Yancey on Easter

I've been reading (somewhat haphazardly) with a mate from church Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew. I really think that, in terms of accessibility, clarity and comprehensiveness [is that a word?], it is the best book about Jesus I have read. Here are some of Yancey's thoughts on this most magnificent 3 days we are about celebrate.

On the crucifixion:

The balance of power shifted more than slightly that day on calvary because of who it was that absorbed the evil. If Jesus of Nazareth had been one more innocent victim, like King, Mandela, Havel, and Solzhenitsyn, he would have made his mark in history and faded from the scene. No religion would have sprung up around him. What changed history was the disciples dawning awareness (it took the Resurrection to convince them) that God himself had chosen the way of weakness. The cross redefines God as One who was willing to relinquish power for the sake of love. Jesus became, in Dorothy Solle's phrase, "God's unilateral disarmament."
Power, no matter how well intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.*

On the resurrection:

There are two ways to look at human history, I have concluded. One way is to focus on the wars and violence, the squalor, the pain and tragedy and death. From such a point of view, Easter seems a fairy-tale exception, a stunning contradiction in the name of God. That gives some solace, although I confess that when my friends died, grief was so overpowering that any hope in an afterlife seemed somehow thin and insubstantial.
There is another way to look at the world. If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality. Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life.
This, perhaps, describes the change in the disciples' perspective as they sat in locked rooms discussing the incomprehensible events of Easter Sunday. In one sense nothing had changed: Rome still occupied Palestine, religious authorities still had a bounty on their heads, death and evil still reigned outside. Gradually, however, the shock of recognition gave way to a long slow undertow of joy. If God could do that...**

*Philip Yancey. The Jesus I Never Knew. pp. 205-205. Zondervan, Michigan, USA (1995).
**Philip Yancey. The Jesus I Never Knew. pp. 219-220. Zondervan, Michigan, USA (1995).

Green on Baptism - III

Green surveys the baptisms of John and Jesus in the Gospels as to their relevance to Christian baptism. He summarises:

"The baptism of Jesus, then, while being unique, has much to teach us about Christian baptism. It is the pledge of the Spirit. It is the mark of Sonship. It is the call to the path of the servant. It is commissioning for ministry.
These are all aspects in Christian baptism, but Christian baptism takes us farther still. It catches us up into the baptism of Jesus, no less. And this baptism has three mighty strands woven into it.
First, there was the 'baptism' of repentance in Jordan, administered by John, with which Jesus willingly identified himself on our behalf.
Second, there was the 'baptism' of the cross, where he dealt with the sin of the world and made possible the justification of the ungodly.
Third, there was the 'baptism' of the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit came powerfully on him and equipped him for ministry.
And we are caught up by baptism into all of this. We go down with Jesus into the water of repentance. We claim for ourselves the justification he won on Calvary. And we look to the Holy Spirit to fill us and equip us for ministry."

-Baptism; It's purpose, practice and power. Michael Green. pp27-28. Paternoster, USA (2006).

Green on Baptism - II

Green takes time to examine the significance of the old testament rite of circumcision to baptism and comes to the following conclusions;

"All of this is very instructive, if indeed we Christians are Abraham's offspring. It tells me that the Christian life is response in faith and obedience to the God who takes the initiative and comes in sheer grace to seek me out. It tells me that God generously gives a physical mark of belonging to seal that unseen contract between His undeserved love and our wobbly faith. Baptism is obviously the mark of initiation into the New Covenant, just as circumcision was into the Old. Indeed, Paul brings the two of these sacramental acts together and links them with the dying and rising of Christ in his letter to the Colossians. 'In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.' (Col 2:11-12)
Baptism, then, corresponds to circumcision under the Old Covenant. It is the mark of the covenant between God's grace and our response. Not just His grace, nor just our response. It is the seal both in His initiative and our response... The other point to note at this stage is that if we see baptism as the fulfillment under the New Covenant of what circumcision was under the Old, then, like circumcision, it cannot be treated as automatically effective. If the inner attitude of response does not grasp hold of God's loving initiative, then the baptised person in Christian society no more tastes the reality of salvation than did the nominal, circumcised Jew who did not share Abraham's faith."

-Baptism; It's purpose, practice and power. Michael Green. pp13-14. Paternoster, USA (2006).

