Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

by Miroslav Volf

Overview

Life at the end of the twentieth century presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion.

Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we "learn to live with one another," but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God.

Is there any hope of embracing our enemies? Of opening the door to reconciliation? Miroslav Volf, a Yale University theologian, has won the 2002 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his book, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon, 1996). Volf argues that “exclusion” of people who are alien or different is among the most intractable problems in the world today. He writes, “It may not be too much to claim that the future of our world will depend on how we deal with identity and difference. The issue is urgent. The ghettos and battlefields throughout the world—in the living rooms, in inner cities, or on the mountain ranges—testify indisputably to its importance.” A Croatian by birth, Volf takes as a starting point for his analysis the recent civil war and “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia, but he readily finds other examples of cultural, ethnic, and racial conflict to illustrate his points. And, since September 11, one can scarcely help but plug the new world players into his incisive descriptions of the dynamics of interethnic and international strife.

Exclusion happens, Volf argues, wherever impenetrable barriers are set up that prevent a creative encounter with the other. It is easy to assume that “exclusion” is the problem or practice of “barbarians” who live “over there,” but Volf persuades us that exclusion is all too often our practice “here” as well. Modern western societies, including American society, typically recite their histories as “narratives of inclusion,” and Volf celebrates the truth in these narratives. But he points out that these narratives conveniently omit certain groups who “disturb the integrity of their ‘happy ending’ plots.” Therefore such narratives of inclusion invite “long and gruesome” counter-narratives of exclusion—the brutal histories of slavery and of the decimation of Native American populations come readily to mind, but more current examples could also be found.

Most proposed solutions to the problem of exclusion have focused on social arrangements—what kind of society ought we to create in order to accommodate individual or communal difference? Volf focuses, rather, on “what kind of selves we need to be in order to live in harmony with others.” In addressing the topic, Volf stresses the social implications of divine self-giving. The Christian scriptures attest that God does not abandon the godless to their evil, but gives of Godself to bring them into communion. We are called to do likewise—“whoever our enemies and whoever we may be.” The divine mandate to embrace as God has embraced is summarized in Paul’s injunction to the Romans: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you” (Romans 15:7).

Susan R. Garrett, Coordinator of the Religion Award, said that the Grawemeyer selection committee praised Volf’s book on many counts. These included its profound interpretation of certain pivotal passages of Scripture and its brilliant engagement with contemporary theology, philosophy, critical theory, and feminist theory. “Volf’s focus is not on social strategies or programs but, rather, on showing us new ways to understand ourselves and our relation to our enemies. He helps us to imagine new possibilities for living against violence, injustice, and deception.” Garrett added that, although addressed primarily to Christians, Volf's theological statement opens itself to religious pluralism by upholding the importance of different religious and cultural traditions for the formation of personal and group identity. The call to “embrace the other” is never a call to remake the other into one’s own image. Volf—who had just delivered a lecture on the topic of Exclusion and Embrace at a prayer breakfast for the United Nations when the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center—will present a lecture and receive his award in Louisville during the first week of April, 2002.

The annual Religion Award, which includes a cash prize of $200,000, is given jointly by Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville to the authors or originators of creative works that contribute significantly to an understanding of “the relationship between human beings and the divine, and ways in which this relationship may inspire or empower human beings to attain wholeness, integrity, or meaning, either individually or in community.” The Grawemeyer awards—given also by the University of Louisville in the fields of musical composition, education, psychology, and world order—honor the virtue of accessibility: works chosen for the awards must be comprehensible to thinking persons who are not specialists in the various fields.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780687002825
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	12/01/1996
Pages:	338
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and the Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He was educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, earning doctoral and post-doctoral degrees (with highest honors) from the University of Tübingen, Germany. He has written or edited more than 20 books and over 100 scholarly articles. His most significant books include Exclusion and Embrace (1996), winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and one of Christianity Today’s 100 most important religious books of the 20th century; Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (2016) and (with Matthew Croasmun) For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference (2019).

