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

by Miroslav Volf

The biblical texts are a canonical bundle of overlapping testimonies from radically different contexts to the one history of God with humanity which culminates in Christ’s death and resurrection. The Scriptures come to us in the form of plural traditions. The texts and the underlying “story of the history” which unites them (see Introduction) do not offer a coherent tradition. Instead, they demand a series of interrelated basic commitments—beliefs and practices. These commitments can be developed into traditions. But such traditions are always secondary phenomena, in need of being interrogated and reshaped in the light of both basic commitments and changing cultural contexts.

If my argument about the nature of the world of the biblical traditions is plausible, then nothing in the nature of Christian beliefs themselves compels us to build a “coherent tradition” out of basic Christian commitments. What matters are these commitments. And what matters is that they be brought to bear on social realities.

Cultures and traditions are not integrated wholes and cannot be made to be such in contemporary societies.

As we share each other’s social territories, we partly inhabit each other’s “traditions,” share each other’s commitments. The very cause of the fragmentation—the hybridity of our views—makes our beliefs and practices fluid, open to change, enrichment, and to partial agreement on such important matters as justice.

“Enlarged thinking” will be helpful in reflecting on the problem of justice, if we do not expect too much of it, as I think Benhabib does. For her it serves to justify moral beliefs and give them validity.

In Chapter VII will give a detailed analysis of the art of “enlarged thinking” or, as I will call it, “double vision.” Let it suffice here to note only that we enlarge our thinking by letting the voices and perspectives of others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves, by allowing them to help us see them, as well as ourselves, from their perspective, and if needed, readjust our perspectives as we take into account their perspectives.4 Nothing can guarantee in advance that the perspectives will ultimately merge and agreement be reached. We may find that we must reject the perspective of the other. Yet we should seek to see things from their perspective in the hope that competing justices may become converging justices and eventually issue in agreement.

If we believe rightly in Jesus Christ who unconditionally embraced us, the godless perpetrators, our hearts will be open to receive others, even enemies, and our eyes will be open to see from their perspective.

Both the “clenched fist” and the “open arms” are epistemological stances; they are moral conditions of moral perception—a claim which rests on a more general Nietzschean insight that “all experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of perception”

the human ability to agree on justice will never catch up with the human propensity to do injustice. We must therefore not only make judgments before agreement is reached—something we in fact inescapably do (Nietzsche 1996, 32); we must also act in accordance with these judgments.

We need to see our judgments about justice and our struggle against injustice through the eyes of the other—even the manifestly “unjust other”—and be willing to readjust our understanding of justice and repent of acts of injustice.

When God executes justice, God does not abstract but judges and acts in accordance with the specific character of each person.

Pentecost overcomes the “confusion” and the resulting false “scattering,” but it does so not by reverting to the unity of cultural uniformity, but by advancing toward the harmony of cultural diversity.

When a “regime of truth” is imposed, however, when cultural mores, public opinion, or decrees of a totalitarian state codify what may or may not be said, saying out loud what is the case may indeed be revolutionary.

The greatness of the prophets consists in the refusal to be drawn into the war of dissimulations. Instead of offering their own “counter-truths” as weapons in a battle, they simply dared to see what was behind the veil of deception and had the courage to speak out loud the truth about the oppressors.

it is important not only that we remember, but how we remember—with love or with hate, seeking reconciliation or going after revenge. Salvation, ladies and gentlemen, does not lie simply in memory; it lies also in what we do with our memory.5 Memory itself must be redeemed before it can save us.

Facts and events need larger narratives to be intelligible; and since larger narratives are disputed, facts and events are disputed too

The belief in an all-knowing God should inspire the search for truth; the awareness of our human limitations should make us modest about the claims that we have found it, however.

To reconstruct the past as it actually happened, independent from a particular standpoint, is impossible. To presume otherwise is not only naively mistaken but positively dangerous. For the claim to universal truth often serves to give legitimacy to very particular interests.

Knowledge is violence, truth an imposition! How different this is from the way we commonly think of knowledge and truth.

We swim in an ocean of distortions and deceptions, and the truth seems impotent to sustain us. You trust the power of truth but the “truth” of power proves stronger—that iron fist in a velvet glove of statistics, research results, pronouncements by undisputed authorities, of appeals to tradition or common sense. The only sensible thing seems to return in kind, to define your own truth and assert it in the face of your opponents with the help of intimidation, propaganda, and manipulation. When opinions clash, weapons must ultimately decide because arguments are impotent.

