Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf

First published: Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1996

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Spiritual treatise; theology

Core issue(s): Good vs. evil; reconciliation; repentance; suffering

Overview

Exclusion and Embrace differs from the many ethical and philosophical responses to the post-Cold War communal crises of the 1990’s, such as the works of Michael Ignatieff, by its explicit Christianity. Miroslav Volf suggests that Jesus Christ epitomized the promise of creative nonviolence when, as the Son of God, equipped with all the power imaginable, he did not choose to retaliate against his enemies. Christ’s forgiveness of those who crucified him stands as the paradigm for the unconditional acceptance of the other.

It is all too easy to urge people to forgive each other, but far harder to provide a practical rationale, other than mere adherence to precept, to do so. Equally, it is far easier to urge forgiveness when the injured group does not include onself. As a Croat who grew up in a country that eventually became engaged in communal violence with the Serbs, Volf realizes he has to ask harder questions and demand more complex answers than overly easy paradigms of forgiveness assume. Too often, people suppose that reconciliation can be accomplished in one gesture: a handshake, a kiss, even a treaty. However, literature—for example, Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e., English translation, 1611), in which King Priam forgives the man who killed his son, yet the Trojan War goes on—shows this is too much to ask.

Volf argues that the victims have to give up any impulse for further revenge and the perpetrators of oppression must also repent of their acts. He suggests that privileged Westerners often emphasize the rhetoric of unilateral peace and forgiveness, all the while presuming a social stability that people who have been the objects of communal violence have lost forever. For oppressed people, Volf suggests, rhetoric of a wrathful God will not seem as alien. To overcome violence, people must not merely wish it away but also see when it is part of God’s plan and when it is not. This involves seeing reconciliation as a general drama, not a one-time event. Volf urges not a poetry of ethics but what might be termed a drama of reconciliation, an embrace and acceptance of the other that can transpire only when exclusion is recognized, ventilated, and played out. Volf’s dense, abstract book is not a practical handbook for reconciling groups in conflict; it is a reckoning of the theological basis on which such a reconciliation might be grounded.

An interesting aspect of Volf’s book is the way he cites many postmodern theorists, most of whom are radical secularists. In including writers such as Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, Tzvetan Todorov, Edward Said, and Michel Foucault, who are more familiar names in advanced interdisciplinary study in university humanities departments than in theological discourses, Volf widens the frame of his discussion beyond the interest of only the religiously minded. He also subjects his arguments to the greatest possible rigor by measuring them against the most frequently cited intellectuals of his time. Yet Volf always takes care to buttress his own position with respect to these thinkers.

He accepts the thrust of Foucault’s contention that what is termed “truth” is often a rationalization of whatever power is predominant at the time. However, Volf suggests that a restrained and self-critical exercise of power can result from practicing a truth that is not simply a disguise for covert power relations. Volf also notes Deleuze’s characterization of the nomad as the symbol for a kind of existence unconstrained by laws or norms, deterritorialized and flowing. However, Volf contrasts this model with the biblical tradition’s most famous nomad: Abraham, who went out from his father’s family in Mesopotamia not only to simply circulate anonymously but also to answer a call from God to take up the land God had promised Abraham’s descendants.

A particularly interesting case is the way Volf engages with Irigaray’s thought in his chapter on gender identify. It is surprising that a book whose appeal lies in its applicability to political violence, which is largely imagined as being between groups of men, even has a chapter on gender. However, Volf recognizes that gender prejudice is a fundamental mark of estrangement from the other and from Christ’s acceptance of everybody. Woman and man, Volf argues, are equal in the eyes of God and interdependent with each other in their difference. Although he recognizes Irigaray’s criticism of the way God has often been characterized as masculine in gender, he does not accept her claim that the concept of God is irretrievably male and must therefore be jettisoned by a radical feminism. Rather, Volf argues, feminism threatens to make a specific gender into a deity, much in the way that masculinist religion ontologized masculinity, making it into an unarguable fact of being. Christianity, for example, forgot its God’s transcendence of gender and sex. Christ can be a reconciling agent for gender division as well as for ethnic and religious division.

Christian Themes

Volf is aware of the age-old dilemma of Christian nonviolence: how to forgive, accept, and reconcile without becoming passive victims, sheep easily preyed on by wolves. For Christians to adopt an attitude of complete nonresistance to adversaries would have meant that Christianity would no longer exist as a practical organism operating in the world and that evil would be allowed to prevail. Volf is a pacifist, but he recognizes that under some circumstances, a militant resistance against evil is not only appropriate but also necessary.

Nor is Volf sentimental about Christianity. He recognizes that Christianity has strayed from its ideals of embrace and acceptance, especially by the prejudices Christianity has promulgated with respect to Jews, the founding biblical people. Furthermore, though Christ preaches peace in the Gospels, he resorts to imagery of violence and of division between the saved and unsaved. Volf answers this by urging a look at the entire drama of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, not just isolated acts of violence or appropriation of language into the rhetoric of violence. Furthermore, the violence of God, as illustrated in the idea of the day of judgment, is of a different order than human violence. According to Volf, God does not endorse one form of human violence as divinely permissible and disallow others; rather he reserves the sole prerogative to manifest violence in any kind of overall plan. Therefore, human violence ultimately infringes on divine prerogative. If we trust in God, realizing that his ultimate motives may well be beyond our understanding, we will learn to renounce violence for ourselves. Christ’s radical embrace of suffering on the cross enacts an opening toward the incomprehensible that can guide even those who feel themselves to have been profoundly wronged in stretching out in forgiveness toward the other.

Some commentators have noted that, though Volf shows how Christ can provide such a model of radical inclusion, he does not show that Christ is necessary to play this role, or that the institutional church, as opposed to the figure of Christ himself, is at all a prerequisite of reconciliation. Volf might reply that he is unfolding a nonexclusive model of Christianity that deliberately reaches out to the other. Though Volf strongly opposes modern rationalism and postmodern relativism, he strives for a mode of Christianity fundamentally biblical yet also in dialogue with the forces at play in the contemporary world.

Sources for Further Study

Baum, Gregory. “Liberating Victims and Victimizers.” Review of Exclusion and Embrace. The Christian Century 115 (February 4-11, 1998): 117-119. Review focuses on Volf’s themes of radical forgiveness and unconditional acceptance of Jesus Christ as a prerequisite to accepting the other.

Hatch, John B. “Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the Rhetoric of Race Relations.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (2003): 737-764. Situates Volf’s theology in the context of race relations in America.

Jones, J. Gregory. “Finding the Will to Embrace the Enemy.” Christianity Today 41 (April, 1997) 29-32. Writing from an evangelical Christian perspective, Jones hails Volf’s subtle, nonretributive treatment of the issue of sin and repentance, and notes the extent to which Volf remains above binary opposition. Jones, though, finds Volf’s exposition lacks a core sense of Christian theological assertion.

Miller, Kevin D. “The Clumsy Embrace.” Christianity Today 42 (October, 1998): 65-70. This profile-interview of Volf specifically discusses his theology in light of the warfare in the former Yugoslavia, focusing especially on his exposition on the parable of the prodigal son.

Oppenheimer, Mark. “Embracing Theology.” Christian Century 120 (January 11, 2003): 18-23. A biographical profile of Volf, especially informative on his Pentecostal youth in Croatia; also includes an explication of his major ideas, including his theology of forgiveness.