Read an Excerpt

Exclusion and Embrace

A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

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By Miroslav Volf

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 1996 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-1233-3

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CHAPTER 1

Distance and Belonging

Complicity

In the Introduction to Culture and Imperialism Edward W. Said writes that in the process of working on the book he came to a profoundly disturbing insight, namely "how very few of the British or French artists whom I admire took issue with the notion of subject' or 'inferior' races so prevalent among officials who practiced those ideas as a matter of course in ruling India or Algeria" (Said 1993, xiv). "Estimable and admirable works of art and learning," he continues, were "manifestly and unconcealedly" implicated in the imperial process (xiv). Writers who should have been a conscience of the culture were but a sophisticated echo of its base prejudices, their noble humanist ideals notwithstanding. It may well be that we should be surprised not at the writers, but at Said's surprise. Ought he not to have suspected at the outset that the veneer of artists' eloquent humanistic self-presentation might cover over a much coarser reality?! As Friedrich Nietzsche noted over a century ago in The Genealogy of Morals, artists have all too often been "smooth sycophants either of vested interests or of forces newly come to power" (Nietzsche 1956, 236). In any case, whether we are disappointed or cynical about artists' complicity in the imperial process, as Christians we should be slow to point the accusing finger. We have had our share of complicity in the imperial process. Though Frantz Fanon is not the most reliable guide on the matter, he is not entirely wrong when in The Wretched of the Earth he chides the church in the colonies for being "the foreigner's Church" and implanting" foreign influences in the core of the colonized people" (Fanon 1963,43). "She does not call the native to God's ways," he writes, "but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor" (42). Of course, this is not all we must say about the impact of missionary endeavor on native populations, not even the most important thing. Lamin Sanneh has rightly pointed to the paradox that by insisting on translation of the Gospel into the vernacular foreign missionaries established "the indigenous process by which foreign domination was questioned" (Sanneh 1987, 332). He suggested that Christian missions are "better seen as a translation movement, with consequences for vernacular revitalization, religious change and social transformation, than as a vehicle for Western cultural domination" (334). Yet, such subversions of the foreign domination notwithstanding, the complicity-witting or unwitting-of Christian churches with the imperial process remains an undeniable fact.

In one sense even more disquieting than the complicity itself is the pattern of behavior in which it is embedded. Our coziness with the surrounding culture has made us so blind to many of its evils that, instead of calling them into question, we offer our own versions of them-in God's name and with a good conscience. Those who refuse to be party to our mimicry we brand sectarians. Consider the following stinging indictment H. Richard Niebuhr makes in The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) on the issue of race:

The color line has been drawn so incisively by the church itself that its proclamation of the gospel of the brotherhood of Jew and Greek, of bond and free, of white and black has sometimes the sad sound of irony, and sometimes falls upon the ear as unconscious hypocrisy-but sometimes there is in it the bitter cry of repentance. (Niebuhr 1954,263)

Still today, many black Baptists or Methodists feel closer to black Muslims than to their white fellow Christians (cf. Berger 1996, 213f.). Or think of the big schism in the church, finalized in 1054 and today gaping wide as ever. It simply redoubled and reinforced religiously the boundary line that ran between Greek and Latin culture, between East and West. Slaves to their cultures, the churches were foolish enough to think of themselves as masters.

The overriding commitment to their culture serves churches worst in situations of conflict. Churches, the presumed agents of reconciliation, are at best impotent and at worst accomplices in the strife. The empirical research conducted by Ralph Premdas in a number of countries has shown "that the inter-communal antipathies present in the society at large are reflected in the attitudes of churches and their adherents" (Premdas 1994, 55). Though the clergy are often invited to adjudicate, "the reconciling thrust quickly evaporates after the initial effort" (55f). The most important reasons for failure are the "inter-locking relations of church and cultural section which spill into partisan politics marked by the mobilization of collective hate and cultivated bigotry" (56). Along with their parishioners the clergy are often" trapped within the claims of their own ethnic or cultural community" and thus serve as "legitimators of ethnic conflict" (56), their genuine desire to take seriously the Gospel call to the ministry of reconciliation notwithstanding.

At times even a genuine desire for reconciliation is absent. Cultural identity insinuates itself with religious force; Christian and cultural commitments merge (Assmann 1992, 157ff). Such sacralization of cultural identity is invaluable for the parties in conflict because it can transmute what is in fact a murder into an act of piety. Blind to the betrayal of Christian faith that both such sacralization of cultural identity and the atrocities it legitimizes represent, the "holy" murderers can even see themselves as the Christian faith's valiant defenders (as Serbian fighters have in their recent war against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia). Christian communities, which should be "the salt" of the culture, are too often as insipid as everything around them.

"If the salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?" asked Jesus rhetorically (Mark9:50). The feel of doom hangs over the question. Since you cannot season it, tasteless salt "is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot" (Matthew 5:13). Yet the very warning about being thrown out calls for "the bitter cry of repentance," as Niebuhr put it, and invites a turnabout. What we should turn away from seems clear: it is captivity to our own culture, coupled so often with blind self-righteousness. But what should we turn to? How should we live as Christian communities today faced with the "new tribalism" that is fracturing our societies, separating peoples and cultural groups, and fomenting vicious conflicts? What should be the relation of the churches to the cultures they inhabit? The answer lies, I propose, in cultivating the proper relation between distance from the culture and belonging to it.