Instead of seeing the self and the other or the two cultures and their common history from no perspective we should try to see them from both perspectives, both “from here” and “from there.”

God sees not simply from outside but also from within, not abstracting from peculiarities of individual histories but concretely, not disinterestedly but seeking the good of all creation (Suchocki 1995, 50f., 59). God’s truth is eternal, but it is emphatically not “nonlocal,” as Nagel suggests the truth of philosophy should be—both eternal and nonlocal (10). God’s eternal truth is panlocal, to follow Nagel’s idiom. This is why God’s truth is not simply one among many perspectives, but the truth about each and all perspectives.

It is not for the lack of space to go that we cannot completely step outside ourselves. It is rather that the split between a “situated” and a “distancing” self can never be complete; every place we go in our “distancing” self we must take ourselves with us

In terms of the search for truth, the most consequential distinction is not between those who are “technically” equipped to perceive the truth and those who are not; it is between those “who want to want the truth,” and those “who turn away from the truth” because their will does not want to strive after truth (Levy 1995, 211).9 Knowing adequately is not just a matter of what eyes, ears, and mind do, but also of what the “heart” does, not just a matter of perception but also of habits and practices.

If we refuse to be unsettled and transformed, we will shy away from truth and stick to our preferred beliefs, which make us “blessed” precisely because they tell us lies. The will to truth cannot be sustained without the will to obey the truth.

Speaking is only part of what we do with truth as we struggle against its distortions; living the truth is certainly equally important. Untruth holds captive both minds and lives and therefore cannot be overcome only with right thoughts and right words. It takes a truthful life to want to seek after the truth, to see the truth when confronted by it, and to say the truth out loud without fear.

The power of truth is a power different from the power of Caesar. In a profound sense, truth is not “a thing of this world,” as Foucault would have it. Rather, truth is a power from a different world. The instrument of this power is not “violence,” but “witness.”

Jesus Christ was crucified as witness to the truth. Sandwiched between the powers of Caiaphas and Pilate this “marginal Jew” refused to place his own self above the truth—and became the Messiah of the world. Why this self-denying refusal in the face of powers that threatened to crush both him and his project? Because when we put ourselves above the truth we open the floodgates of violence whose torrents are most deadly to the weak. If the truth ceases to matter more than our individual or communal interests, violence will reign and those with stammering tongues and feeble hands will fall prey to those with smooth words and sharp

Though I must be ready to deny myself for the sake of the truth, I may not sacrifice the other at the altar of my truth. Jesus, who claimed to be the Truth, refused to use violence to “persuade” those who did not recognize his truth. The kingdom of truth he came to proclaim was the kingdom of freedom and therefore cannot rest on pillars of violence. Commitment to nonviolence must accompany commitment to truth otherwise commitment to truth will generate violence. The truth is a shield against the violence of the strong against the weak, I argued earlier. If the shield is not to turn into a deadly weapon, it must be held in a hand that refuses to do violence, I want to add here.

“The truth will make you free,” said Jesus. Free for what? In the light of my larger argument in this chapter, I will put it this way: free to make journeys from the self to the other and back and to see our common history from their perspective as well as ours, rather than closing ourselves off and insisting on the absolute truth of our own perspective; free to live a truthful life and hence be a self-effacing witness to truth rather than fabricating our own “truths” and imposing them on others; free to embrace others in truth rather than engage in open or clandestine acts of deceitful violence against them.

The sword intended to root out violence ends up fostering it. The fear of the “chaos from below” elicits “chaos from above,” which in turn perpetuates “the chaos from below” (cf. Assmann and Assmann 1990, 20). We are caught in a vicious cycle: competing truths and justices call forth violence, and violence enthrones the truths and justices of its perpetrators.

As violence erupts, oppression and deception will hold sway, new imbalances of power will be generated, and profound disagreements over truth and justice perpetuated. And this all will be done by big and little Caesars wielding their large and small swords. In such a world, our question cannot be whether the reign of truth and justice—the reign of God—should replace the rule of Caesar. It should—the sooner the better. Our question must be how to live under the rule of Caesar in the absence of the reign of truth and justice.

In situations of conflict, religion then becomes a potent force for legitimizing the use of violence for political ends. Christians may wear an oversized cross and Muslims a replica of the Koran around the neck, and by ostentatiously announcing a religious conviction they will be making an unmistakably political assertion not only about who they are but also in what name they are fighting.

