life changing

Philosophically dense, but extremely compelling theology. Volf, a Croatian national, wrote this book as his response to his internal struggle watching the Serbian genocide of the early 90s. How could he embrace those who were killing his people? But as a Christian, he must, mustn't he? Is God on the side of the poor and oppressed? Where is his justice, and what does it look like? Can we find empathy for our enemies?

These difficult questions permeate his exploration of exclusion (hate) and embrace (love). Volf grapples with the very difficult realities of subscribing to, and practicing, nonviolence in a world where doing so often means our own obliteration. Is that the inevitable end of a Christian? Maybe, but Volf shows us in profound fashion how the willingness to embrace even our enemies can lead to healing and reconciliation and maybe, just maybe, put an end to the perpetual cycles of violence that define this world.

this book rocks, seriously loved it. while the book is filled with great insights, here's a few that stood out to me:

how do we reconcile the tension between God's identification with the oppressed and its ensuing demand for justice with God's embrace of the oppressor and call for forgiveness? Volf, personally coming from a context of genocide, is very vulnerable about the dramatic tension in attempting to reconcile himself with both the God who identifies with the suffering, exploited, abused and victimized and delivers the needy (thereby critiquing the powers of victimization and holding them to account) and the God who forgives the victimizers, perpetrators, oppressors and calls us not towards revenge or isolated neutrality but towards reconciliation.

whereas moltmann and similar theological movements have done the crucial work of reemphasizing recently lost emphases on God's solidarity with the poor, marginalized, and oppressed, Volf picks up the crucial theme of atonement for the perpetrator. volf places God's self-donation or self-giving love as the broader context under which God's solidarity with the oppressed and atonement for the perpetrator must be placed.

volf explores a theology of reconciliation in the face of the challenge of "otherness" in contemporary society, in which boundaries are often created in which we exclude the other in our collective identities.

"embrace" is employed as a metaphor (along the lines of the prodigal son story and in the context of Christ's embrace of our wretched humanity on the cross) to explore God's posture towards the offender, framing reconciliation for those who have been violated to have a posture of embrace towards those who have violated them. using trinitarian language, we must make space in ourselves for the other in whom are identities are constituted--both positively and negatively. for the victim, a posture of embrace thus entails repentance for what the sin has done to our own lives.

this could easily be misunderstood as "blaming the victim" and this is where i think volf's discussion is perhaps at its most powerful, still being able to call evil evil and call it to account, while nonetheless recognizing that there is a different kind of evil, even on a lesser scale, that victimization does to us and from which we need God's healing. the result of this healing will be the strength to have a posture of embrace towards those who have wounded us and a willingness towards reconciliation.

and yet for the offender to enter and receive the embrace offered calls for acknowledgement of the offense in repentance. the call to enter the kingdom and be reconciled to God comes first with the call to repent. God's all-embracing love requires nothing of us for it to be there but everything from us in order to enter it. there is no "cheap grace" here in which the offender is free to abuse again and again under the name of "love" and "reconciliation" which are more fluffy distortions of the self-sacrificial nature such words truly mean in their biblical framework.

given his backdrop from the genocide in the former yugoslavia his story lends such a powerful voice to address the issue of "otherness" and reconciliation in today's world. i also love that he goes "through" postmodern thought rather than "around" it, drawing meaningfully from its major thinkers' often brilliant insights but unintimidated to freely critique its destructive weaknesses.

i also loved the last chapter (7?) where he attempts to reconcile the Crucified Messiah with the Rider on the White Horse, how do we reconcile the vulnerable suffering Messiah revealing God in weakness, humility and identification with the outcast, marginalized and broken and embracing humanity in its wickedness and rebellion, with the Rider on a White Horse who comes with a sword to strike down the nations and treads in the bloody winepress of his wrath? Volf argues that God's violence is a "violence to end all violence" which is hope for the oppressed and victimized around the world who seek to embrace the oppressor to no avail; Volf lambasts the Western sentimentality which has shirked from affirming the justice of God's violence and claims (this was striking to me) to truly reclaim a non-violent proactive resistance to oppression and injustice in our world we actually need a stronger reclamation of God's justice, a "more violent" God (properly framed as a "violence to end all violence" in the context of his loving pursuit to restore his creation and set the world to rights from the hands of human brutality) as the grounding of God being powerful enough to redeem creation from humanity's sin and ground our hope.

overall this book really challenged me alot to wrestle with the question of reconciliation in our world and to have a broader view of God's all-embracing, self-giving love, not only for the victimized and oppressed, but for the unjust and oppressors--and of course the lines of both these categories run through all our own identities.

This book on forgiveness and nonviolence, later expounded upon in The End of Memory, does a great job of arguing for why one should love their enemies rather than perpetuating the cycle of violence. Though some may find fault with Volf's trinitarian theology, the core of the matter finding its basis in the crucified Messiah is something that many Christians are seemingly lacking these days as many horrors are baptized in the American Christian's imagination. Volf is right to say that those who seek such things have no place seeking legitimation in the religion which worships the crucified Messiah.

An interesting and thought provoking book written with the intent of challenging the reader to examine their own beliefs about pacifism and embracing the enemy. It was difficult to comprehend the horror of war, such as the writer described in his own life between Serbia and Croatia, especially in relation to his own actions in forgiveness based on his faith in God. This is a book that changes one's Worldview.