Green on Baptism - I

"So, as we turn from the confusion of the modern partial answers and search in the New Testament, three strands are evident in christian beginnings. Baptism is meant to denote all three. There is a human side, repentance and faith. There is the churchly side, baptism into the visible family of Christian people. And there is the divine side, forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit. All three are necessary parts of Christian initiation. We have become so impoverished in our understanding, and so distanced from one another through our denomination emphases, that we often fail to perceive the need for all three strands in the rope of Christian beginnings. Baptism brings us into the church. Baptism embodies our response to the grace of God. But if we are baptised in water only, and not in the Holy Spirit, we have missed out on the gift of God and content ourselves with the wrapping paper. All three are necessary... The 'one baptism' has all these strands to it. Don't be satisfied with less. Don't write off those who stress a different strand from you. A real Christian is a believer in Jesus Christ who has received God's Holy Spirit and has been baptised into his church."

Baptism; It's purpose, practice and power. Michael Green. pp8-9. Paternoster, USA (2006).

A Holy Meal

Just finished this marvelous little book, A Holy Meal: The Lord's Supper in the Life of the Church.
It is a brilliantly constructed, brief, insightful, holistic discussion of the significance of, what we at my church call, Holy Communion.
I think anyone would be hard pressed to find such an accessible and thorough treatment of the topic.
Smith takes time to explain the importance of the sacraments as symbols in the life of the church.

"Like a sign a sacrament points to another reality without necessarily looking like that reality. A sacrament is an external symbol that is visual an sensory, but its primary significance is that it is a gesture, a communal act, or a ritual that points to and enables a community to join together in something of spiritual significance. What is noteworthy is the close connection between the symbol and what is symbolized, so close, indeed, that in human speech they are identical, as with a photograph. I can hold up a picture of my grandsons and say, "These are my grandsons," and no one wonders whether I am confused by a little piece of coloured paper. We understand this kind of language; it is customary in our common life to use photographs and speak of symbols in this way. To take this kind of language literally would miss the point and would rob us of both the capacity to use language well and the wonderful gift of symbols. Without symbols our lives would be flat and one-dimensional. Symbols and sacraments enrich our lives, enabling us to engage spiritual reality with heart and mind, indeed, with our whole selves."*

He then proceeds to celebrate the meaning of this sacrament of the Lord's supper using 7 words; Memorial, Communion, Forgiveness, Covenant, Nourishment, Anticipation and Eucharist. Here is one of his lovely summary statements;

"When we celebrate the Lord's supper, the ascended Lord Jesus Christ himself is in our midst as one who will ultimately host us at the marriage supper of the Lamb. We believe in the "Real Presence," one might say. But as Jesus himself stresses, he is among us as one who serves. This is the wonder of this table. Jesus meets us and hosts a meal; he forgives us and feeds us. Through intimate communion and fellowship with him and with our sisters and brothers, we look back (in remembrance), but we also look ahead to the kingdom that is yet to come. We renew our baptismal identity and vows as people of the new covenant. And with hope we identify with the Lord himself, who is the servant of all."**

Excellent read.


* Gordon T. Smith. A Holy Meal: The Lord's Supper in the Life of the Church. pp24. Baker Academic, Michigan USA (2005).
**Gordon T. Smith. A Holy Meal: The Lord's Supper in the Life of the Church. pp98. Baker Academic, Michigan USA (2005).

To the last Ridge - IV

At the battle of Villers-Bretonneux. April, 1918.

"Several men arrived at a chateau on the outskirts of the town. It had belonged to a millionaire, and was regally furnished. There was an aviary in the grounds where birds from all parts of the world were kept. They were all dead - killed by the gas that the Germans had poured into the town before their attack. The men entered the chateau, found a billiard table, and with a typical gaiety began to play while bullets smacked through the window above their heads. They sniped the enemy through a hole in the wall between shots. One of them was pounding ragtime choruses on a grand piano."

To the Last Ridge, W.H Downing. p 123. Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney (1998).