The loss of great religious monopolies in the West and the deregulation of religion does not necessarily imply a lesser role of religion in social conflicts. Rather, as the spread of pluralism and relativism eats away at the internal unity of societies, religious symbols can continue to be used in the conflicts between various social groups. As long as religious symbols continue to capture the imagination of people and as long as societies remain conflict-ridden, people will seek to draw religious symbols into their conflicts, to use them as weapons in their wars.

Religion is alive and well in today’s world, and so is violence. Moreover, it would seem that both can work together today, sowing desolation as they have done throughout human history. On the double assumption that religions are an important factor in public life and that “the most fanatical, the cruelest political struggles are those that have been colored, inspired, and legitimized by religion”

Peace between religions would do little to create peace between peoples—unless, of course, one understands peace between religions as peace between people who espouse them, in which case the thesis is trite. The only thing peace between religions would prevent is strictly religious wars. In terms of fostering peace the issue of reconciliation between religions as systems of beliefs and practices is less important than the character of each religion.

Religions advocate nonviolence in general, while at the same time finding ways to legitimate violence in specific situations; their representatives both preach against war and bless the weapons of their nation’s troops. And so the deep religious wisdom about nonviolence boils down to a principle that no self-respecting war-lord will deny, namely that you can be violent whenever you cannot be nonviolent, provided your goals are just (which they usually are for the simple reason that they are yours). Religious dialogue or no religious dialogue, without the principled assertion that it is never appropriate to use religion to give moral sanction to the use of violence, religious images and religious leaders will continue to be exploited by politicians and generals engaged in violence.

First, the cross breaks the cycle of violence.

Second, the cross lays bare the mechanism of scapegoating.

The cross is, third, part of Jesus’ struggle for God’s truth and justice.

Active opposition to the kingdom of Satan, the kingdom of deception and oppression, is therefore inseparable from the proclamation of the kingdom of God. It is this opposition that brought Jesus Christ to the cross; and it is this opposition that gave meaning to his nonviolence. It takes the struggle against deception and oppression to transform nonviolence from barren negativity into a creative possibility, from a quicksand into a foundation of a new world.

Fourth, the cross is a divine embrace of the deceitful and the unjust.

The cross of Christ should teach us that the only alternative to violence is self-giving love, willingness to absorb violence in order to embrace the other in the knowledge that truth and justice have been, and will be, upheld by God.

Instead, reason and discourse themselves need to be redeemed to the extent that they are implicated in the agonistic and sinful relations of power. Only those who are willing to embrace the deceitful and unjust as Christ has done on the cross, will be able to employ reason and discourse as instruments of peace rather than violence.

The road of nonviolence in the world of violence often leads to suffering: one can sometimes break the cycle of violence only at the price of one’s life, as the example of Jesus demonstrates. If history is any guide, the prospects are good that nonviolence will fail to dislodge violence.

God will judge, not because God gives people what they deserve, but because some people refuse to receive what no one deserves; if evildoers experience God’s terror, it will not be because they have done evil, but because they have resisted to the end the powerful lure of the open arms of the crucified Messiah.

The violence of the Rider on the white horse, I suggest, is the symbolic portrayal of the final exclusion of everything that refuses to be redeemed by God’s suffering love. For the sake of the peace of God’s good creation, we can and must affirm this divine anger and this divine violence, while at the same time holding on to the hope that in the end, even the flag bearer will desert the army that desires to make war against the

At the very heart of “the One who sits on the throne” is the cross. The world to come is ruled by the one who on the cross took violence upon himself in order to conquer the enmity and embrace the enemy. The Lamb’s rule is legitimized not by the “sword” but by its “wounds”; the goal of its rule is not to subject but to make people “reign for ever and ever” (22:5). With the Lamb at the center of the throne, the distance between the “throne” and the “subjects” has collapsed in the embrace of the triune God.

There is a duty prior to the duty of imitating God, and that is the duty of not wanting to be God, of letting God be God and humans be humans. Without such a duty guarding the divinity of God the duty to imitate God would be empty because our concept of God would be nothing more than the mirror image of ourselves.

Without entrusting oneself to the God who judges justly, it will hardly be possible to follow the crucified Messiah and refuse to retaliate when abused. The certainty of God’s just judgment at the end of history is the presupposition for the renunciation of violence in the middle of it. The divine system of judgment is not the flip side of the human reign of terror, but a necessary correlate of human nonviolence. Since the search for truth and the practice of justice cannot be given up, the only way in which nonviolence and forgiveness will be possible in a world of violence is through displacement or transference of violence, not through its complete relinquishment.