I read this book like Kell from Good Burger.

“Uh huh, Uh huh, I know some of these words”

I’ve meant to read this forever & it’s worthy of the hype. Volf has quite a way with words and concepts. This will be a good book to re-read at some point. In the epilogue, he defends his social Trinitarian position with which I am tempted to disagree but after listening closely I think it’s mainly semantics.

This is the classic book on Christian identity formation. I found it a challenging read but well worth it. In the first half, Volf sets out his theory about how as humans, we identify ourselves by who we exclude. But he encourages Christians to truly embrace others. He then applies his ideas to several complex issues such as gender roles, oppression and justice, deception and truth, violence and peace. The book was published in 1996 but the issues still feel very current.

A really excellent work on violence, reconciliation, justice, oppression, and so forth, filtered through Volf's language of exclusion and embrace. He writes from the thick of it, having grown up Croatian in the former Yugoslavia. It is a challenge for a work of theology of this type to stand the test of time, and Volf's personal experience of exclusion and embrace gives his ideas an immediacy that has lasted for 20 years. Some of the atrocities that were immediate to him when writing Exclusion and Embrace in the 1990s were the Balkan conflict, the 1992 LA uprising (he lived in LA for a time), and various other tragedies around the world (genocide in Rwanda and the Sri Lankan civil war). Since this book was written, many more such atrocities have occurred, and Volf's words continue to speak truth into current situations.

He begins by quoting a question Jürgen Moltmann asked him at a conference: "'But can you embrace a četnik?' Serbian fighters called 'četnik' had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities. I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ." (9) And thus the whole project of Exclusion and Embrace began. "Can I embrace a četnik--the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify the embrace? Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. 'No, I cannot--but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.' In a sense this book is the product of the struggle between the truth of my argument and the force of Moltmann's objection." (9)

I'm sure I will return to this book over and over again. It made excellent Advent reading, especially the section on Revelation and judgment. Exclusion and Embrace, I think, is best read at some distance from suffering, whether chronological or intellectual. (Volf argues for having some amount of distance from culture in order to think critically and well about it.) The arguments of
Exclusion and Embrace are too much for the one bearing the pain of being excluded, but might be immensely helpful to someone who has borne that pain and wants to move to a place of peace. Volf often focuses on remembering rightly and even forgetting (in an eschatological sense), so one could argue Exclusion and Embrace is written to those for whom violent exclusion is in the past. It's not that Volf has nothing to say to those currently in deep suffering; I just wouldn't thrust Exclusion and Embrace in the hands of someone currently in a war zone.

The whole project of Exclusion and Embrace reminded me of Corrie Ten Boom's story of embracing one of the concentration camp guards she met during her later ministry. She both wanted to embrace and forgive him, and desired to exclude him. When she did embrace him, she felt a flow of love between them. This reconciliation of oppressor and victim is a hard pill to swallow, but it is the most challenging and radical aspect of Christianity. "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us," Paul says in Romans 5, and for Volf, this is the embrace that ends exclusion. Romans 5:5 was a significant verse for Ten Boom in her ministry, and Romans 5:1-11 is important to Exclusion and Embrace.

The chapter on gender identity as an outworking of exclusion and embrace was helpful (and I quote from it below), but it also felt oddly out of place in the book. There were more typos in this chapter (in my edition) than in other chapters, leading me to think it may have been something of an afterthought, or at least less edited than the other chapters. Volf did not really touch on violence in relations between genders, though every other chapter deals with violence in some way, which makes it stand apart from the rest, and also fails to account for the sadly common element of gender-motivated violence. The chapter felt a bit like checking a box rather than providing a thorough, robust vision for gender in Volf's ideal of embrace. I have heard that the chapter was removed from subsequent editions of Exclusion and Embrace, and I hope that Volf has written better about this elsewhere, or ideally, edited a volume on the topic with many voices chiming in about it. Volf's idea of exclusion and embrace is a great conversation partner with gender studies, but I don't think he executed it to the best of his ability in this book.

"All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover him at their side. To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting his way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology." (24)

"For God to be the model of masculinity one must first project maleness onto God and then use the projection to legitimize certain allegedly specifically male characteristics and activities." (171)

"Should we not analyze the biblical statements about men and women, try to reconstruct biblical 'manhood' and 'womanhood,' and apply it in contemporary contexts? Without denying that we can learn much from men and women in the Bible, I propose that such an approach would be mistaken. Biblical 'womanhood' and 'manhood'--if there are such things at all, given the diversity of male and female characters and roles that we encounter in the Bible--are not divinely sanctioned models but culturally situated examples; they are accounts of the successes and failures of men and women to live out the demands of God on their lives within specific settings. This is not to say that the biblical construals of what men and women (of what men and women as men and women) should or should not do and be are wrong, but that they are of limited normative value in a different cultural context, since they are of necessity laden with specific cultural beliefs about gender identity and roles." (182)

"My proposal is that we locate normativity in the formal features of identity and the character of relations of divine persons. Instead of setting up ideals of femininity and masculinity, we should root each in the sexed body and let the social construction of gender play itself out guided by the vision of the identity of and relations between divine persons. What is normative is not some 'essence' of femininity and masculinity, but the procedures, modeled on the life of the triune God, through which men and women in specific cultural settings should negotiate their mutual relations and their constructions of femininity and masculinity." (182) [Note that Volf specifically speaks against locating visions for human relations in the Trinity in the way commonly done by groups like the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, or the "umbrella" analogy for the Trinity and human families. Rather, here he is speaking of divine self-giving love that is modeled by God toward us, rather than by us toward God.]

"It takes the struggle against depression and oppression to transform nonviolence from barren negativity into a creative possibility, from a quicksand into a foundation of a new world." (293)