To the last Ridge - III

Of being shelled at Polygon Wood, the third battle of Ypres. September, 1917;

"By the red and flickering light of the sheelbursts men could be seen running and staggering, bent low. They dropped into what had been a trench, into shellholes, enduring, enduring with tautened faces, lying close to the ground, crouching as they burrowed for dear life with their entrenching tools, while the storm of steel wreaked its fury on tortured earth and tortured flesh. There were on all sides the groans and the waling of mangled men. A seargent ran around his platoon. He saw by the flashes bodies twisted and doubled and still, and dying men with eyeballs protruding and slightly wavering, blowing bubbles of blood from their lips as they breathed. Then the top of his skull was lifted from his forehead by a bullet, as on a hinge, and his body fell on two crouching men, washing them with his blood and brains. We were in the front line, but did not immediately know it. The din was frightful. A man with a blackened face and shattered arm ran bleeding towards the rear. A officer was seen in flashlights yelling in a corporal's ear. The answer was unheard. The corporal moved hither and thither, found what men he could, and motioned them forward. We stumbled from shellhole to shellhole by ones and twos with panting breath and shiny faces. One fell writhing. They disappeared in the flickering luminous smoke. The smell of burnt explosive was thick and pungent. Bodies, living and dead, were buried, tossed up and the torn fragments buried again."

To the Last Ridge, W.H Downing. p 76-77. Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney (1998).

To the last Ridge - II

Of being in the mud at Montauban, France, 1916.

"The dead lay everywhere. The deeper one dug, the more bodies one exhumed. Hands and faces protruded from the slimy, toppling walls of the trenches. Knees, shoulders, and buttocks poked from the foul morass, as many as the pebbles of a brook. Here had been a heavy slaughter of English lads four days before; so great had been the price in blood and sweat and tears of those few acres. There were also German dead, but it was hard to tell them from the resr, for khaki is grey when soaked and muddy.
Our clothes, our very underclothing, were ponderous with the weight of half and inch of mud on the outer surface, and nearly as much on the inner. Casualties were heavy in the sixty hours we were in that place. The days were bad, but sixteen hours of a cold, pitchy night was a burden not easily borne. We were shot at from three sides, and it was torment. There was no hot food and no prospect of it. We drank shellhole water, as it was too cold for the corpses to rot. We were soaked from head to feet (the feet that were never dry all that winter) with sweat and icy mud"

To the Last Ridge, W.H Downing. p 17. Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney (1998).

Emergency Sex

About 3 weeks ago I finished reading a book with this provocative title, 'Emergency Sex (and other desperate measures)'. It is the short recollections of 3 young people who worked for the United Nations in the ninety's spliced together chronologically. Their work spanned 4 continents; the conflict zones of Cambodia (where they all met), Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia and Liberia. Each person - Ken Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thompson - became involved with the UN for very different reasons and brought very different skills, motivations and expectations to their tasks. It is the convergence and divergence of these three's relationship that shapes the narrative, but it is their 'unedited' experiences of field work that forms the content of the book.
This is a raw, funny, confronting and troubling insight into the reality of international diplomatic work; It is an open window on the lives of the very ordinary people who work in extraordinary circumstances; it is an expose of the paradox that is the United Nations.
If you don't believe that human beings are capable of both great good and terrifying evil, this book is convincing evidence. It is also convincing evidence that this world is not a happy place for massive numbers of our fellow men, women and children.
I thoroughly recommend it. Thanks to my colleague on the clubbe ward at the Children's Hospital who lent it to me.

Here are some excerpts:

Andrew, Rwanda
"This is an average massacre by Rwandan standards, unremarkable in scale or circumstance. Several thousand civilians had gathered in the church grounds, promised protection by th Hutu governor. Hutu militias went methodically through the crowd instructing other Hutus to leave, and government soldiers cut off the escape routes. Then the governor fired his weapon in the air as a kill-the-tutsis signal and the young men drunk on banana beer hacked them all to pieces. It's hard work killing that many people in a confined space with only machetes and clubs, so the killers returned home to their families each night to rest and drink before the next days work. It took three days and so far we know of only two survivors...
What's difficult now, five weeks and four hundred bodies into the dig, is the pile of entwined corpses several yards down in the grave. There's just no way to find the bottom, no matter how often the backhoe goes in. It's a wicked game of pick-up-sticks, whrer I grab a leg or arm of what looks to be the easiest corpse to lift off, only to find that another part of the same bofy is buried under half a dozen others, all of which have the same problem. Sometimes I get obsessed over one that won't release and spend hours on it with a pick and trowel. This annoys my team, because they have to heave off other bodies just so I can extract mine, but I can't face the same body two days in a row."

