Vítor Westhelle, Liberating Luther: A Lutheran Theology from Latin America. Translated by Robert A. Butterfield. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2021, 238pp. $29.00

Abstract

What is the task of the theologian who seeks to find a voice in the nexus between imagination and institution, living faith and struggling church? What is the mission of the church, which faces up to its history of coercion, finds its feet in service and activism, yet opens a space to receive and share words of divine revelation? What is the rightful and wrongful use of power, whether that of the church or the theologian? What is the liberating power of the God whose power is made perfect in weakness? I suggest that these questions set the agenda for Vítor Westhelle's essays translated under the title Liberating Luther. Dating from the late 1970s to the 1990s, the collection represents Westhelle's creative work for the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil within the emergence of liberation theologies across denominations in Latin America. Both words of the title orient the reader to the contents: the task of a theologian within a specific tradition, the mission of a church amidst struggle for liberation.

As a synonym for the church's action in facing poverty and structures of injustice, the word praxis provides a thread to follow through the essays. Westhelle takes up the praxis concept from his friend and mentor Hugo Assmann, a Catholic on the earlier edge of liberation theology. From Assmann, Westhelle gleans first a focus on defending people's right to work within an overall socio-political analysis; second, he gains the insight that Marxists and other social scientists attack theological abstractions, but neglect the role of people of faith and congregations in practical situations of struggle. Theology that is liberative – and not simply in service to the status quo – emerges as faith reflects upon particular experiences of conflict and struggle. Westhelle questions the extent to which Assmann appears to equate praxis with strategic efficacy: is liberation only a matter of instrumental means to reaching a goal? Two essays address class conflict within churches of Latin America. With the example of the church in Chile responding to the 1973 Pinochet military coup, Westhelle illustrates how divisions between pastors and laity manifested class interests made even more complex by the confessional and ethnic identities of those involved. What is the role of the liberation-informed pastor when solidarity with the marginalized and exploited poor also divides oneself from working class lay people within one's own congregation? The task of the liberation theologian amidst the divisions of an institution calls forth creativity and discernment within particular situations.

With the 1992 recognition of five hundred years of colonization on the American continent and the genocide of indigenous peoples, Westhelle interprets the Cain and Abel myth to confront the church with its own complicity in murder. Cain, out of fearful desire for securing his own self-affirmation, communicated with Abel in order to eliminate the difference his brother represented. Conquistadores, missionaries, and settlers employed instrumental means to eliminate the difference of indigenous peoples and the otherness that their cultural and religious worlds embodied. The Cain essay accompanies a similar one on the relationship between mission and power, where Westhelle notes that the colonization project reduced the face of the conquistador to the sword and the face of the missionary to the imposed liturgical crucifix. Westhelle's reflections are searching, challenging, and open to interpretation: where both essays appear to point is the insight that just as violence happened through reducing oneself to an instrument to conquer the other, so with repentance and healing, the self who takes responsibility for the history of violence cannot hide behind instruments – even instruments of service and justice. Drawing the churches' mission out from a history of imposed power requires the honesty and vulnerability to admit oneself as a sinner who cannot save oneself from one's own past, who can only face the other in openness to the other's initiative, and who confesses to a saving divine Other, whose cruciform power is made perfect in weakness.

In each essay, the concern for liberating praxis brings with it the recurrent theme of openness to particularity, to particular difference. Regarding ecumenism, Westhelle articulates his suspicion that the conditions of neoliberal capitalism are somehow related to the reduction of religious difference. When markets, individual freedoms and careers, and the drive for private property shape the dominant views of neoliberal society, then particular bonds of solidarity around faith, traditions, and values which are not reducible to monetary value lose their specific profiles. It is in this economic context that Westhelle raises suspicion about the wisdom of the post-Second World War ecumenical consensus that ‘doctrine divides, but service unites’. When churches erode confessional identities for a common purpose of providing services to those on the outside of capitalism's benefits, Westhelle suspects that churches also lose their voice. The richness of the biblical narrative worlds, the commitments of the theological traditions, these sources provide the words to name the world in ways that shake up dominant values and open spaces for newness to emerge.

Westhelle devotes critical attention to the confessional commitments of the Lutheran church that are in tension with liberation praxis. Critical reflection details how the theology of law and gospel has often served to corral theological meaning to individual sin and forgiveness. Without losing that tradition to a generic commitment to service and justice, however, Westhelle argues for a somewhat secularized analogy of law and gospel in the form of practical reason oriented toward equality. Amidst particular situations of conflict and change, practical reason informed by faith should publicly challenge social structures and make spaces for those hurt by the existing social order to speak their truth. Westhelle stops short of claiming that Martin Luther was a liberation theologian. Rather, his essay recognizes the historical difference from Luther that any liberation retrieval of a Lutheran confessional identity must find a way to traverse through with care and creativity.

Robert Butterfield has done an invaluable service for readers of Westhelle from around the world. Rendering his dense yet playful prose and wide-ranging quotations from multiple languages into readable English took commendable intellectual effort. Without denying my gratitude for this volume, I note how more editorial care could have been taken to relate these essays to the previously published body of Westhelle's work. The first essay on the cross has not previously been translated into English to this reviewer's knowledge, but the content bears similarity to the biblical material on the cross in the first chapters of Westhelle's 2006 Scandalous God. Two essays on ecological themes printed here have already appeared in substantially the same content in the 2016 Cascade Press volume Transfiguring Luther. I mention these connections here to aid scholars and pastors eager to carry forward Westhelle's project of liberating Luther.