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 Listlessly withdrawn from a world in which no improvement is possible, because every action is a shot in the dark?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).