Exclusion and Embrace - I

I recently finished reading ‘Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation’ by Miroslav Volf. It is essentially a study into the social implications of the gospel, in particular how the gospel is to be manifested in the context of violence and conflict.
I found it to be a thoroughly engaging and challenging read. I thought I might share some of Volf’s analysis over the next few weeks.

When commenting on Paul’s solution to the particularity of God’s revelation to the Jewish nation, and God’s universal intent in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Volf develops a schema for understanding Christian cultural identity;

“What are the implications of the Pauline kind of Universalism? Each culture can retain its own cultural specificity; Christians need not “loose their cultural identity as Jew or Gentile and become one new humanity which is neither” (Campbell, 1991). At the same time, no culture can retain its own tribal deities; religion must be de-ethnicized so that ethnicity can be de-sacralized. Paul deprived each culture of ultimacy in order to give them all legitimacy in the wider family of cultures. Through faith one must ‘depart’ from one’s culture because the ultimate allegiance is given to God and God’s Messiah who transcend every culture. And yet precisely because of the ultimate allegiance to God of all cultures and to Christ who offers his ‘body’ as a home for all people, Christian children of Abraham can ‘depart’ from their culture without having to leave it (in contrast to Abraham himself who had to leave his ‘country’ and ‘kindred’). Departure is no longer a spatial category; it can take place within the cultural space one inhabits. And it involves neither a typically modern attempt to build a new heaven out of the worldly hell nor a typically postmodern restless movement that fears to arrive home. Never simply distance, a genuinely Christian departure is always also presence; never simply work and struggle, it is always already rest and joy.”*



*Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. p49. Abingdon Press, Nashville (1996).