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

by Miroslav Volf

the problem of ethnic and cultural conflicts is part of a larger problem of identity and otherness.

First, the identity of a person is inescapably marked by the particularities of the social setting in which he or she is born and develops.

identifying with parental figures, peer groups, teachers, religious authorities, and community leaders, one does not identify with them simply as human beings, but also with their investment in a particular language, religion, customs, their construction of gender and racial difference,

Second, since the identity is partly shaped by recognition we receive from the social setting in which we live, “nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false...

“tribal” identity is today asserting itself as a powerful

Attending to social arrangements is essential. But it is Christian economists, political scientists, social philosophers, etc. in cooperation with theologians, rather than theologians themselves, that ought to address this issue because they are best equipped to do so—an argument Nicholas Wolterstorff has persuasively made in his essay “Public Theology or Christian Learning” (Wolterstorff 1996).

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.

its own way, postmodernity creates a climate in which evasion of moral responsibilities is a way of life. By rendering relationships “fragmentary” and “discontinuous,” it fosters

Bauman is right about modernity and postmodernity, then reflection on the character of social agents and of their mutual engagement is urgently needed.

Social arrangements condition social agents; and social agents fashion social arrangements.

But what should shape social agents so that they in turn can fashion healthy social arrangements instead of simply being molded by them?

Some 25 years ago in The Politics of Jesus John Howard Yoder argued against “the modern ethicists who have assumed that the only way to get from the gospel story to ethics, from Bethlehem to Rome or to Washington or Saigon, was to leave the story behind” (Yoder 1972, 25).

“the substance of guidance in social ethics” (115)?

I take this to imply that for Yoder there are other aspects of Jesus’ life that ought to serve as examples for Christians besides his passion, though the cross is the key for reading these other aspects of Jesus’ life. But how should we understand the cross? More specifically, what does it tell about the character of the Christian self in relation to the other?

solidarity.

sufferings of Christ on the cross are not just his sufferings; they are “the sufferings of the poor and weak, which Jesus shares in his own body and in his own soul, in solidarity with them”

since God was in Christ, “through his passion Christ brings into the passion history of this world the eternal fellowship of God and divine justice a...

The theme of solidarity with the victims (129–31) is supplemented by the theme of atonement for the perpetrators (132–38).

as the oppressed must be liberated from the suffering caused by oppression, so the oppressors must be liberated from the injustice committed through oppression.

whose very being is love (1 John 4:8).

will pick up and develop here the theme of divine self-donation for the enemies and their reception into the eternal communion of God.

so also should we.

In contrast, I want to spell out the social significance of the theme of divine self-giving: as God does not abandon the godless to their evil but gives the divine self for them in order to receive them into divine communion through atonement, so also should we—whoever our enemies and whoever we may be.5

“struggling on the side of,”

All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover him at their side.

In The Real Jesus Luke Timothy Johnson has argued that the canonical Gospels “are remarkably consistent on one essential aspect of the identity and mission of Jesus.”

They all reveal the same patterns of radical obedience to God and selfless love toward other people.

All four Gospels also agree that discipleship is to follow the same messianic pattern. They do not emphasize the performance of certain deeds or the learning of certain doctrines. They insist on living according to the same pattern of life and death shown by Jesus. (Johnson

“Jesus is the suffering servant whose death is a radical act of obedience toward God and an expression of loving care for his followers” (165f.).

baptism, which marks the beginning of the Christian life and therefore determines the whole of it; and the Lord’s Supper, whose reiterated celebration enacts ritually what lies at the very heart of Christian life. Baptism is an identification with the death of Christ (Romans 6:3); “crucified with Christ” through baptism, Christians live “by faith in the Son of God, who loved them and gave himself for them” (Galatians 2:20). At the Lord’s supper Christians remember the One who gave his body “for them” so that they would be shaped in his image (1 Corinthians 11:21,

the holy Trinity as model of supreme love and interpersonal communion, and the Son of God who comes, becomes a man, and goes to sacrifice” (Dumitrescu

genuinely Christian reflection on social issues must be rooted in the self-giving love of the divine Trinity as manifested on the cross of Christ; all the central themes of such reflection will have to be thought through from the perspective of the self-giving love of God. This book seeks to explicate what divine self-donation may mean for the construction of identity and for the relationship with the other under the condition of enmity.

Self-giving is not met with self-giving, but with exploitation and brutality. What some feminist thinkers object to is not so much the idea of self-donation, but that in a world of violence self-donation would be held up as the Christian way. With this objection they are not alone. If we happen not to be on the receiving end of self-giving—if we are weak, exploited, or victimized—all of us will object. In a world of violence, the cross, that eminently counter-cultural symbol that lies at the heart of the Christian faith, is a scandal.

The inner logic of the cross demands acceptance of two interrelated beliefs that are deeply at odds with some basic sentiments of modernity.

It expects the creation of paradise at the end of history and denies the expulsion from it at the beginning of history (cf. Lévy 1995, 91ff., 199ff.).

the cross underscores that evil is irremediable.

“keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of the

“culture of endurance” and a “culture of social hope”; the one is nonmodern and the other typically modern. The culture of endurance assumes that “the conditions of human life are and always will be frustrating and difficult” whereas the culture of social hope “will center around suggestions for drastic change in the way things are done—will be a culture of permanent revolution” (Balslev 1991,

Unlike Rorty, I do believe that the “utopian hope” itself must be given up, not just its “philosophical guarantees,” such as were attempted in Marxist philosophies of history. But when the hope that rests on “control” and “reason” and is blind to the “unbearable” and “irremediable” has died, then in the midst of an “unbearable” and “irremediable” world a new hope in self-giving love can be born.

This hope is the promise of the cross, grounded in the resurrection of the Crucified.

To describe the process of “welcoming,” I employed the metaphor of “embrace.” The metaphor seems well suited to bring together the three interrelated

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.”

cannot take place until the truth has been said and justice done.

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”

Christians we should be slow to point the accusing finger.

“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”

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”

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.

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.

Though the clergy are often invited to adjudicate, “the reconciling thrust quickly evaporates after the initial effort”