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

by Miroslav Volf

Believing in a god behind all concrete manifestations comes therefore close to not believing in one: each culture ends up worshipping its own tribal deities, which is to say that each ends up, as Paul puts it, “enslaved to beings that are by nature not gods” (Gal 4:8).

First, in the name of the one God, Paul relativizes Torah: Torah, which is unable to produce a single united human family demanded by the belief in the one God,47 cannot “be the final and permanent expression of the will of the One God.”

Second, for the sake of equality Paul discards genealogy:

Third, for the sake of all the families of the earth Paul embraces Christ: the crucified and resurrected Christ is the “seed” of Abraham in whom “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” (Gal

person (“one leader—one people”) or of his vision (“one principle or law—one community”), but above all through his suffering.

Neither the imposition of a single will nor the rule of a single law removes enmity. Hostility can be “put to death” only through self-giving. Peace is achieved “through the cross” and “by the blood” (Eph 2:13-17).

baptism into Christ creates a people as the differentiated body of Christ. Bodily inscribed differences are brought together, not removed.

The Pauline move is not from the particularity of the body to the universality of the spirit, but from separated bodies to the community of interrelated bodies—the one body in the Spirit with many discrete members.

unlike Plotinus, Paul is not ashamed of his genealogy (see Rom 9:3); he is just unwilling to ascribe it religious significance.

no culture can retain its own tribal deities; religion must be de-ethnicized so that ethnicity can be de-sacralized. Paul deprived each culture of ultimacy in order to give them all legitimacy in the wider family of cultures.

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. Never simply distance, a genuinely Christian departure is always also presence; never simply work and struggle, it is always already rest and joy.

Both distance and belonging are essential. Belonging without distance destroys:

But distance without belonging isolates:

An eloquent witness to this radical reinterpretation of the relationship between religion and cultural identity is Paul’s seemingly insignificant replacement of a single word in a text from Genesis: the promise that Abraham will inherit the land (12:1) becomes in Paul the promise that he will inherit the world (Rom 4:13).

Paul writes, “if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation” (2 Cor 5:17 CEB).

Any notion of catholic personality that was capable only of integrating, but not of discriminating, would be grotesque.

there are evil deeds that cannot be tolerated.

There can be no new creation without judgment, without the expulsion of the devil and the beast and the false prophet (Rev 20:10), without the swallowing up of the night by the light and of death by life (Rev 21:4; 22:5).

The call is as important today as it was then. Yet it is too abstract. It underestimates our ability to twist the “one Word of God” to serve our own communal ideologies and national strategies.

America is a Christian nation, we then think, for instance, and democracy the only truly Christian political arrangement. Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture.

We reject the false doctrine, as though a church should place allegiance to the culture it inhabits and the nation to which it belongs above the commitment to brothers and sisters from other cultures and nations, servants of the one Jesus Christ, their common Lord, and members of God’s new community.

The result: a world without the other. The price: rivers of blood and tears. The gain: except for the bulging pocketbooks of warlords and war profiteers, only losses, on all sides.

we are moral and civilized; they are the wicked barbarians. Rightful moral outrage has mutated into self- deceiving moral smugness.

What makes ethnic cleansing seem so “nonmodern” and “nonWestern” is that it is starkly at odds with a major public story we like to tell about the modern democratic West—a story of progressive “inclusion.”

The exclusion signified in “ethnic cleansing” as a metaphor is not about barbarity “then” as opposed to civilization “now,” not about evil “out there” as opposed to goodness “here.” Exclusion is barbarity within civilization, evil among the good, crime against the other right within the walls of the self.

“The good and just,” insists Nietzsche, have to crucify the one who devises an alternative virtue because they already possess the knowledge of the good;

Even if one is not fully persuaded by Nietzsche and Foucault—as I am certainly not—they rightly draw attention to the fact that the “moral” and “civilized” self all too often rests on the exclusion of what it construes as the “immoral” and “barbarous” other.

Without boundaries we will be able to know only what we are fighting against but not what we are fighting for.

The absence of boundaries creates nonorder, and nonorder is not the end of exclusion but the end of life.

A consistent pursuit of inclusion places one before the impossible choice between a chaos without boundaries and oppression with them.

as described in Genesis, creation exists as an intricate pattern of “separate-and-bound-together” entities.

In a preliminary and rather schematic way, one can point to two interrelated aspects of exclusion, the one that transgresses against “binding” and the other that transgresses against “separating.

Exclusion takes place when the violence of expulsion, assimilation, or subjugation and the indifference of abandonment replace the dynamics of taking in and keeping out as well as the mutuality of giving and receiving.

Third, judgment. In popular culture, passing a judgment is often deemed an act of exclusion.

face up “to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires,” to the fact that they do not “refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance.”

I reject exclusion because the prophets, evangelists, and apostles tell me that this is a wrong way to treat human beings, any human being, anywhere, and I am persuaded to have good reasons to believe them.

In my vocabulary, in any case, exclusion does not express a preference; it names an objective evil.

An advantage of conceiving sin as the practice of exclusion is that it names as sin what often passes as virtue, especially in religious circles.

He was no prophet of “inclusion,”56 for whom the chief virtue was acceptance and the cardinal vice intolerance.

he was the bringer of “grace,” who not only scandalously included “anyone” in the fellowship of “open commensality”57 but also made the “intolerant” demand of repentance and the “condescending” offer of forgiveness (Mark 1:15; 2:15-17).

First, renaming. No food, Jesus said, was unclean (Mark 7:14-23); division into clean and unclean foods creates false boundaries that unnecessarily separate people. The flow of blood from a woman’s body is not unclean (Mark 5:25-34, implicitly); the laws of purity for women are false boundaries that marginalize them.58 Put more abstractly, by the simple act of renaming, Jesus offset the stark binary logic that regulates so much of social life:

Second, remaking. In addition to removing the label unclean placed on the things that were clean, Jesus made clean things out of truly unclean things.

This is exclusion as elimination at work with such shameless brutality in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, and Myanmar.

The more benign side of exclusion by elimination is exclusion by assimilation. You can survive, even thrive, among us, if you become like us; you can keep your life, if you give up your identity.

Alternatively, we are satisfied to assign “others” the status of inferior beings.

This is exclusion as domination, spread all over the globe in more or less diffuse forms, but most glaring in the caste system in India and former Apartheid policies in South Africa.

It is exclusion as abandonment.

If others neither have goods we want nor can perform services we need, we make sure that they are at a safe distance and close ourselves off from them so that their emaciated and tortured bodies can make no inordinate claims on us.

With a flood of “dysphemisms,”68 others are dehumanized in order that they can be discriminated against, dominated, driven out, or destroyed. If they are outsiders, they are “dirty,” “lazy,” and “morally unreliable”; if women, they are “sluts” and “bitches”; if minorities, they are “parasites,” “vermin,” and “pernicious bacilli.”

If indeed exclusionary language and cognition—we may call this “symbolic exclusion”—serve morally to underwrite the practice of exclusion, we should be warned against tracing them back to “ignorance,”