It took me several months to read Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace (1996) both because I was in the midst of school and other obligations as well as the fact that it is a work best read slowly. Here is my review and reflection on the work. The short version is that this dense and complex book is perhaps the most challenging and necessary work I’ve read in years. Volf tackles the topic of violence that occurs along race and ethnic lines that is often legitimized through divine invocations. What are its sources? Why does it happen? And what is the Christian response? The issue is particualrly relevant to Volf whose native Croatia was coming out of a long ethnic conflict with Serbia as he wrote the book. Volf opens the book recounting that after he presented a lecture on his theology of embrace, his friend and mentor Jürgen Moltmann asked him if he could embrace a četnik.

It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called “četnik” had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities. I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a četnik—the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify the embrace? Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. “No, I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.” (9)

It is in this setting that Volf begins his deeply personal, heavily philosophical, and powerfuly theological exploration. The hope for Volf is in the gospel of God’s history of salvation, but pat answers will not do. As I read this book, it gave me new lenses to see the world. Films I watched, books I read, and news reports I heard were filtered through and placed in the conversation Volf begins in Exclusion and Embrace. The book never flinches from diving into the hard questions and often comes up with harder answers. It is a book I wish everyone would read, but I know that it is too challenging and complex for a general audience—I often had to read paragraphs several times to understand the intricacies of Volf’s arguments. Perhaps we can hope that he will at least come out with a more popular version of this work that is frighteningly relevant in our world that is bursting at the seams with ethnic, religious, and idelogical conflict.

For the longer review, click below.

The subtitle of Exclusion and Embrace is perhaps the best descriptor why the work is so dense: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconcilitation. Volf seeks to explore the vastness that each of those terms include. He wrote the book in the early to mid-1990’s while still a professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary (he has since moved onto Yale Divinity School). Volf situates the book in the stories of three cities, whose narratives around the time of publication spoke of deep divisions and the need for deeper reconciliation: Berlin, Los Angeles, and Sarjevo. Volf continually returns to these narratives and other concrete examples to situate his theories. In his exploration, Volf looks at modern, postmodern, and post-colonial philosophies to see how they answer the problems exclusion, that lead to so much war and violence. His approach to these different philosophies is appreciative—that is, he tries to find common ground first—but ultimately he finds them all incomplete. The only hope for the radical divisions in this world, which are the root of sin and are sinful themselves, is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Exclusion is the source of the destructive violence one finds in the world. Volf is well aware of the effects of exclusion as a native Croatian who grew up under an oppressive communist regeime and later saw atrocities committed by differing factions in the Serbian-Croatian War in the early 1990’s. What is the answer to this exclusion that rejects and dehumanizes the other? Volf does not accept the modern vision of inclusion, which he argues is truly a form of exclusion, using critiques from postmodern and post-colonial thinkers. The modern inclusion in which all differences of the other are either absorbed or squashed destroys the uniqueness of the different party. However, the postmodern version of inclusion is also lacking in its relativistic program to remove all boundaries. Life without boundaries is chaos, which is death, and we must be able to differentiate ourselves from the other person and yet not exclude them from ourselves. For Volf, the key biblical narrative of exclusion is found in the tale of Cain and Abel (Gen 4.1-16), which is more than a case of sibling rivalry, but a tale of an encounter between “them” and “us.” Here Volf develops most fully his understanding of sin.

The power of sin rests less on the insuppressible urge of an effect than on the persuasiveness of the good reasons, generated by a self in order to maintain its own false identity….

Sin is not so much a failure of knowledge as a misdirection of will which generates its own counter-knowledge… To commit sin is not simply to make a wrong choice, but to succumb to an evil power. (96)

Cain’s act of exclusion removed himself from community and from relationship with God. “God’s question made clear that life in community means sharing a common social space and taking responsibility for the other.” (98) Volf then turns to theology for the answer to the problem of exclusion.

The solution is not inclusion, but embrace, whose understanding Volf situates in his view of the Trinity and the cross. Volf, a social Trinitarian building off of Moltmann and perichoretic theology, sees the community of the Trinity in eternal embrace. Each person of the Trinity is uniquely themselves, but also recognizes that their identity is intricately related to the other members of the Trinity. The Son is who he is because of his self-identity, because he is not the Father or the Spirit, and because of his relationship to the other members of the Trinity. Each member of the Trinity can embrace the others and their differences without absorbing them and thus diminishing the uniqueness of the other. Similarly, each member of the Trinity understands that they cannot be who they are without the other persons of the Trinity. This is all rather heady stuff, but the implication for Volf is that as humans created in God’s image, we are called to join in the embrace of the Trinity as well as engage as fully social beings, meaning that we are to embrace each other. We are who we are because of others and we cannot be who we are without others. (It does not take a stretch of the imagination to see that Volf is no fan of the radical individualism found in Rene Descartes’ philosophy.)

Secondly, embrace is seen in the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross. Here God takes all his enemies and brings them into a social setting in which reconciliation can truly occur. Embrace must include the enemy and not only like-minded friends. The cross demands this.

