"Sundays" are for Volf - Chapter 7: Violence and Peace

One great quote from Volf's concluding chapter:

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone....Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God's refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent [take Darfur, for instance], it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind. (Exclusion and Embrace, 304)

And that's it for the book and this blog series. To quote my colleague, Don Taylor, who began the book well after I did, and finished before me: "That's one of the best books I've read in a lot of years."

Other Volf Posts:
Introduction
Chapter 1: Distance and Belonging
Chapter 2: Exclusion
Chapter 3: Embrace
Chapter 4: Gender Identity
Interlude
Chapter 5: Oppression and Justice
Easter Sunday
Chapter 6: Deception and Truth

"Sundays" are for Volf - Chapter 6: Deception and Truth

Once classes began this semester, my desire to post something intelligent on each chapter of Exclusion and Embrace slowed down my reading. So I'll content myself with a couple brief quotations from Volf's excellent penultimate chapter on a chastened epistemology:

"The argument that there is a single truth about some important matters and that one should strive to find it should be plausible to Christians. After all, do we not believe that the day will come when the secrets of the hearts will be revealed and when God will say out loud the way things really were--who did what to whom and by what means?...Trying is not the same as succeeding, however. Though God knows the way things were and will one day say it out aloud, human beings know only partially and can say it only inadequately. There is now way to climb up to God's judgment seat to make infallible pronouncements, so to speak, in God's stead as God's vicars on earth" (242-3).

"To be a witness means to strive to do the self-effacing and noncreative work of--telling the truth. That does not mean that a witness will have to situate herself 'nowhere' and in sublime disinterestedness make perspectiveless pronouncements about what everyone and anyone must have seen or heard. No, standing at one place or another she will tell in her own words what she has seen or heard. But though a good witness cannot and need not abstract from her particular situatedness, she will seek to renounce the clandestine imperialism of her own self-enclosed self which refuses to make space for the other as other in its cognition. That a witness will rarely fully succeed and sometimes not even try, goes without saying. Hence we keep suspicion close at hand even when listening to those whom we take to be good witnesses. But neither our suspicion nor witnesses' frequent failure alters the obligation and the ability of the witness to respect the otherness of the other--by seeking to tell the truth" (268).

Easter Sunday and Volf

"There is a profound wisdom about the nature of our world in the simple credo of the early church 'that Christ died for our sins' (1 Corinthians 15:3). At the core of Christian faith lies the claim that God entered history and died on the cross in the person of Jesus Christ for an unjust and deceitful world. In taking upon himself the sin of the world, God told the truth about the deceitful world and enthroned justice in an unjust world. When God was made sin in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21), the world of deceit and injustice was set aright. Sins were atoned for. The cry of the innocent blood was attended to. Since the new world has become reality in the crucified and resurrected Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) it is possible to live the new world in the midst of the old in an act of gratuitous forgiveness without giving up the struggle for truth and justice. One can embrace perpetrators in forgiveness because God has embraced them through atonement."
- Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Abingdon 1996), 294-5.

"Sundays" are for Volf - Chapter 5: Oppression and Justice

Volf begins this excellent chapter with an illustration borrowed from Peter Berger about "competing, indeed clashing, justices":

In 1843 General Charles Napier conquered Sind and installed the order of British colonial rule, no doubt to bring the blessings of civilization to the 'inferior races.' When the British came, one of the colonial impositions they instituted was the prohibition of sati--of widows being cremated on their husbands' funeral pyres....The Brahmans of Sind, however, defended sati as an age-old custom. General Napier's response was as simple as it was arrogant: 'My nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive, we hang them. Let us all act according to national custom!' (193)

What to do in the face of competing claims to justice?

The problem with the claim that there is one universal justice, says Volf, is that we don't have access to it: "Unlike God's knowledge [Christians'] knowledge is limited and distorted. Their judgments about what is just in concrete situations are inescapably particular....We must therefore distinguish between our idea of God's justice and God's justice itself" (198-199).

But it won't do to adopt the postmodern defence of difference and opposition to a universal conception of justice: "Postmodern thinkers have difficulty in thinking about justice without entangling themselves in self-contradictions, and they are hard put to explain how, on their understanding of human beings, struggle against injustice is possible" (205).

Volf has more sympathy for the concept of justice within a particular tradition, but even this won't solve disputes between rival traditions.