Yet what does distance mean? What does belonging mean? Distance in the name of what? Belonging to what extent? Many profound theological issues are involved in answering these questions. I will explore them by examining what kind of relation between religious and cultural identity is implied, first, in the original call of Abraham and, second, in its Christian appropriation. In the final section I will then discuss what kinds of stances toward "others" a Christian construction of cultural identity implies and what kind of community the church needs to be if it is to support these stances.

Departing ...

At the very foundation of Christian faith stands the towering figure of Abraham (see Kuschel 1995). He is "the ancestor of all who believe" (Romans 4:11). What made Abraham deserve this title? "Faith" is the answer the Apostle Paul gave. Abraham was looking into the abyss of nonbeing as he contemplated his own body, "already as good as dead," and the "barrenness of Sarah's womb." There was nothing his hope could latch onto. Yet, "in the presence of God ... who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things which do not exist" (Romans 4:17, 19) Abraham "believed in the Lord" (Genesis 15:6) that he would have an heir-and became "the father of us all" (Romans 4:16).

Before we read that Abraham "believed" (Genesis 15:6), however, Genesis records that he "went forth" (12:4). God said to Abraham:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (12:1-3)

Sarah being barren (Genesis 11:30), the command to "go forth" placed before Abraham a difficult choice: he would either belong to his country, his culture, and his family and remain comfortably inconsequential or, risking everything, he would depart and become great-a blessing to "all the families of the earth" (Brueggemann 1977, 15f£.). If he is to be a blessing he cannot stay; he must depart, cutting the ties that so profoundly defined him. The only guarantee that the venture will not make him wither away like an uprooted plant was the word of God, the naked promise of the divine "I" that inserted itself into his life so relentlessly and uncomfortably. If he left, he would have to set out "not knowing where he was going" (Hebrews 11:8); only if the divine promise comes true will the land of his ancestors that he left emerge as the land of expulsion, a land to which Adam, Eve, Cain, and the builders of the tower of Babel have been expelled from the presence of God. Abraham chose to leave. The courage to break his cultural and familial ties and abandon the gods of his ancestors Goshua 24:2) out of allegiance to a God of all families and all cultures was the original Abrahamic revolution. Departure from his native soil, no less than the trust that God will give him an heir, made Abraham the ancestor of us all (see Hebrews 11:8).

The narrative of Abraham's call underlines that stepping out of enmeshment in the network of inherited cultural relations is a correlate of faith in the one God. As Jacob Neusner points out,

the great monotheist traditions insist upon the triviality of culture and ethnicity, forming trans-national, or trans-ethnic transcendental communities ... Judaism, Christianity, and Islam mean to overcome diversity in the name of a single, commanding God, who bears a single message for a humanity that is one in Heaven's sight. (Neusner 1997)

As I will argue later, from my perspective the talk about the "triviality of culture" and about "overcoming diversity" is too strong when taken at its face value (and there are reasons to believe that Neusner does not mean what he says in a strong sense). His main point, however, is well taken: the ultimate allegiance of those whose father is Abraham can be only to the God of "all families of the earth," not to any particular country, culture, or family with their local deities. The oneness of God implies God's universality, and universality entails transcendence with respect to any given culture. Abraham is a progenitor of a people which, as Franz Rosenzweig puts it, "even when it has a home ... is not allowed full possession of that home. It is only 'a stranger and a sojourner.' God tells it: 'The land is mine'" (Rosenzweig 1971, 300)

To be a child of Abraham and Sarah and to respond to the call of their God means to make an exodus, to start a voyage, become a stranger (Genesis 23:4; 24:1-9). It is a mistake, I believe, to complain too much about Christianity being "alien" in a given culture, as Choan-Seng Song has done, for instance, in the Introduction to his Third-Eye Theology about the place of Christianity "in the world of Asia" (Song 1991, 9). There are, of course, wrong ways of being a stranger, such as when an alien culture (say one of the Western cultures) is idolatrously proclaimed as the gospel in another culture (say one of the Asian cultures). But the solution for being a stranger in a wrong way is not full naturalization, but being a stranger in the right way. Much like Jews and Muslims, Christians can never be first of all Asians or Americans, Croatians, Russians, or Tutsis, and then Christians. At the very core of Christian identity lies an all-encompassing change of loyalty, from a given culture with its gods to the God of all cultures. A response to a call from that God entails rearrangement of a whole network of allegiances. As the call of Jesus' first disciples illustrates, "the nets" (economy) and "the father" (family) must be left behind (Mark 1:1620). Departure is part and parcel of Christian identity. Since Abraham is our ancestor, our faith is "at odds with place," as Richard Sennett puts it in The Conscience of the Eye (Sennett 1993, 6).

