A very deep and theological book, this explore how Christians can forgive in the face of great evil. Volf is Croation and the book flows out of his experiences as a Christian in the Balkans in the mid and late nineties. Basically the embrace of forgiveness is only made possible at times by appropriate exclusion. This book gave me a new perspective on my parents divorce when it was happening because I could see how divorce as exclusion (in order to put a stop to unhealthy relationships) can make room for embrace and forgiveness.
This book needs to be read far slower than I did and he uses pretty sophisticated theological vocab and models.

I think Miroslav Volf and I probably disagree on a good number of things. There were parts I found Pelagian and there appeared a James Martin-esque faux pas that included an embarrassingly bad reading of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman (see p. 214).
However, it is important to read outside our echo chambers. On top of that, Volf is thoughtful and writes beautifully with concern for the problems facing us in our ever-divided, increasingly partisan world.

So many threads! From 1) a theology and concept of embrace across cultures-origins-rationalities while preserving the alterity of the other to 2) the meting out of justice in a world with rival justices to 3) the retelling of history that must accompany justice but does violence when it tends towards universals to 4) the importance of fluid selfhood in its quest towards truth to 5) the radical dissimilarity between divine justice and our own.

A well-researched read bursting to the brim with citations (I suppose it was literally written by a professor and that's probably 30% of his job). I find it so interesting that Volf, a Christian Protestant systematic theologian, brings in and demonstrates profound appreciation for Nietzsche while obviously not aligning on much of anything. It was also fun to get brief tours of various philosopher-theologians' thoughts (Foucault, MacIntyre, Deleuze, etc.). My favorite chapters were V) Oppression and Justice and VI) Deception and Truth, and I really can't tell you how many words I have highlighted because you'd consider it excessive.

Two things prevent this from being a 5-star. 1) Volf writes in a repetitive, wandering style that may be more suited for an auditory delivery, e.g. a lecture. 2) This book stops short at the abstract layer and holds no hint of practice or implementation. Volf does respond to this in the epilogue, calling himself an "impractical" theologian focused on the vision and will to embrace and not its how-tos, which are also equally as essential. I appreciate the self-awareness.

A whole journey, and an impeccably well-timed read for me.

Read for City Church book club.

Some quotations as always:

As Edward Said points out, all cultures are “hybrid... and encumbered, or entangled and overlapping with what used to be regarded as extraneous elements.” The distance from our own culture, which is born of the Spirit of the new creation, should loosen the grip of our culture on us and enable us to live with its necessary fluidity and affirm its inescapable hybridity. Other cultures are not a threat to the pristine purity of our cultural identity but a potential source of its enrichment. Inhabited by people who are courageous enough not simply to belong, intersecting and overlapping cultures can mutually contribute to the dynamic vitality of each.

In a profound reading of the Gospels in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche underscored the connection between the self-perceived “goodness” of Jesus’s enemies and their pursuit of his death; crucifixion was a deed of “the good and just,” not of the wicked, as we might have thought. “The good and just” could not understand Jesus because their spirit was “imprisoned in their good conscience” and they crucified him because they construed as evil his rejection of their notions of good. “The good and just,” insists Nietzsche, have to crucify the one who devises an alternative virtue because they already possess the knowledge of the good; they have to be hypocrites because, seeing themselves as good, they must impersonate the absence of evil. Like poisonous flies, “they sting” and they do so “in all innocence.” Exclusion can be as much a sin of “a good conscience” as it is of “an evil heart.” And Nietzsche’s warning that “whatever harm the world-calumniators may do, the harm the good do is the most harmful harm” may not be entirely out of place.

The account of creation as “separating-and-binding” rather than simply “separating” suggests that “identity” includes connection, difference, and heterogeneity. The human self is formed not through a simple rejection of the other—through a binary logic of opposition and negation—but through a complex process of “taking in” and “keeping out.” We are who we are not because we are separate from the others who are next to us but because we are both separate and connected, both distinct and related; the boundaries that mark our identities are both barriers and bridges.