In the end, Volf does not suggest that we should attempt agreement on what justice is. Instaed, he proposes "how we should go about seeking and pursuing justice in the context of plurality and enmity." His solution, not surprisingly, involves embrace: "[A]greement on justice depends on the will to embrace the other...justice itself will be unjust as long as it does not become a mutual embrace" (197).

N.B. These excerpts don't do justice to the richness of Volf's proposal.

"Sundays" are for Volf - Interlude

My "younger" (older) sister drew my attention to this example of Volf putting the theory he develops in Exclusion and Embrace into practice. Volf is listed as one of the authors of, "Loving God and Neighbor Together," a Christian response to the Muslim open letter, "A Common Word Between Us and You." But since Volf heads up the Yale Center for Faith and Culture that published the response, I suspect he is its primary author.

At any rate, Volf's involvement in the response takes on added significance when you remember that he is a Croatian, and that Exclusion and Embrace was written out of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in which Muslims played a role. (I could make this point a lot stronger if I could equate Muslim Serbs with the cetnik fighters Volf describes as his enemies in the preface to Exclusion and Embrace, but I confess that I remain baffled by the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.)

This post is an interlude, since I haven't read the chapter in Volf's Exclusion and Embrace for this week. There are three more chapters to go, and they all look good: "Oppression and Justice," "Deception and Truth," and "Violence and Peace." We'll see what happens next week. I fear that between being a dad and preparing for classes, I will have time for little else.

"Sundays" are for Volf - Chapter 4: Gender Identity

In this fourth chapter of Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf applies his discussion of exclusion and embrace in the previous chapters to the test-case of gender identity: "the decisive question will be how the nature of God ought to inform relations between men and women as well as their construction of 'feminity' and 'masculinity' (169).

Over against some, such as Karl Barth, who argue that Scripture's use of masculine images for God means that God is primarily a model for human fathers, and others who argue as a result that we need to construct or focus on feminine metaphors for God, Volf insists that "Since God is beyond sexual difference, there is nothing in God that can correspond to the specifically fatherly relation that a man has toward his progeny....what a father can learn from God are his responsibilities as a human being who happens to be a father....Whether we use masculine or feminine metaphors for God, God models our common humanity, not our gender specificity" (171-2).

Volf then proposes a normative model for the relationship between male and female based on a relational model of the Trinity. With regard to the Trinity, the Father is first in constitution because "he is the source of divinity," but the different members are co-equal and their relationship is egalitarian rather than hierarchical. The members of the Trinity are distinct, but through self-giving they mutually indwell each other. God's purposes for humankind flow out of this relationship: "God came into the world so as to make human beings, created in the image of God, live with one another and with God in the kind of communion in which divine persons live with one another" (181).

What does this mean for gender identity? "What is normative is not some 'essence' of femininity and masculinity, but the procedures, modeled on the life of the triune God, through which women and men in specific cultural settings should negotiate their mutual relations and their constructions of femininity and masculinity" (182).

What, you ask, about the passages in the New Testament that seem to present a hierarchical pattern for male-female relations (at least in marriage)? Volf "will simply disregard the subordinationism as culturally conditioned and interpret the statements from within the framework of an egalitarian understanding of the Trinitarian relations and from the perspective of the egalitarian thrust of such central biblical assertions as the one found in Galatians 3:28" (182-3).

I am sympathetic towards Volf's egalitarian perspective, but disregarding passages as culturally relative is not, in my view, a useful way forward. This is because I reject the idea--which originated in classic liberalism but is now very popular in evangelical circles--that one can extract timeless truth and discard the culturally conditioned husk. As one of my students put it last year, the Bible is timeless in the same way that we speak of Shakespeare being timeless, even though it is obvious that one can't understand Shakespeare without knowing something about Shakespeare's historical context. (I am influenced here by Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament [HarperSanFrancisco, 1996].)

"Sundays" are for Volf - Chapter 3: Embrace

From time to time I wonder how I would respond to the old fundamentalist objection to the liberal social gospel: Why does Volf keep talking about the socio-political implications of the gospel to the neglect of other more important matters? Isn't the gospel really about saving souls? Leaving aside for the moment my sense that the fundamentalists and many of their evangelical successors threw out the baby with the bath water, the most convincing response is this: Volf's is a personal as much as a political challenge. The book consistently addresses my own responsibility as a Christian living in a small Christian college town--if, that is, love for God and neighbour are Christian demands.

