A labyrinth of arguments and logic brilliantly thought through, BUT for me at the time to dense a read for me to be able to take in properly.

I read MV’s Free of Charge earlier this year. A friend recommended this book as well as Free of Charge as I journey through my own story. Free of Charge was accessible and, although filled with challenging concepts, was not a difficult read. I’m glad that was my first intro to MV. This book (Exclusion and Embrace) felt, in many ways, like a much more academic and fleshed out version of Free of Charge. It challenged me as a reader - almost 400 pages with necessary academic footnotes and explanations on nearly every page. I am a lay reader- not a pastor or academic (although I am an avid reader) - and it took me about 2 months to work my way through E&E. I read and re-read multiple sections in order to try to grasp its key concepts, and I’m sure that plenty still went over my head. I will be returning to this book frequently I believe, and it has forever influenced how I view the story of the Prodigal Son and the Embrace of our Heavenly Father. I highlighted and underlined and wrote in the margins on plenty of pages. I mentally argued with and questioned MV throughout this book, and although I may not agree with everything, this book has influenced my interactions with those around me and will I hope continue to influence how I live my life. This book was a worthy challenge.

A Deep Discussion

4.5 stars - I particularly love the use of metaphor as metaphysics in this book. Not perfect, but a resonant book I think, and one was very meaningful for me at the time I read it

Powerful theological and sociological work addressing human forces that unite and divide us. Explores the sociological implications of the Gospel of Jesus at work in individuals and communities.

It took me a few months, but I'm glad I pushed through - this book is enlightening and enriching on so many levels. That fact that it was written 20 years ago and still holds such high relevance today amazes me.

It was my first time reading it, but I'm sure it's not the last. The depth and complexity will take a few more rounds to sink in. I'll be keeping it easily accessible on my bookshelf, for future reference.

Excellent book. So much to ponder.

Some years ago my wife, Shannon, occasionally wrote reviews of classic books for a publication for gifted high school students. Although I don't think there is an official genre know as the re-review, I think there probably ought to be. In a day and age when most people fail to read even one book a year, much less a relatively challenging and completely serious and comprehensive work of theology, perhaps we readers ought to take it as part of our role to reintroduce books from decades past to readers for whom they will be new, if not unheard of. It's in that spirit that I take a few minutes to write out some thoughts on Volf's Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, a book first published in 1996. Still in print and available 22 years later from Abingdon Press, I felt Volf's wrestling with questions of identity and the possibility of embrace spoke to our own period, if only because in the age of Trump we seem to be wrestling more starkly, and perhaps more helplessly, with the questions that drive Volf's reflections. Can we all just get along, much less embrace, in the face of random police shooting in the name of civil order, family separations in the name of national security, lethal white unity rallies with good people on all sides on all sides, and the general belief that we are so hopelessly separated by our different identities that empathy is beside the point and, in the words of Roxane Gay, we should all just stay in our lanes?

I would like to think a work of theology could solve all this; indeed, Volf indicates that it is the real work of theologians to be about the business of helping to form subjects who could bring about the world of embrace that he imagines. There is a generosity of vision in Volf's book that I find admirable, even compelling. His central concept of embrace is not a campfire Kumbaya version of hugging it out, but a compelling narrative of what it means, or at least ought to mean, to be a fully realized human being. For Volf, the notion of embrace is inherent in the mutual and overspilling love of the Trinity, as well as the fundamental character of God's engagement with human beings; the incarnation is a metaphysical embrace of humanness, and the cross is an appeal to be embraced in return. Human beings are only fully realized as human beings when we actually seek to give up our separateness and embrace others as we find them. As he puts it:

the most basic thought that it [the metaphor of embrace] seeks to express is important: 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. 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”

It is unfortunate, of course, that we often experience our religion most fundamentally as an act of exclusion, whether in the practice of shunning, hellfire and brimstone preachers, or the simple and more mundane acts of making sure our church services and gatherings for fellowship feel comfortable for the already comfortable, and uncomfortable for the already discomfited or destitute. And so Volf's work is surely a challenge to the good and the just and the true among us. He notes with approval Nietzsche's reminder that the crucifixion was an act of the righteous:

Nietzsche underscored the connection between the self-perceived “goodness” of Jesus’ enemeies 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 (61)

At the same time, Volf's prescriptions sit only uncomfortably with current conceptions of justice and empowerment, not least because the proper goal of a world formed by the concept and practice of embrace is not freedom or self-realization, at least not as these terms have been typically thought of in both our modern and post-modern socialites. Volf's work asks us to imagine the ideal of embrace not as the coming together of two fundamentally separate individuals "hugging it out" when it comes to their differences, but rather as a complex dance in which we realize that we cannot be what we ought to be until we learn to genuinely love those that we have despised, and even more that we find it in in ourselves to love those who have despised us. As he puts it:

At the core of the Christian faith lies the persuasion that the “others” need not be perceived as innocent in order to be loved, but ought to be embraced even when they are perceived as wrongdoers. As I read it, the story of the cross is about God who desires to embrace precisely the “sons and daughters of hell.” (85).

