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

by Miroslav Volf

Then he adds that, not being his “brother’s keeper’’ (v. 9), he is not responsible for knowing where his brother is.

To top it off, the comment about not being his “brother’s keeper” is a subtle attempt to ridicule the question in...

By his own act of exclusion he excluded himself from all relationships—from the land below, from God above, from the people around.

“What have you done?” (4:10). Here we learn why God kept asking Cain questions. Yahweh, the God who hears the groans of the oppressed, saw the murder coming and warned against it; God, who attends to the harassed and brutalized, heard the innocent blood crying out and judged the perpetrator.

Divine judgment accomplished what divine questions did not;

Commentators are divided on whether Cain complained about the weight of the sentence (“my punishment is greater than I can bear”) or admitted the greatness of his transgression (“my in...

In the land of exclusion, the “Lord put a mark on Cain,” not to brand him as a perpetrator but to protect him as a potential victim.141 The “mark” may symbolize a system of differentiation that protects from “mimetic violence” of all against all,

In most cases, however, the choice is not constrained by an inescapable “either us or them.” If there is will, courage, and imagination, the stark polarity can be overcome.

People with conflicting interests, clashing perspectives, and differing cultures can avoid sliding into the cycle of escalating violence and instead maintain bonds, even make their life together flourish.

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.

“repentance,” “forgiveness,” “making space in oneself for the other,” and “healing of memory”

The Hebrew prophets make the injustice endured by the “little people” into the primary lens through which they view the mighty, and in God’s name they demand that the mighty mend their ways.

The evangelists and the apostles instruct their marginalized fellow Christians how to relate to one another and to the inhospitable and hostile world as followers of the Crucified.

With the American and French Revolutions, the idea of freedom emerged as the pillar of modern liberal democracies.

All people are equal and all are free to pursue their interests and develop their personalities in their own way, provided they respect the same freedom in others. Such freedom is inalienable;

When this inalienable freedom is either denied by a totalitarian state or suppressed by a dominant culture we speak of oppression;

The freedom either to be exploited or left alone to die of starvation? Hence socialist thinkers declared the liberal notion of freedom empty.

freedom is actual power to live life with dignity, to be the artisan of one’s own destiny.

When people are kept in abject poverty and illiteracy while others grow rich and “develop their personalities” at the former’s expense we speak of oppression;

Zygmunt Bauman observed in Postmodern Ethics, the Grand Idea at the heart of modern restlessness, [the] guiding lantern perched on the prow of modernity’s ship, was the idea of emancipation: an idea which draws its meaning from what it negates and against which it rebels—from the shackles it wants to fracture, the wounds it wants to heal—and owes its allure to the promise of negation.

Would it not be perverse to argue that “oppressor” is but only the incriminating label that a self-styled victim likes to place on his or her enemy, or that “victim” is just the name a person who is as oppressive as anybody else likes to use in order to gain social advantage?

Would not blurring the categories of “oppressed” and “oppressor” be a mockery of the millions who have suffered at the hands of the violent—battered women, exploited and dehumanized slaves, tortured dissidents, persecuted minorities? It certainly would.

The categories cannot be given up. And yet the schema “oppression/liberation” remains beset with unresolved ...

It is simply not the case that one can construe narratives of the encounter between parties in conflict as stories of manifest evil on the one side and indisputable good on the other.

If we organize our moral engagement around the categories of “oppression/liberation” we will need clear narratives of blame and innocence.

Failing to find a blameless victim, however, we will be left with two equally unattractive choices: either to withdraw from engagement in moral disgust (and thereby give tacit support to the stronger party), or to impose clear-cut moral narratives with moral partisanship (and therefore share in the ideological self-deception of the one party).

How will the liberated oppressed live with their conquered oppressors? “Liberation of the oppressors” is the answer that the “oppression/liberation” schema suggests.

Bauman in Life in Fragments, injustice tends to be compensated for by injustice-with-role-reversal. It is only the victors, as long as their victory stays unchallenged, who mistake, or misrepresent, that compensation as the triumph of justice. Superior morality is all too often the morality of the superior.

It could be argued that in some cases, reconciliation is not what is needed, at least not before justice is done, as the Kairos Document has insisted.12 Though the argument has force, will we make progress toward justice if the ultimate goal is not reconciliation?

The father of Latin American Liberation Theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez, was right to insist that love, not freedom, is ultimate.

Jürgen Moltmann, the ultimate goal of human beings is not the “kingdom of freedom.” Rather, the kingdom of freedom is a process toward the kingdom of God, which is the kingdom of love.

To make love tower over freedom does not mean abandoning the project of liberation, however. The Holy One of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ, is on the side of the downtrodden and poor, a God who listens to the sighs of the voiceless and the cries of the powerless, a God who liberates.

If modernity feeds on the promise of freedom contained in “the grand narratives,” postmodernity is defined by incredulity concerning such narratives.

When the play gets serious, when one party breaks what the other party thinks are the rules of fair play and players are being carried off the field, would not continuing to play “in peace” amount to perpetuating injustice?

No, what stands in the way of reconciliation is not some inherent incommensurability, but a more profoundly disturbing fact that along with new understandings and peace agreements new conflicts and disagreements are permanently generated.

The only thing worse than the failure of some modern grand narratives of emancipation would have been their success! Merely by trying to accomplish the messianic task, they have already done too much of the work of the antichrist.

Lyotard helps us ask the right kind of question, which is not how to achieve the final reconciliation, but what resources we need to live in peace in the absence of the final reconciliation.

the struggle against oppression must be guided by a vision of reconciliation between oppressed and oppressors; otherwise it will end in “injustice-with-role-reversal.”

I will offer here only three brief disclaimers. First, the final reconciliation is not a work of human beings but of the triune God. Second, it is not an apocalyptic end of the world but the eschatological new beginning of this world.35 Third, the final reconciliation is not a self-enclosed “totality” because it rests on a God who is a perfect love.

From the perspective of contemporary Western sensibilities, these two things together—divine love and human repentance—addressed to the victims represent the most surprising and, as political statements, the most outrageous and (at the same time) most hopeful aspects of Jesus’s message.

little “Jihads” along with their mothers and fathers need not only material and psychological help but release from the understandable but nonetheless inhumane hatred in which their hearts are held captive.

Granted, many a false prophet used the message of repentance to stabilize the order of oppression:

It is not easy to know from what Jesus called his hearers to repent; he speaks often of sinners, but rarely of their sins.

sin appears here as a failure to live the life of discipleship as described in the Sermon on the Mount.

Two prominent foci of his message, however, illustrate well the social relevance of repentance—his teaching on wealth and violence. Jesus said, “You cannot serve God and wealth,” and “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 6:24; 5:44).

Devotion to wealth and hatred of the enemy are sins of which the followers of Jesus must repent.

the two injunctions translate into a critique of envy and enmity.

The most seminal impact of enmity, we might argue, using Bauman’s vocabulary, consists in transforming the violent practices of the dominant into dominant practices.

most confessions come as a mixture of repentance, self-defense, and even some lust for revenge.55 We admit wrongdoing, justify ourselves, and attack, all in one breath.

But is forgiveness any easier? Deep within the heart of every victim, anger swells up against the perpetrator, rage inflamed by unredeemed suffering. The imprecatory Psalms seem to come upon victims’ lips much more easily than the prayer of Jesus on the cross. If anything, they would rather pray, “Forgive them not, Father, for they knew what they did!”