"In all wars, whether large or small, whether carried out on battlefields...or faculty lounges, we come across the same basic exclusionary polarity: 'us against them,' 'their gain--our loss,' 'either us or them.' ...Tragically enough, over time the polarity has a macabre way of mutating into its very opposite--into 'both us and them' that unites the divided parties in a perverse communion of mutual hate and mourning over the dead." But "If there is will, courage, and imagination the stark polarity can e overcome" (99). This long third chapter explains how.

Thankfully, Volf outlines his argument at the beginning: "The central thesis of the chapter is that God's reception of hostile humanity into divine communion is a model for how human beings should relate to the other" (100). "[E]ssential moments in the movement from exclusion to embrace" include repentance, forgiveness, "making space in oneself for the other," and "healing of memory." (For the last point, see Volf's recent book, The End of Memory.)

Against the modern grand narrative of liberation from oppression which is not successful in bringing peace, Volf argues that in the present in-between time we should work toward "a nonfinal reconciliation based on a vision of reconciliation that cannot be undone" (110).

Movement 1: Even the victims need to repent, because "God's reign...cannot take place without a change of their heart and behavior" (114). They need to repent from mirroring the image of their enemies and from "the desire to excuse their own reactive behavior" (117).

Movement 2: "Forgiveness is the boundary between exclusion and embrace. It heals the wounds that the power-acts of exclusion have inflicted and breaks down the dividing wall of hostility" (125).

Movement 3: Making space for the other is modeled by the cross. At the eucharist we are summoned to follow God's pattern of reconciling the world to himself: "Inscribed on the very heart of God's grace is the rule that we can be its recipients only if we do not resist being made into its agents; what happens to us must be done by us" (129).

Movement 4: Volf concludes final forgetting is not possible before Christ's return: "as long as the Messiah has not come in glory, for the sake of the victims, we must keep alive the memory of their suffering....This indispensable remembering should be guided, however, by the vision of that same redemption that will one day make us lose the memory of hurts suffered and offenses committed against us" (138-9). Volf points out that without forgetfulness there can be no heaven: "Since I do not believe that a theodicy can succeed, I continue to believe that all those who want heaven cannot want the memory of horrors" (139 n. 27).

Enough said.

"Sundays" are for Volf - Chapter 2: Exclusion

This chapter unsettles, which is what a first-rate exploration of human depravity should do. Modernity made a virtue out of so-called inclusion; Volf exposes its dark underside. The 'ethnic cleansing' in the Balkans, Volf argues, was not an aberration in the civilized West: "There is far too much 'cleansing' in the history of the West for the horror about ethnic cleansing in the Balkans to express legitimately anything but moral outrage about--ourselves....[T]he medicine itself is making the patient sick with a new form of the very illness it seeks to cure" (60-61). Exclusion sometimes expresses itself as assimilation--"you can keep your life, if you give up your identity"; sometimes as domination, and sometimes as abandonment--keeping the needy at a distance so they "can make no inordinate claims on us" (75).

The answer is not the eradication of boundaries--that would lead to chaos. It must still be possible to make judgments not by achieving some objective stance from which to judge, but by being crucified with Christ which results in a "de-centered center." This "de-centered center"--for some reason the phrase reminds me of the picture in the old Four Spiritual Laws--"opens the self up, makes it capable and willing to give itself for others and to receive others in itself" (71). "[T]he will to be oneself, if it is to be healthy, must entail the will to let the other inhabit the self; the other must be part of who I am as I will to be myself" (91).

Judgement is possible, but it is not a moralistic judgment that makes black and white distinctions between the guilty and innocent, for no one is innocent. "[P]eople often find themselves sucked into a long history of wrongdoing in which yesterday's victims are today's perpetrators and today's perpetrators tomorrow's victims" (80). "In addition to inflicting harm, the practice of evil keeps re-creating a world without innocence. Evil generates new evil as evildoers fashion victims in their own ugly image" (81). (U2's "All That You Can't Leave Behind" CD came out too late for Volf to write instead, "so you become a monster so the monster will not break you.")

"Solidarity in sin underscores that no salvation can be expected from an approach that rests fundamentally on the moral assignment of blame and innocence....Under the conditions of pervasive noninnocence...no one should ever be excluded from the will to embrace" (84-85).

I noted several quotes to consider using in my Gospels class:

• How could Jesus attract sinners when he made such high moral demands? "The mission of Jesus consisted not simply in re-naming the behavior that was falsely labeled 'sinful' but also in re-making the people who have actually sinned or have suffered misfortune" (73).
• The Good Samaritan: "Numbed by the apparent ineluctability of exclusion taking place outside of my will though with my collaboration, I start to view horror and my implication in it as normalcy. I reason: the road from Jerusalem to Jericho will always be littered by people beaten and left half-dead; I can pass--I must pass--by each without much concern" (77).
• Mark 2:17: "To such a real sense of well-being of nonetheless deeply sick persons Jesus was referring when he said, 'those who are well have no need of a physician'....The truth about their sense of well-being holds them captive to the lie about their illness" (89).
  