This kind of call sounds strange to our age of tribalism, though perhaps no stranger than any age where we find it easy to love those like us, less easy to love those unlike us, and not possible at all to love those who do not love us. On the other hand, perhaps it is not so different from the famous proclamation from Martin Luther King, Jr. that "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Volf has a complicated, and I think useful, description of embrace as a fourfold process:

The four structural elements in the movement of embrace are opening the arms, waiting, closing the arms, and opening them again. For embrace to happen, all four must be there and they must follow one another on an unbroken timeline; stopping with the first two (opening the arms and waiting) would abort the embrace, and stopping with the third (closing the arms) would pervert it from an act of love to an act of oppression and, paradoxically, exclusion. The four elements are then the four essential steps of an integrated movement. (141)

This structure seems to me to both recognize and respect the integrity of others in their freedom. Embrace cannot be forced; nor is embrace is limitless. Nevertheless, in Volf's understanding, embrace is necessary to our full humanities, to forgiveness, and ultimately to justice and the task of creating the kind of society in which we might hope to live and flourish as human beings.
As I said at the outset, I think Volf's book is worth reading since it is eerily contemporary in its impulses and in its wrestling. We can learn from him even where we disagree. I do think that if the book were written now, he might have to ask harder questions about the relationship between justice and love, between embrace and power. It's very clear in Volf's work that he subordinates justice to love, saying that embrace has to shape the definition of justice, that embrace is "about love shaping the very content of justice." This is well and good, but it remains unclear that embrace is possible outside the possibility or at least the horizon of justice. From my own position situated within the matrices of power as a white male American middle class human being--all affording me pleasures and potentialities and possibilities that others do not possess in an unjust world--what does it mean for me to offer embrace in the absence of justice. Is it possible to expect embrace outside the quest or journey toward justice. Volf's book reflects on repentance as a part of this process, but I think he could use even more thinking here in the particular ways that repentance is properly not simply from the self and toward the other (ultimately God), but is also and must be a turning away from injustice and my participation in it and toward justice, away from a life in which embrace might be colored with the expectation of inevitable betrayal and toward a life mutuality that in some ways must accompany embrace. Although I think we would do well to wonder whether subordinating justice is any more appropriate as a Christian ethic than would be the subordinating of one person of the Trinity to another, I do think the Volf's wrestling is worth our reckoning with. It is surely the case that 20 years later we are no closer to the beloved community that embrace would supposedly make possible than we were when Volf wrote this very good and important book.

No other book have I dog-eared the corners of pages than Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Volf has a rare ability to make plain very complex concepts.

He pulls from, engages, challenges, and often undresses major schools of thought and the brightest thinkers among them. His passage examining the parable of the prodigal so engaged and impacted me, I had to pick myself up off the floor.

Published in the mid 90s, the publisher describes the book as follows: "Life at the end of the twentieth century presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil." Does that description not seem even more pertinent today?

Volf urges that healing and reconciliation depends on finding ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other and proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion.

If you're interested in the concepts of identity and justice, then this is a book of note. And it's an important read for anyone who wonders if reconciliation and justice are possible on this planet.

Absolutely incredible. One of the best books I've ever read. Brilliantly researched, beautifully articulated, and deeply biblical, Volf's book addresses issues of identity, gender, justice, truth, and violence in an Orthodox but never cloying lens. Highly highly recommended.

A truly brilliant book on the psychology, theology and practice of exclusion of others and the redemptive and restorative practice of inclusion. This incredibly dense and theologically deep treatise is riveting and inspiring. Page after page of illuminating presentations make it incredibly enjoyable to read, despite it's density. In fact, it was only in the last eleven pages i found myself remotely disappointed. Volf's final analysis that we are to trust in God's violent justice, and therefore eschew our own, was a bit of a letdown. He argues that the Rider on the White horse can be interpreted no other way than a final act of just violence, which God alone is capable of meting out. On the one hand, Volf gives a great theological argument for Christian non-violence, but in the end seems to embrace the necessity of violence, albeit, God's just violence carried out by Him alone. i had to wonder why one would not prefer the ultimate nonviolent choice of annihilation for the unredeemable rather than the necessity of violent overthrow. If nothing is impossible with God, except perhaps the complete redemption of creation, then would God not prefer cessation of existence for the violent over the unlikely necessity of violent overthrow? Wouldn't it make more sense that the closest God comes to violence is to stop thinking about us and therefore chooses something more like euthanasia over murder? i would highly recommend this book, but stop when you get to page 295.

"Exclusion and Embrace" came highly recommended from a couple folks I deeply respect so it was at the top of my theological reading list after grad school. It did not disappoint, and is truly a marvelous book. It's one of those books where you think, "If every human in the world could just read, understand, and practice all of this, we'd be good to go." Having said that, I read it over the course of months rather than weeks, because my brain would be hurting or shattered after just 5-7 pages. This is a very ambitious book seeking to offer a Christian account of oppression and justice, deception and truth, peace and violence, and ultimately exclusion and embrace; and it's as timely today as it was when originally published 25 years ago.

"As we make space in ourselves for the perspective of the other on this journey, in a sense we have already arrived at the place where the Spirit was poured out on all flesh. And as we desire to embrace the other while we remain true to ourselves and to the crucified Messiah, in a sense we already are where we will be when the home of God is established among mortals."