Ken, Liberia
"We estimate that a third of the women in displaced persons camps have been raped. Half the population of the country was displaced during the war, so if we're right, that means one in six women has been raped. We give questionnaires to demobilized fighters and ten percent of the fighters admit to having raped more than ten times during the war. Not a single prosecution, investigation, UN report, press expose, nothing. It's as if 100,000 rapes never happened.
I shake Mr. Ignatius Peabody's hand. We shake our heads. He's going back out there, through the gates, through the checkpoints. I have to go to a morning staff meeting.
'Thankyou Mr. Ignatius. I can't promise that anything will happen with these reports, but I will pass them on to New York.'
'Ah say, ma people, what we have done-oh'
'Godspeed Ignatius'
'Tank Gawd for life, Mr. Ken.'"



Emergency Sex (and other desperate measures). Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thompson. Erbury Press, London (2004).

To the last Ridge - I

Reading the first world war memoirs of W.H Downing* (see current reading menu). I was given the book by my father with the recommendation that this was 'the best' Australian war memoir.
It is a deeply emotional experience to read this book.
I feel sympathy for the young men whose lives were shattered. I feel revulsion at the horror of war. I feel pride for their incredible courage. I feel fondness for their larrikin humour. I feel shame and anger over the reality of evil. I feel unworthy of their sacrifice. I feel challenged by their persistance and perseverance...

Here are some excerpts. Tell me how they make you feel.

Scores of stammering German machine-guns spluttered violently, drowning the noise of the cannonade. The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat lattice of death. There were gaps in the lines of men - wide ones, small ones. The survivors spread across the front, keeping the line straight. There was no hesitation, no recoil, no dropping of the unwounded into shellholes. The bullets skimmed low, from knee to groin, riddling the tumbling bodies before they touched the ground. Still the line kept on.

Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb, but still the line went on, thinning and stretching. Wounded riggled into shellholes or were hit again. Men were cut in two by streams of bullets. And still the line went on.

*To the Last Ridge, W.H Downing. Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney (1998).

Peterson on The Holy

"The Holy, as a name for God, emphsises that God is other, above, majestic. God cannot be understood from below. God cannot be accounted for by what we imagine God might be. God cannot be argued into belief by philosophical reasoning. God cannot be explained or interpreted by notions we have aquired by assembling feelings of reverence from sunsets, spiked with a few stories of miracles, and then legitimated with some comments that we pick up from celebrity interviews. God cannot be subsumed under the categories that we use to classify and order our experience. Holy alerts us to an awareness that God "is different, that in his way he is himself, though not far away, but rather near at hand, in the sphere of the present, inflaming and assuaging convention." God reveals himself. Because of who God is, The Holy, we have to let God tell us who he is. If we insist on using our ideas to form our image of God, we will get it all wrong."


- Eugene H. Peterson, The Jesus Way. p141. Hodder and Stoughton, London (2007).
Quote from K.H Miskotte, When the Gods are silent, p. 183. Collins, London (1967)

Peterson on Biblical Worship

"A frequently used phrase by some contemporary Western Christians symptomatic of Baalistic tendencies in worship is "lets have a worship experience". It is the Baalistic perversion of "let us worship God". It is the difference between cultivating something that makes sense to an individual, and acting in response to what makes sense to God. In a "worship experience," a person sees something that excites him or her and goes about putting spiritual wrappings around it. A person experiences something in the realm of dependency, anxiety, love, loss or joy and a connection is made with the ultimate. Worship becomes a movement from what I see or experience or hear, to prayer or celebration or discussion in a religious setting. Individual feelings trump the word of God.
Biblically formed people of God do not use the term "worship" as a description of an experience, such as "I can have a worship experience with God on the golf course." What that means is, "I can have religious feelings reminding me of good things, awesome things, beautiful things nearly any place." Which is true enough. The only thing wrong with the statement is its ignorance, thinking that such experience makes up what the Christian church calls worship.
The biblical usage is very different. It talks of worship as a response to God's word in the context of the community of God's people. Worship in the biblical sources and in liturgical history is not something a person experiences, it is something we do, regardless of how we feel about it, or whether we feel anything about it at all. The experience develops out of the worship, not the other way around. Isaiah saw, heard, and felt on the day he received his prophetic call while at worship in the temple - but he didn't go there in order to have a "seraphim experience."