As a metaphor, embrace implies that the self and the other belong together in their mutual alterity. For the self shaped by the cross of Christ and the life of the triune God, however, embrace includes not just the other who is a friend but also the other who is the enemy. Such a self will seek to open its arms toward the other even when the other holds a sword. The other will, of course, have to drop the sword, maybe even have the sword taken out of his hand, before the actual embrace can take place. Yet even the struggle over the sword will be undergirded by the will to embrace the other and be embraced in return. (146)

Embrace needs grace; without grace, we will never be able to move beyond the cycles of continual violence. But grace is risky and simply because one party is willing to embrace the other does not mean that the other party will return the gesture. Again, Christ hanging on the cross attests to this fact. It is in the realm of embrace that we can have a society based upon God’s value of covenant rather than on human ideas of contracts. Ultimately, embrace will require the gift on nonremembering, or a divine wiping out of all memory of evil. It is a complex idea and one that does not seem possible even for Volf this side of the last days. But we will never be able to fully embrace others as long as the memory of their offense lives on.

Volf looks at the physical act of embrace to explain the steps he sees necessary in embracing the other. First, there is the opening of the arms, which communicates that as humans, we are not “self-enclosed” identities. “I do not want to be myself only,” Volf writes, “I want the other to be part of who I am and I want to be part of the other.” (141) Second, there is the act of waiting for the other’s response. This is the risky part of embrace. For the other may reject the one seeking embrace or even hurt them. But it is the vulnerability of the act that “distinguishes embrace from grasping after the other and holding the other in one’s power.” (143) Third, there is the closing of the arms, or the actual embrace. “In an embrace, the identity of the self is both preserved and transformed, and the alterity of the other is both affirmed as alterity and partly received into the ever changing identity of the self.” (143) Finally, there is the opening of the arms. If the arms never open again, then what we have is not the embrace of two interdependent persons, but the absorbtion of one into the other. “The other must be let go so that her alterity—her genuine dynamic identity—may be preserved; and the self must take itself back into itself so that its own identity, enriched by the traces that the presence of the other has left, may be preserved.” (144-145)

Volf turns to Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son (Lk 15.11-32) as a key narrative that shows the “drama of embrace.” While the prodigal son “[cuts] himself off from the relations which constitute his very identity” (157), the father “does not let go of the relationship between them.” (159) Using strong exegesis, Volf looks at how the elder brother excludes the prodigal while the father embraces him. The older brother focuses on a rules-based understanding of life.

What is so profoundly different about the “new order” of the father is that it is not built around the alternatives as defined by the older brother: either strict adherence to the rules or disorder and disintegration; either you are “in” or you are “out,” depending on whether you have or have not broken a rule. He rejected this alternative because his behavior was governed by the one fundamental “rule”: relationship has priority over all rules. Before any rule can apply, he is a father to his sons and his sons are brothers to one another. (164)

Volf then takes his understanding of exclusion and embrace and applies it to the topic of gender identity (Chapter IV) as a case study. Here Volf argues that we cannot truly learn anything specific about what it means to be a woman or a man by looking at God since God has no sex or gender. “If God is completely beyond sexual distinctions but our language of God is necessarily gendered, then all specifically masculine or feminine content of the language about God stems exclusively from the creaturely realm.” (170, emphasis in the original) Rather, we can understand what it means to be human by looking that the Trinity and how the members of the Godhead interact with each other. The relationships of the Trinity are found in radical self-giving. Here Volf is most sobering:

In a world of enmity self-giving is the risky and hard work of love. There are no guarantees that self-giving will overcome enmity and that the evildoers will not try to invade the space that the self has made and crush those willing to give themselves for the good of others. We will have to resist such evildoers without betraying the commitment to self-giving. But though self-giving has no assurance of success, it does have the promise of eternity because it reflects the character of the divine Trinity. (189)

I find Volf’s understanding of gender identity challenging. Those who do not accept his understanding of a social Trinity may reject his vision of gender identity. I for one, agree with his theological precepts, but I am not sure I am entirely convinced by the rest of his argument in this chapter.

In the second part of the book, Volf looks at oppression and justice (Chapter V), deception and truth (Chapter VI), and violence and peace (Chapter VII). Again in each of these chapters, the author is thoughtful and willing to explore deeply into complex issues. He consistently finds hope and answers in the narrative and person of Jesus. Answers found in modernity and postmodernity are appreciated and critiqued. Volf does not assume that there is one patently Christian answer that exists abstractly apart from all culture, but he is aware that the message of the gospel is unique in that it remains untainted by sin, though our understanding of it does not. On the issue of violence, Volf is sadly unclear at times. He seems to say both that it is appropriate to forcefully restrain the evildoer and that the only Christian response is non-violence. It is a complex issue and he is far from settled on the matter. The strongest point he makes on Christians engaging in violence is that they should never seek religious legitimation for their violent acts. (306) Violence, like judgment and salvation, is in God’s hands. In a later interview with Christianity Today right after September 11, 2001, Volf clarified his views on violence and restraining the evildoer.

I will put some longer quotes from these chapters up on the blog later so as to not burden this already lengthy review.

In all, I loved this book. I am challenged by this book, as Volf was challenged as he wrote the work (see pages 137-138). If I may be so bold, Exclusion and Embrace is a work that should determine the direction of theological and ethical studies. It should be read together in churches and other communities and reflected upon prayerfully.