In today's cultural climate Abraham's kind of departure might receive censure from two opposite (though in some important respects unified) fronts. On the one hand it might be challenged as too goal oriented, too linear, not radical enough; on the other, it might be dismissed as too detached, too aloof, in some sense too radical. The first challenge comes from postmodern thinkers, such as Gilles Deleuze. One way to describe his thought is to say that he made "departing" into a philosophical program; "nomadic" functions for him as a central philosophical category. "Nomads are always in the middle," writes Claire Parnet explicating Deleuze (Deleuze and Parnet 1980,37). They have no fixed location, but roam from place to place, always departing and always arriving. "There is no starting point just as there is no goal to reach," underlines Deleuze (10); every place of arrival is a point of departure. Indeed, there is even no stable subject, either divine or human, who could give direction to the departures. One is always departing pure and simple, flowing like a stream, to use one of Deleuze's favorite images, merging with other streams and changing in the process, de-territorializing them as one is de-territorialized by them (57).

Contrast the "nomadic" life of Abraham. Refusing to go with the flow, Abraham decided to go forth in response to a call of God. Both the call and the decision to obey it presuppose an acting agent, a stable subject. Moreover, Abraham's departure had a starting point-his country, his kindred, and his father's house; and it had a definite goal-creation of a people (" a great nation") and possession of a territory (" the land that I will show you"). Departure is here a temporary state, not an end in itself; a departure from a particular place, not from all sites (pace Robbins 1991, 107). And this is the way it must be if the talk about departures is to be intelligible. Departures without some sense of an origin and a goal are not departures; they are instead but incessant roaming, just as streams that flow in all directions at one and the same time are not streams but, in the end, a swamp in which all movement has come to a deadly rest. Of course, social intercourse happens not to follow the prescriptions of Deleuze's theory, at least not yet. Though Deleuze has difficulty thinking of the concept of human agency, people do act as agents; they have goals, make things happen, and often enough these are evil things. What can those who wish to depart without wanting to arrive do to resist the evildoer? Without subjectivity, intentionality, and goal-orientedness, they will be carried by the stream of life, "blissfully" taking in whatever ride life has in store for them, always saying and accepting everything, including every misdeed that those who have goals choose to commit (Frank 1984, 404, 431). Against his intention (Deleuze 1991, 195ff.), Deleuze would have to say "yes" without being able to say "no," much like the Nietzschean "all-contented" ass who always says "yea" (Nietzsche 1969,212). No, father Abraham, better to stay with your family and in your country than to follow Deleuze's call to go forth.

"Stay within the network of your relations"-this is what the critics from the other side would advise Abraham. Such advice might come from those feminists who, unlike Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, consider separation and independence ills to overcome rather than goods to strive for (de Beauvoir 1952). To them, Abraham could appear as a paradigmatic male, eager to separate himself ("go forth"), to secure his independence and glory ("great nation"), crush those who resist him ("curse"),be benevolent to those who praise him ("blessing"), and finally extend his power to the ends of the earth ("all the families"). Abraham is all transcendence and no immanence, the transcendence of a separated and conquering male "I" underwritten by the imposing transcendence of the divine "1." Such a transcendent self is "phallic" and destructive, the argument would go. Must not every son of Abraham count with the possibility that his father will be called to take him "to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering" (Genesis 22:2), with no guarantees that God will provide a lamb as a substitute? (Lyotard and Gruber 1995, 22). An "anti-phallic" revolution must bring down the detached and violent self, situate it in the web of relationships, and help it recover its immanence. "Immanence," writes Catherine Keller in From a Broken Web, "is the way relations are part of who I am" (Keller 1986, 18). The new, she suggests, comes not through the heroic history of separating selves that respond to a transcendent call ("restless masculine roving'),but is created "with and within the field of relations" (18).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf. Copyright © 1996 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
Introduction,
The Cross, the Self, and the Other,
Part One,
Chapter 1 Distance and Belonging,
Chapter II Exclusion,
Chapter III Embrace,
Chapter IV Gender Identity,
Part Two,
Chapter V Oppression and Justice,
Chapter VI Deception and Truth,
Chapter VII Violence and Peace,
Bibliography,
Index,