Status
Collection
Description
Life in the twenty-first century presents a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Is there any hope of embracing our enemies? Of opening the door to reconciliation? Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we "learn to live with one another," but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God. Volf won the 2002 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for the first edition of his book, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon, 1996). In that first edition, professor Volf, a Croatian by birth, analyzed the civil war and ?ethnic cleansing ? in the former Yugoslavia, and he readily found other examples of cultural, ethnic, and racial conflict to illustrate his points. Since September 11, 2001, and the subsequent epidemic of terror and massive refugee suffering throughout the world, Volf revised Exclusion and Embrace to account for the evolving dynamics of inter-ethnic and international strife.… (more)
Publication
Awards
Similar in this library
User reviews
We all know that we should forgive each other. We even know how often—seventy times seven (i.e. unending forgiveness). The problem comes not with the
Miroslav Volf hit this crisis between knowing and doing after at the end of a lecture when Jürgen Moltmann stood and asked, "But can you embrace a cětnik" (9)? These Serbian fighters had been terrorizing and destroying Croatia, Volf's country. He was torn between "the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God's Lamb offered for the guilty" (9). This question drove him to research and write Exclusion and Embrace.
Exclusion and Embrace is the best book on forgiveness that exists. Period. Volf used the image of the crucified God, arms outstretched with side pierced, to show how those who are offended can make space within themselves to embrace the other. This does not mean that the embraced are exonerated—they can be embraced "even when they are perceived as wrongdoers" (85). This, of course, is precisely how Jesus receives us.
Although written in 1996, this book feels tailored for today. In our culture of "truthiness," Volf writes of "Deception and Truth." As geopolitical tensions flair, Volf writes of "Oppression and Justice," "Violence and Peace." Even gender identity receives a chapter. It is stunning to see just how broad the theme of forgiveness reaches.
Every paragraph of Exclusion and Embrace is rich. Volf's writing is a dense and insightful mixture of philosophical acuity, psychological wisdom, and theological insight. Our world needs this book more now than ever.