
to convey that the gospel is the transgression of “legal” domains, semantic
fields with their protocols, or régimes of truth, while being neither and both
the abolition and the completion of the law.
Church that Happens!
While discussing the role of
theology to define church as a sign, Vitor Westhelle brings the qestion of re-presentation in to the debate. By drawing on the ideas of Aristotle, Hegel,
Marx, and Spivak on poiesis and praxis/ economia and politia, he asks
the pertinent question whether church represents
or re-presencing or not presenting something. Here, Westhelle exposes the inherent dilemma
embodied in the definition of church as a sign. It is an important question with regard to
the authority and validity of the sign- the church. According to Westhelle, the ecclesia does not stick to a particular
locus in its engagement with economia and politia; rather it finds itself in a ‘third space’ in between them.
Church is not just given or produced;
rather it is an event. Thus according
to Westhelle, church happens! Following the Reformed tradition, Westhelle contends
that church is non-essential but lives in its functional features. For him, church exists in its signifying
practices of proclamation of the Word of God and the sacraments which
necessitate interpretation and appropriation.
At the same time, he is hesitant to fix ecclesia in its functional locale alone. Drawing on the Derridean concept of ‘Gift,’
Vitor argues that there is a divine ‘secret’ in the tradition of the church
which is interpreted and passed on to generations as ‘constitutive memories’ in
many ways and thus those ‘imitations’/ ‘performances’/ ‘significations’
constitute the contemporary experiences of church event.
Creation and the Right to the Land
Westhelle engages with the
theology of Creation from the perspective of the displaced in Latin
America. According to Westhelle, the term ‘created
order’ that is used in the story of creation in the book of Genesis is an
ambiguous concept, since the category ‘order’ is an ideological disguise for
domination, repression, and persecution.
He explains: “order becomes the moral parameter to speak about God’s
will in the midst of the cosmos, justifying the organization of the state. Where order is granted by the head of the
state, where order is the result of the demiurgic work of the “invisible hand”
of capitalism, where order is the patriarchal hierarchy, the stability and
control of the whole society is granted.”
Westhelle argues that the question of ‘order and progress’ was the
colonial agenda established in Latin America by the colonizers. ‘What lacks order, lacks goodness.’ ‘Lack of
order is evil.’ Here the logic of order
becomes a tool for annihilation and marginalization. In this sense, a resistance to this ‘order’
is a ‘disorder’ or chaos. Unlike the process theologians who approache creatio ex nihilo as a pre-biblical
cosmogony, Westhelle argues that it has been used in the Bible especially in
Pauline letters and Maccabees in terms of doxology. For him, creatio ex nihilo is a doxological
affirmation of the resurrection of the flesh of the oppressed. Westhelle, for theology of creation for the
displaced people of Latin America is nothing but a question of place/ space or
non-space.
Eschatology
and Space
The question of place or
no-place in the theology of creation is well explained in Westhelle’s recent book
Eschatology and Space. He argues that
the spatial dimensions of the eschaton
have been glaringly absent from western theological discourse. Alluding to Enrique Dussel, Westhelle
contends that eschatology is the final realization of the proximity of the
origin. Eschaton is the location in which the reversal of the order
occurs. For him, “the eschatology of the
theologies of liberation is not about the order and progress, which suggests a
longitudinal paradigm, but about limits, borders, and margins. Its attempt is to make these margins
visible, for they are the turning point to another world, a world that can only
be devised by those who dare to stand at its threshold and remove the veil that
hides the truth beyond it. And herein
lies the meaning of ‘apocalypse.’”
Westhelle makes use of the
Derridean notion of khora to
explicate this apocalyptical content of non-space, or the question of
displacement, as he defines khora as
“the space produced in the rupture of space that in itself is no space.” These experiences of displacement or
non-space are the breaking points, transitions, or new beginnings that are hard
to fathom. It is the non-space of the
weak epiphany through which the kairos
meet khora and the displaced people
meet the crucified God. Westhelle’s God
is a marginal God-a subaltern God as it re-imagines the location of margin as
the non-space of eschaton. His notion of eschatological space redraws
the western notion of transcendent God and invokes the marginal and
alluric.
Y. T. Vinayaraj