- Eugene H. Peterson, The Jesus Way. p111. Hodder and Stoughton, London (2007).

Peterson on Sin and Forgiveness

"Praying with David, who knew a good deal about sin, we soon learn that the remedy for sin is not the extermination of sin, not long training in not-sinning, not a rigorous program conditioning us in a pavlovian revulsion to sin. The only effective remedy for sin is the forgiveness of sin - and only God can forgive sin. If we refuse to deal with God, we are left dealing with sin by means of punishment or moral education or concocting some strategy of denial.None seem to make much of a dent in the sin business. No. The way, the only way, is to get in on God's forgiveness. And we do that by confession. No excuses, no rationalizations, no denial, no New Year's resolutions, only 'I will confess...' "


- Eugene H. Peterson, The Jesus Way. p91-92. Hodder and Stoughton, London (2007).

Peterson on the Holiness of Words.

"Everywhere and always as Christians follow Jesus we use words that were first used by God in bringing us and the world around us into being. Our language is derivative (as everything about us is!) from the language of God. Our common speech is in continuity with the language of God. Words are essential and words are holy wherever and whenever we use them. Words are inherently holy regardless of their employment, whether we are making a shopping list, making conversation with an acquaintance on a street corner, praying in the name of Jesus, asking for directions to the bus station, reading the prophet Isaiah, or writing a letter to our MP. We do well to reverence them, to be careful in our use of them, to be alarmed at their desecration, to take responsibility for using them accurately and prayerfully. Christian followers of Jesus have an urgent mandate to care for language - spoken, heard or written - as a means by which God reveals himself to us, by which we express the truth and allegiance of our lives, and by which we give witness to the word made flesh."

- Eugene H. Peterson, The Jesus Way. p66-67. Hodder and Stoughton, London (2007).

Peterson on Sacrifice and Faith.

"Sacrifice is to faith what eating is to nutrition; it is the action that we engage in that is transformed within ourselves invisibly and unobserved into a life lived in responsive obedience to the living God who gives himself to and for us, sacrifices himself for us. Faith, of which Abraham is our father, can never be understood by means of explanation or definition, only in the practice of sacrifice. Only in the act of obedience do we realise that sacrifice is not diminishment, not a stoical "This is the cross I bear" nonsense. It does not result in less joy, less satisfaction, less fulfillment, but in more - but rarely in the ways we expect."

- Eugene H. Peterson, The Jesus Way. p51. Hodder and Stoughton, London (2007).

Remainder

I recently finished this novel given to me by a friend in the publishing industry. It is written by Tom McCarthy who, amoung other things, is the General secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS). On its website the society's 'Manifesto' contains the following;

"We, the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society, declare the following:-

1.That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.

2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death's beauty - that is, beauty."*


These declarations already give you an insight into the themes of this interesting novel. It is really a study in existentialism; an absurd insight into the life of a character who becomes obsessed with recreating ("re-enacting") his memories(...are they his?). It is, however, disarming in its capacity to draw you (the reader) into the mind of this character. This inclusion is achieved by first person narration of such simple, honest charm that as a reader one is in the place of a special confidant.

Here are the opening paragraphs;

"About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That's it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know.
It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that - well, for one, I don't even remember the event. it's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been - or, more precisely, being about to be - hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap - the crater - that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers."**

As a christian (ie. having a vastly different perspective on death to that of the INS), I found myself feeling a great sense of pathos for this (fictitious) person who becomes consumed with creating an eternal present out of his (imagined?) past, such that in so doing the world, and in particular other people, are collapsed into nothing more than props in his narcissitic drama. Is this the essence of sin?
As well as pathos, there was empathy. How often I have wanted other people to do things my way; to fit into my agenda; to control all the things around me so as to make the world perfect for myself.

It reminds me of these words by Iris Murdoch;
“Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”





*http://www.necronauts.org/manifesto1.htm
**Tom McCarthy, Remainder. p3. Alma Books, Surrey, UK (2006).

Exclusion and Embrace – V

Volf carefully teases out the challenges of seeking justice in this age, and in so doing establishes the necessary injustice of all human attempts at justice. However, he does not deny the necessity of this 'unjust justice' in a world of violence and evil, but argues that, "There can be no justice without the will to embrace".