I also wrote (or thought) "working relations among academics" a couple times. What I could have said was "ouch." I'll leave those notes in my copy of the book.

"Sundays" are for Volf - Chapter 1: Distance and Belonging

Most of this is summary of Volf's excellent first chapter. If you are interested only in my reflections, scroll down to the end of the post.

First, the problem: How can the church be a force for reconciliation when it has so often been complicit in Western imperialism? "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" (36).

"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" (37).

Volf then discusses what distance and belonging means through theological reflection on Abraham's departure from his own land, people and culture. The key, for Volf, is in a departure without leaving which is distinguished from both modern individualism and the postmodern deferral of meaning: "And yet precisely because of the ultimate allegiance to God of all cultures and to Christ who offers his 'body' as a home for all people, Christian children of Abraham can 'depart' from their culture without having to leave it (in contrast to Abraham himself who had to leave his 'country' and 'kindred'). Departure is no longer a spatial category; it can take place within the cultural space one inhabits. And it involves neither a typically modern attempt to build a new heaven out of the worldly hell nor a typically postmodern restless movement that fears to arrive home" (49).

"The distance born out of allegiance to God and God's future...does two important services. First, it creates space in us to receive the other" (51). Second, "it entails a judgment against evil in every culture" (52).

Two or three reflections:

• My natural response is to say a vigorous "Amen" with a contemptuous glare at the Eee-vangelical church south of the border. Just war indeed. But then, of course, I am not creating space to receive the other. Perhaps not yet an "agent of war" my contempt for the evil synthesis of religion and right-wing political culture in much of the American church keeps me from being an agent of peace.
  
• Volf's reflections on ethnicity and on how the Gospel can be universalistic in a way that allows for difference are particularly intriguing after reading Steve Mason's almost entirely convincing argument that the Greek word normally translated "Jew" should be translated Judean. According to Mason, we should recognize that the ancients had no concept of "religion" as we understand it today; the "Judeans" were rather an ethnic group like the Greeks and the Romans and the Egyptians. More on this and its implications for the study of early "Judaism" at another time.

Sundays are for Volf

I have decided to borrow an idea from Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed by starting a series of posts on a specific book. Whereas McKnight chooses brand new books that everyone should read, I have selected a book that just about everyone I know has read (except me): Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Abingdon, 1996). The plan is to post something every Sunday on a successive chapter in Volf, but the fact that I am publishing the first Sunday post on Monday evening is not a good sign! I don't know what this will look like--I don't expect to provide chapter summaries; I do promise to keep the posts short. My primary goal is to encourage my own disciplined reading in an area that is not strictly required for course prep or research, but the book is significant enough that revisiting its contents may still be of value to those who have read it once already. So without further ado...

The book begins as follows: "After I finished my lecture Professor Jürgen Moltmann stood up and asked one of his typical questions, both concrete and penetrating: 'But can you embrace a cetnik?' It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbain fighters called 'cetnik' 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 cetnik...? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wnated to say. "No, I cannot--but as a follower of christ I think I should be able to.' In a sense this book is the product of the struggle between the truth of my argument and the force of Moltmann's objection" (9).

Volf concludes his introduction with a handy summary of the metaphor of embrace and, I suspect, the book as a whole: "the will to give ourselves to others and 'welcome' them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. The will to embrace precedes any 'truth' about others and any construction of their 'justice.'...I immediately continue to argue, however, that the embrace itself--full reconciliation--cannot take place until the truth has been said and justice done" (29).

Other notes:

• I like this: "Instead of reflecting on the kind of society we ought to create in order to accommodate individual or communal heterogeneity, I will explore what kind of selves we need to be in order to live in harmony with others" (20-21). Reminds me of this.
• And I like Volf's description of the theologian's task: "When not acting as helpmates of economists, political scientists, social philosophers, etc.--and it is part of their responsibility to act as [sic. in?] this way--theologians should concentrate less on social arrangements and more on fostering the kind of social agents capable of envisioning and creating just, truthful, and peaceful societies, and on shaping a cultural climate in which such agents will thrive" (21).
  

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Hmm...Short, I fear, is relative.