Missions Resources - Bibliography
Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
Authors: Volf, Miroslav
ISBN: 0-687-00282-6
Publisher: Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996
Number of pages: 333
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
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This is the most important book on ethnicity and reconciliation at urbana.org. Miroslav Volf is taking on a fiercly critical audience - fellow theologians, but his insight is biblical, profound, and personal. Volf is a Croatian theologian, who got drawn into a study of ethnicity during the Balkan wars of the mid-nineties. Specifically, he knew God wanted him not to hate Serbs, despite their ethnic cleansing and terrorism against his own people. Volf found this call to love them disgusting, but he started working on it, and learning and submitting to scripture. He also was not going to compromise on justice, as far as the bible is concerned. The violence, the systematic rape, the savagery of human agency cannot be done away with. Volf is about talking truth - there is real, serious, "cosmic terror" out there. The result is this book.
Exclusion, as Volf uses the word, turns out to be one of the most fundamental sins of the human life. Embrace is a coverall term for reconciliation, peace, wellness in community and above all God's reign. God's call to Embrace is one of the core commandments in scripture. Indeed, even the Great Commission is about Embrace. God is creating a kingdom and a new people whom he calls his own. We have the privilege of rejecting all our individualistic, tribal, cultic, segregationary and nationalistic impulses for God to replace them with the fruit of his spirit. We have the privilege of proclaiming the good news of a new kingdom to replace our kingdoms and nations and personal castles.
The tension lies between grace for the perpetrators and justice for the innocent. Volf writes in the preface:
It was a difficult book to write. My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God's Lamb offered for the guilty. How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators? ... In a sense even more disturbingly, I felt that my very faith was at odds with itself, divided between the God who delivers the need and the God who abandons the crucified, between the demand to bring justice for the victims and the call to embrace the perpetrator.
Volf also discusses something even harder than forgiveness: God will ultimately call us to forget. I impulsively reacted with scorn upon his statement, but I realized through Volf's teaching that scripture is quite clear on the matter. We will have to forget the evils we have suffered. But that is a paradox! How can one forget these wrongs and yet retain one's identity? Doesn't Scripture promise that the kings will bring the glories of their nations into the new Jerusalem? And aren't the very glories of many nations their survival and faith despite genocide and oppression? What does it mean to be Jewish, or African American, or Irish, or Croatian, without memory of oppression? Yet God promises us a new name in heaven, and ultimately, he will command us to forget and he will empower us to do so.
In his Urbana 03 speech, Samuel Escobar said:
[T]ranscultural mission means going to "the other," to the one who is different from us. This means many times a movement from hostility to hospitality, from exclusion to embrace. One of the important evangelical theologians of our days is Miroslav Volf, a Croatian who lived through the horrible experience of war and ethnic cleansing in what used to be Yugoslavia. His book Exclusion and Embrace is a book for our times if we want to explore in depth the missionary challenges of our time. Volf says, "For the followers of the crucified Messiah, their main message is: hate belongs before God not in a reflectively managed and manicured form of a confession, but as a pre-reflective outburst from the depths of our being. Hidden in the dark chambers of our hearts and nourished by the system of darkness, hate grows and seeks to infect everything with its hellish will to exclusion. In the light of the justice and love of God however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness." Forgiveness means that exclusion is substituted by embrace, a change of attitude and outlook that Jesus brings to the life of those that want to accept him.
Volf takes us one step further with a necessary reference to our trinitarian faith. "Why should I embrace the other?" he asks and his answer is "the others are part of my own true identity. I cannot live authentically without welcoming the others - the other gender, other person or other cultures - into the very structure of my being. For I am created to reflect the personality of the triune God." Our transformation, our salvation, our conversion continue to be Christocentric. However, we cannot understand Jesus Christ apart from the Father and the Spirit. "The one divine person is not that person only, but includes the other divine persons in itself; it is what it is only through the indwelling of the other. The Son is the Son because the Father and the Spirit indwell him; without this interiority of the Father and the Spirit there would be no son. Every divine person is the other persons, but he is the other person in his own particular way. Analogously, the same is true of human persons created in the image of God. Their identity as persons is conditioned by the identity of other persons in their social relations." This recovery of the trinitarian dimension of our Christology has important consequences for evangelism. To begin with, it exposes the excessive individualism of our concepts and practices in evangelism.
This way of understanding conversion to Jesus Christ as a movement from exclusion to embrace will have special relevance in the coming years. Tribalism and ethnic cleansing has not ceased, its ugly face is showing up in Africa, in Spain, in Latin America. Migrants and refugees are among the unreached peoples of our days. And also many migrants are becoming missionaries in the places to which they go, yes the poor are announcing the Kingdom. The children of the Kingdom in churches are to demonstrate that for them exclusion has been overcome by embrace. Exclusion is becoming part of the political agenda of European countries that are now experiencing an avalanche of immigrants from Latin America, the former Soviet Union and Africa. There are American politicians that also want to bring an exclusionist policy for immigrants. Immigrants are used as cheap labour because they are necessary but then when it is convenient they are forcefully expelled. And there are many churches that do not see immigrants as human beings but only as possible converts. The approach must change. I like the way Hispanic theologian Justo Gonzalez expresses this, "If the Christian Gospel is not powerful enough within the church itself to lead us through the difficulties of ethnic conflict and cultural dissonance we can hardly claim that it is good news to a world going to similar difficulties on a much larger scale. The church must be one not primarily for its own sake or its own order, its own sense of security, etc. The church must be one because a fragmented church is not much help to a fragmented world." (Justo González, For the healing of the nations, 109)
This book is simultaneously the deepest and most intelligent book I have ever read on the topic, and the least stuck in the ivory tower. Its pages are full of the joy of knowing God with ones heart and mind. Exclusion and Embrace took a whole month for me to work through, including getting confused and re-reading sections. It was worth every hour. It has changed the way I relate to my church, where I am a minority, to the lost around me, and to the world news.
Paul Grant
urbana.org editor
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