"... to agree on justice you need to make space in yourself for the perspective of the other, and in order to make space, you need to want to embrace the other. If you insist that others do not belong to you and you to them, that their perspective should not muddle yours, you will have your justice and they will have theirs; your justices will clash and there will be no justice between you. The knowledge of justice depends on the will to embrace. The relationship between justice and embrace goes deeper, however. Embrace is part and parcel of the very definition of justice. I am not talking about soft mercy tampering harsh justice, but about love shaping the very content of justice."*

Volf goes on to emphasise that practicing this kind of justice is grounded in the salvation activities of God in which evil is named, restrained and judged but within the context of gracious forgiveness and the eschatological reality of perfect justice in which the justice of this age will be transcended by freedom and love.



*Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. p220. Abingdon Press, Nashville (1996).

Exclusion and Embrace – IV

Volf expounds the self-sacrifice involved in the new covenant, and so challenges our thinking on the way of seeking reconciliation in relationships.

"The 'blood' in which the new covenant was made is not simply the blood that holds up the threat of breaking the covenant or that portrays common belonging; it is the blood but of self-giving, even self-sacrifice. The one party has broken the covenant, and the other suffers the breach because it will not let the covenant be undone. If such suffering of the innocent party strikes us as unjust, in an important sense it is unjust. Yet the 'injustice' is precisely what it takes to renew the covenant. One of the biggest obstacles to repairing broken covenants is that they invariably entail deep disagreements over what constitutes a breach and who is responsible for it. Partly because of the desire to shirk the responsibilities that acceptance of guilt involves those who break the covenant do not (or will not) recognize that they have broken it. In a world of clashing perspectives and strenuous self-justifications, of crumbling commitments and strong animosities, covenants are kept and renewed because those who, from their perspective, have not broken the covenant are willing to do the hard work of repairing it. Such work is self-sacrificial; something of the individual or communal self dies in performing it. Yet the self by no means perishes, but is renewed in the truly communal self, fashioned in the image of the triune God who will not be without the other."*



*Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. p155. Abingdon Press, Nashville (1996).

Exclusion and Embrace – III

Volf emphasises the centrality of the crucified Christ in his reflections on the way to reconciliation between enemies.

“At the heart of the cross is Christ’s stance of not letting the other remain an enemy and creating space in himself for the offender to come in. Read as the culmination of the larger narrative of God’s dealing with humanity, the cross says that despite its manifest enmity toward God humanity belongs to God; God will not be God without humanity. “While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son,” writes the Apostle Paul (Romans 5:10). The cross is the giving up of God’s self in order to not give up on humanity; it is the consequence of God’s desire to break the power of human enmity without violence and receive human beings into divine communion. The goal of the cross is the dwelling of human beings “in the Spirit”, “in Christ”, and “in God”. Forgiveness is therefore not the culmination of Christ’s relation to the offending other; it is the passage leading to embrace. The arms of the crucified are open – a sign of a space in God’s self and an invitation for the enemy to come in.”*



*Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. p126. Abingdon Press, Nashville (1996).

Exclusion and Embrace – II

Volf argues brilliantly, and might I say courageously, for the non-innocence of all parties (perpetrators, victims and the ‘third-party’ observers) involved in conflict and violence*. He therefore establishes the primacy of undeserved grace in the work of reconciliation;

“Where does the ‘no-innocence’ perspective leave us? Gazing paralysed at a world in which “fair is foul and foul is fair”? Listlessly withdrawn from a world in which no improvement is possible, because every action is a shot in the dark? What gain does recognition of solidarity in sin bring? In addition to freeing us “from delusions about the perfectablility of ourselves and our institutions” (Wink, 1992), it pricks the balloons of the self-righteousness of perpetrator and victim alike and protects all from perpetuating evil in the name of presumed goodness. 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 cannot be how to locate ‘innocence’ either on the intellectual or social map and work our way toward it. Rather, 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 damask 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 undeserved grace has primacy over the economy of moral deserts. Under the conditions of pervasive noninnocence, the work of reconciliation should proceed under the assumption that, though the behaviour of a person may be judged as deplorable, even demonic, no-one should ever be excluded from the will of 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.”**



*Volf carefully, however, differentiates what he calls solidarity in sin (the non-innocence of all parties) from equality of sin.
**Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. pp84-85. Abingdon Press, Nashville (1996).