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

by Miroslav Volf

Evil as ignorance presupposes too much false innocence and generates too many vain hopes.

We demonize and bestialize not because we do not know better but because we refuse to know what is manifest and choose to know what serves our interests.

The “practice of exclusion” and the “language of exclusion” go hand in hand with a whole array of emotional responses to the other, ranging from hatred to indifference;

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.

The fate of the indigenous population at the hands of the colonizers is not unique; it is the extreme example of a stable pattern. Centuries ago, the prophet Isaiah announced judgment against those who dispossess and drive out others so that they alone can be the masters of the land (5:8): Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left alone in the midst of the land!

The clashing perspectives give rise to a glaring incongruity: in a world so manifestly drenched with evil, everybody is innocent in their own eyes.

perpetrators tirelessly generate their own innocence, and do so by the double strategy of denying the wrongdoing and reinterpreting the moral significance of their actions.

does solidarity in sin imply equality of sins?

From “All are sinners” it does not follow that “All sins are equal”;91 from “Neither is innocent” one cannot conclude “The sins of both are equal.”

The aggressors’ destruction of a village and the refugees’ looting of a truck (and thereby hurting their fellow refugees) are equally sin, but they are not equal sins;

the rapist’s violation and the woman’s hatred are equally sin, but they are ma...

The equality of sins dissolves all concrete sins in an ocean of undiff...

This is precisely what the prophets and Jesus did not do. Their judgments were not general but specific. They did not condemn everyone and anyone but the mighty and the rut...

The tendency of the parties in conflict to see themselves as innocent and the others as guilty matches the tendency of the third party to see the one party as good and the other as evil.

there is no “pure” space from which corrupt human beings can make pure judgments about purity and corruption.

“pious” disdain for the evildoers in the name of “goodness” is every bit as un-Christian as Nietzsche’s “godless” disdain for the weak in the name of “strength.”

Solidarity in sin underscores that no salvation can be expected from an approach that rests fundamentally on the moral assignment of blame and innocence.

the question is how to live with integrity and bring healing to a world of inescapable noninnocence that often parades as its opposite.

we should demask as inescapably sinful the world constructed around exclusive moral polarities—here, on our side, “the just,” “the pure,” “the innocent,” “the true,” “the good,” and there, on the other side, “the unjust,” “the corrupt,” “the guilty,” “the liars,” “the evil”

the economy of undeserved grace has primacy over the economy of moral deserts.

no one should ever be excluded from the will to embrace because, at the deepest level, the relationship to others does not rest on their moral performance and therefore cannot be undone by the lack of it.

“others” need not be perceived as innocent in order to be loved, but ought to be embraced even when they are perceived as wrongdoers.

Suspicion is called for when, from behind a smoking howitzer, we hear the words, “There is no choice.”

Carl Gustav Jung wrote, “It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.”

The Powers, he claims, are neither simply human institutions and structures nor an order of angelic (or demonic) beings. They are both institutional and spiritual;

This is the low-intensity evil of the way “things work” or the way “things simply are,” the exclusionary vapors of institutional or communal cultures under which many suffer but for which no one is responsible and about which all complain but no one can target.

finally the “priests” enter in a solemn procession and accompany all this with a soothing background chant that offers to any whose consciences may have been bothered the assurance that God is on our side and that our enemy is the enemy of God and therefore an adversary of everything that is true, good, and beautiful.

the power of evil rests on the power of “imperial speaking,” the power by which evildoers seek to create an illusion that “all is well”105 when in fact all is anything but well;

Much of the power of evil lies in the perverse truth it tells about the warped well-being it creates.

Pannenberg describes the germ as the tendency of the self “in fact [to] become the infinite basis and reference point for all objects, thus usurping the place of God.”

the hope for a new exodus lies exactly where the hope of the first exodus was: in the “strong wind” of God (Exod 14:21). Central to the Christian faith is the belief that the Spirit of the crucified Messiah is capable of creating the promised land out of the very territory the Pharaoh has beleaguered.

The story of Cain and Abel is then not only an example of rivalry between two brothers, but it narrates the structure of encounter between “them” and “us”—the Kenites who were unwilling to accept a special grace that the Israelites have received from God, as manifest in the blessings of King David’s rule.

the intention of primeval history is to underscore that every human being is potentially Cain and Abel,

within primeval history, the story about a murderous “them” is a story about a murderous “us.” Cain is “them,” and Cain is “us”; “Cain” is all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve in relation to their brothers and sisters.

Its greatness lies precisely in that it combines a clear judgment against the perpetrator with the commitment to protect him from the rage of the “innocent” victim.

God both relentlessly questions and condemns Cain (4:6-12) and graciously places a protective mark upon him (4:15).

since recognition can be given or withheld by the ultimate judge, the self will engage in a struggle as it seeks to maintain its identity and attempts to assert itself at the expense of the other. This tendency opens the gate to the land of exclusion, a place in which exclusions are perpetrated and the excluding ones themselves live excluded—“banished”129—“from the presence,” though never from the continued care of God (v. 16).

Anger was the first link in a chain of exclusions.

Instead of looking up toward God, his countenance “fell” in a breach of communion with God (4:5);

Premise 1: “If Abel is who God declared him to be, then I am not who I understand myself to be.”

Premise 2: “I am who I understand myself to be.”

Premise 3: “I cannot change God’s declarati...

Conclusion: “Therefore Abel cannot co...

The power of sin rests less on the insuppressible urge of an affect than on the persuasiveness of the good reasons, generated by a perverted self in order to maintain its own false identity.

Like a dangerous animal, sin is “lurking,” “prowling,” “desiring’’ to attack and destroy;

Sin is not so much a failure of knowledge as a misdirection of will, which generates its own counter-knowledge.

To commit sin is not simply to make a wrong choice but to succumb to an evil power.

Cain murdered, because he fell prey to what he refused to master.

The crime scene is “the field” outside the public sphere (4:8), where no help can be procured, no witnesses are available, and no communal judgment can be passed.

Cain responds to the divine question, “Where is your brother Abel?” with a lie, “I do not know” (4:9). He implicitly denies the crime.