'Exclusion and Embrace'
Submitted by Mark on February 17 2002 21:49:23
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Three years ago I bought the book "Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation" by Miroslav Volf (1996, Abingdon Press). Volf is a native of Croatia and wrote the book out of his experience there during the war in former Yugoslavia. He is now professor of theology at Yale Divinity School. I think his book has profound relevance to our situation as BLers, but I never finished reading it, because it's so theologically dense. Here is part of the summary of the book on the back cover: "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...Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other....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...as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening oursleves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God." As I said, I didn't finish reading the book, but I did find the following noteworthy quotes: "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. In the Palestine of Jesus' day, 'sinners' were not simply 'the wicked' who were therefore religiously bankrupt, but also social outcases,...Jesus' table fellowship with 'tax collectors and sinners', a fellowship that indisputably belonged to the central features of his ministry, offset this conception of sin. Since he who was innocent, sinless, and fully within God's camp transgressed social boundaries that excluded the outcasts, these boundaries themselves were evil, sinful, and outside God's will." "Sin is here the kind of purity that wants the world cleansed of the other rather than the heart cleansed of the evil that drives people out by calling those who are clean 'unclean' and refusing to help make clean those who are unclean." "With a flood of 'dysphemisms', 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 minorities, they are 'parasites,' 'vermin,' and 'pernicious bacilli'....[these 'dysphemisms'] insert the other into the universe of moral oblications in such a way that not only does exclusion become justified but necessary because not to exclude appears morally culpable. The rhetoric of the other's inhumanity obliges the self to practice inhumanity." "Symbolic exclusion is often a distortion of the other, not simply ignorance about the other; it is a willful misconstruction, not mere failure of knowledge. 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. That we nevertheless believe our distortions to be plain verities is no counter-argument; it only underlines that evil is capable of generating an ideational environment in which it can thrive unrecognized." "Others become scapegoats, concocted from our own shadows as repositories for our sins and weaknesses so we can relish the illusion of our sinlessness and strength. We exclude also because we are uncomfortable with anything that blurs accepted boundaries, disturbs our identities, and disarranges our symbolic cultural maps. Others strike us like objects that are 'out of place,' like 'dirt' that needs to be removed in order to restore the sense of propriety to our world." "The question is how to live with integrity and bring healing to a world of inescapable noninnocence that often parades as its opposite. The answer: in the name of the one truly innocent victim and what he stood for, the crucified Messiah of God, 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' - and then seek to transform the world in which justice and injustice, goodness and evil, innocence and guilt, purity and corruption, truth and deception crisscross and intersect, guided by the recognition that the economy of undersearved grace has primacy over the economy of moral deserts...though the behavior of a person may be judged as deplorable, even demonic, 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." |
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