It took me forever, but finally got through this one. The concepts are powerful and important, although I think that the writing style is unnecessarily convoluted. Well worth wading through, however.

Four stars because on second read I still trying to grasp aspects of the argument. It is worth a slower read and certainly stretching and challenging. The last two chapters were the most helpful. Maybe it just took me that long to start catching on.

I like the idea of the book. He says that religious violence stems from a loose attachment to religious symbol with a lack in depth of thought, devotion and substance. However, this is a very hard read. Like the German army in Russia, I did not make it to the end.

Wow. I heard Volf speak once, many years ago, and was impressed by his thoroughness, insight, and compassion. This book encompasses all those around a topic that I care deeply about. I find Volf's theology of embrace very compelling and incredibly hopeful.
"The will to give ourselves to others and 'welcome' them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity."

I’ve known about this book for a long time, but never broken down and read it. I’m glad I finally got around to it. It’s one of the best books I’ve read at applying God’s revelation of himself through Christ to articulate a thoroughly Christian ethic. He spends a lot of time interacting with postmodern thinkers with more thought than just about every other Christian writer I’ve read. This meditation on Christ’s call to love our enemies deserves multiple read throughs.

Really important book for social ethics and social division. I don't agree with Volf on some major points of doctrine (exclusivity of Christ and the relationship between Yahweh and Allah), but I didn't see those coming up in this book.

This will be a long review because this book made me think so much, so the tl;dr version is: A very thought-provoking book on how we, as imperfect humans, can manage to implement God's perfect justice in a way which reflects that perfect justice. His short answer is that we can only do this by embracing the "other" (essentially our enemies or those who oppose us) with love and grace, but boy does he go deeper than that simple sentence.

This book grew out of some lectures Mr. Volf gave reflecting on the wars in the Balkans in the late 1990s between Croats, Serbs, and Muslims. I usually highlight books I'm reading in yellow for an interesting quote and for a really, really excellent quote, I use red. This book is filled with a lot of red quotes. In this passage Mr. Volf is talking about how Christians sometimes get so caught up in culture that they fail to distinguish between culture and Christian values. He writes:

"The overriding commitment to their culture serves churches worst in situations of conflict. Churches, the presumed agents of reconciliation, are at best impotent and at worst accomplices in the strife." And then, "Cultural identity insinuates itself with religious force; Christian and cultural commitments merge. Such sacralization of cultural identity is invaluable for the parties in conflict because it can transmute what is in fact a murder into an act of piety."

A damning quote if there ever was one, especially in light of the current political situation in America.

Or this gem: "What we should turn away from seems clear: it is captivity to our own culture, coupled so often with blind self-righteousness."

I could go on and on with quotes like these, but I really want to talk about his discussion of justice. He lays out three different ways of implementing justice, of which the first one is the only one viable from a Christian viewpoint, that is that as followers of Christ, our standard of justice is God's perfect justice. Sounds easy, correct?

Not so fast, points out Mr. Volf. Yes, God's standard of justice is perfect, but do we as fallible humans implement it perfectly? He writes: "Our understanding of God’s justice is imperfect and we often pervert justice even as we seek to do it." Oof! That hits a little close to home. Of COURSE we are not going to get God's perfect justice done perfectly.

Take the Spanish Inquisition for instance. The leaders who were torturing those who opposed the catholic faith thought they were doing good in torturing people because if they got the person to recant their position and enter the faith, they would be ensured eternal bliss in heaven, so a little human-implemented suffering was a positive good! So as Mr. Volf points out, just assuming that we ipso facto have and know God's perfect justice and implement it perfectly is a fool's game.

But how then can we have anything close to God's perfect standard of justice? asks Mr. Volf. The only way we can even think we are doing this is to embrace those who oppose us. He writes: "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."

From this point, Mr. Volf is just on fire with his analysis of justice and how we have it without creating injustice in our justice! (Yes, we do this all the time). I'm just going to post some quotes to pique your interest:

"The irreversible history of injustice weighs on the shoulders of the present. The burden cannot be cast away. Neither revenge nor reparations can redress old injustices without creating new ones."

"Justice demands not a perfect map of the existing world, but nothing less than the undoing of the world, past and present, and the creation of a new world."

"If you want justice and nothing but justice, you will inevitably get injustice. If you want justice without injustice, you must want love."

"In short, a world of perfect justice would be a world of transcended justice, because it would be a world of perfect freedom and love."

One of his conclusions in the section on justice is this: "since “justice” is impotent in the face of past injustice, reconciliation is ultimately possible only through injustice being forgiven and, finally, forgotten."

Just his section on what he means when he says "forgotten" is remarkable.

It is not without reason that Christianity Today named this one of the 100 most influential theological works of the 1900s.

A fascinating and thoroughly challenging work of theology, but boy was I humbled reading it.

Addendum: I finished the book today and my opinion of it hasn't changed. But a final comment. In the new edition, Mr. Volf added a final chapter responding to some of the critiques he received over the book. The chapter is kind of spotty, some of it good, some unnecessary. There is a section that is a really good example of why theologians shouldn't argue with each other. He has a long response to one of his colleagues critiques that is boring and unnecessary and really doesn't even make any sense unless you are acquainted with the issues which most readers will not be. This is a good example of the sort of incestuous relationship theologians have with each other in which they debate minutiae that matters only to each other. The chapter would have been better if he had completely left that out. I would detract half a star for this, but I liked the book so much, I will forbear.











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