To preserve the alterity of the other in the embrace it is essential to acquire the unusual ability not to understand the other. In an important essay “The Power of Not Understanding,” Z. D. Gurevitch has argued against the simple schema that posits a movement from “the inability to understand” to “the ability to understand.” This schema diverts attention from the fact that the initial “inability to understand” may be tacitly predicated on the desire to understand the other on the self’s own terms, within the framework of its own reflexivity, whereas the other may not be understandable within the self’s framework precisely on account of being the other. “The-inability-not-to-understand” may be, paradoxically, a hindrance to understanding. Hence Gurevitch argues that “the-ability-not-to-understand”—“the ability to recognize and behold the other (or the self) as an other”—is essential. In concrete encounters with the other, at “the moment of not understanding” the self understands that what there is to understand about the other can “only be addressed as a question.” The emergence of the other as a question right in the midst of an embrace represents a productive refusal to occultate the opacity of the other, a refusal that opens possibilities of new and better understanding: the self sees both itself and the other in a new light. Within the movement of embrace, the nonunderstanding, which seems like a defeat is in fact a small triumph—“yet this is not the triumph of the self, but of the other as other for the self.”

Do not rival traditions and rival communities of discourse give rise to rival justices? They do. MacIntyre believes, however, that traditions also provide resources for settling the disputes. Genuine intellectual encounter cannot take place in some generalized way among people who stand nowhere, as the Enlightenment thinkers assumed and much of modern culture takes for granted. For rational discussion to replace the sterile exchange of assertions and counter-assertions people must inhabit traditions. From within a tradition, they can then carry on rational debates not only with the fellow members of the same tradition but also with those who inhabit rival traditions.

Overlapping and changing social spaces account for a good deal of fragmentation in contemporary societies: we tolerate different rationalities in different milieus and live with partly inconsistent moral principles. But consider the consequence of eliminating fragmentation and incoherence. It would involve purging extraneous elements from traditions so as to make them pure, coherent. As MacIntyre well knows, this cannot happen simply through a change of beliefs.

There is a profound “injustice” about the God of the biblical traditions. It is called grace. As I argued in Chapter IV, in the story of the prodigal son

As James McClendon puts it, our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.
The New Testament writers put it this way: before you can search for and accept the truth, before you can unmask deceptions and ideologies, the truth must be “in you” (see John 8:45; 2 Cor 11:10). In a well-known passage in Ephesians, readers are warned not to be “tossed to and fro and blown about” by “people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming” (4:14). What anchor will keep them from being carried away by distortions of truth? They should alētheuein en agapē, says the writer (4:15). Commentators usually render this term “speaking the truth in love.” But the verb used in the original is not “to speak” but “to truth,” which in addition to speaking the truth may mean cherishing, maintaining, doing, or living the truth (see John 3:21). Since the notion of “deceitful scheming,” which functions as a contrast, denotes more than just speaking falsehood, alētheuein includes here both telling and living the truth. Speaking is only part of what we do with truth as we struggle against its distortions; living the truth is certainly equally important. Untruth holds captive both minds and lives and therefore cannot be overcome only with right thoughts and right words. It takes a truthful life to want to seek after the truth, to see the truth when confronted by it, and to say the truth out loud without fear.

Friedrich Nietzsche exaggerated when, in Twilight of the Idols, he wrote that “the will to a system is a lack of integrity,” but he was making an important point. I believe that human finitude, temporality, and fallibility, as well as God’s incomprehensibility, stand in tension with theology’s aspiration to comprehensive systematicity.

The main thesis of the book is that the will to embrace is:
prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. The will to embrace precedes any “truth” about others and any construction of their “justice.” This will is absolutely indiscriminate and strictly immutable; it transcends the moral mapping of the social world into “good” and “evil.”

5 stars for content, 4 stars for the writing. Bro could use an editor, let me tell you.

I really enjoyed Volf's perspective on violence, exclusion, and the work of Jesus on the cross. He makes this point later in the book, but oftentimes, more liberal Christian thinkers take God's love and embrace to an end beyond scripture's warrant (at least in my opinion and Volf's). This book is a necessary counterpoint to those views, borne out of the Serb-Croat ethnic conflict of the 90s.

A few main points stood out for me. One is God's willingness to embrace those at odds with Him. The analysis of Cain and Abel resonates. Even when Cain had murdered Abel, God refused to cast him out entirely and did not let anyone kill Cain: "God did not abandon Cain to the cycle of exclusion that he himself has set in motion. Labeled by the mark of God, Cain belonged to God and was protected by God even as he settled away "from the presence of the Lord."" This unwillingness to exclude is what took Jesus to the cross. There, he not only forgives us but opens his arms to embrace us in communion.

There's also the idea of identity being rooted in the other and yet, without the collapse of distinction, whether this is about God's relation within the Trinity, one group's relationship to another, or the relationship between men and women. Identities don't exist without the other, and this is a point that Volf comes back to again and again.

Last, violence is not for human beings to take up. But our non-violence is rooted in the truth that "vengeance is the Lord's." And what's more, human non-violence does not necessarily correspond to God's non-violence or to an unwillingness to judge. There will come a day when all evil will be excluded, and that action of exclusion can be construed as violent. And yet, the lamb who suffered violence at the hands of others and broke cycles of violence will sit enthroned in the new world, a monument to and a rule legitimized by his suffering.

"The cross says that despite its manifest enmity toward God humanity belongs to God, God will not be God without humanity…The cross is the giving up of God's self in order not to 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…Forgiveness is not the culmination…it is a passage leading to embrace."

The chapter on gender is lackluster/outdated but the rest is packed with rich and timeless considerations that the church would be wise to listen to.

Volf helps us navigate Scripture in a way that grasps not just the words but the character of the Word. So much of violence done in God’s name misunderstands this critical distinction.

I’ll be keeping this one to reference for sure.

Exclusion and Embrace is not a book that should be approached lightly. This work is extremely thought provoking and, at times, challenging. Not for the faint of heart, Volf presents a thesis that is radically different from popular thinking, in either liberal or conservative circles: that at the heart of the cross, Jesus is modelling is a radical inclusion and opening of Himself to the other, and this is what followers of Christ are called to emulate. At the level of gender, truth, and peace: embracing the other is absolutely essential to taking up the cross of Christ.

The reason I did not give five stars is because of the difficulty of this book to read at times. Some of the content is necessary for proving the thesis while other aspects seem to be unnecessary. That said, this book is extremely well written.

This book is so important. I have wrestled a lot with how to love my "enemy" whether that be the family member I'm angry at or the fellow citizen who is my political opposite. This book provides a powerful challenge to those who so quickly write off "the other." Volf compellingly argues that justice goes hand in hand with a desire to embrace our enemy, no matter how despicable their actions. We must also truly strive to see the justice and truth in their positions, even if from our position it seems like they have absolutely none. This is not easy pie-in-the-sky empathy. It's brutally difficult empathy. But as Christians who look to take up their crosses and obey Jesus, there is no other way. Read this book! The text itself is pretty dense but its message is nothing short of radical.

Mirsolav Volf has been a massive influence in my own theology as both a pastor and someone who does human rights work. If you haven't read this classic, what are you doing with your life? A beautiful reflection on the way forward for the world.

How is it possible to love one's enemies, as Jesus so distinctively calls his followers to do? What is the nature of divine and human forgiveness? And how does God's embrace of humanity and the God revealed in Christ crucified empower us to embrace the other?

Volf explores these themes with rich biblical commentary, sophisticated theology that meaningfully engages post-modern thinking, and with grounding in violent human conflict. Related reflections on justice, truth, and violence would each be their own worthy book.

I loved some of this book, but it was clear throughout that the author writes from a white, male perspective, and there was so much that is vital for the flourishing of the less privileged that he only vaguely hinted at.

Fantastic. This book was a gift and it will undoubtedly be a conversation partner and resource for me for a long long time. Volf leaves very few stones unturned in this discussion of reconciliation. Everytime I found myself thinking, "What about ____?" He often addressed my question in just a few pages. The book also feels both timely and timeless as a theological roadmap to reconciliation that can lead to it in most any culture. The downside (if it can be called a downside) is that it is a bit of a slog. But complex challenges almost always require complex books to address them. The challenge of the pastor/teacher is to read this and simplify the message while subtracting very little. I found this difficult because no single paragraph can be quoted without feeling the need to quote the 17 paragraphs before and after.

It is theologically and biblically rich (and even the places where I questioned Volf's theology did not detract from the value of the book). Obviously, I read it in a time when reconciliation is definitely needed, but I think it would have been as much of a gift even if we were in relatively peaceable times.

Finally, the bibliography is a great resource by itself. I found myself opening Goodreads regularly in order to add a new book to my "want to read" shelf.

Excellent book, and possibly the most thorough and thoughtful treatment I’ve read on the topic of justice and reconciliation. Volf engages a myriad of sources from across the philosophical spectrum, and draws heavily on God’s embrace of the other on the cross of Christ.

The only downside, and this isn’t a criticism, is that someone needs to take this book and boil it down for a more general audience. This is an important book for the church, but I’m not sure it is accessible enough.