Exclusion and Embrace, Revised and Updated: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

by Miroslav Volf

Publisher:

Abingdon Press

, 2019

Life in the twenty-first century presents a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Is there any hope of embracing our enemies? Of opening the door to reconciliation? Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion.

Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we "learn to live with one another," but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God.

Volf won the 2002 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for the first edition of his book, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon, 1996). In that first edition, professor Volf, a Croatian by birth, analyzed the civil war and “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia, and he readily found other examples of cultural, ethnic, and racial conflict to illustrate his points. Since September 11, 2001, and the subsequent epidemic of terror and massive refugee suffering throughout the world, Volf revised Exclusion and Embrace to account for the evolving dynamics of inter-ethnic and international strife.

Contents

Top Highlights

“Its main thesis is this: ‘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.’” (source)

“Uniqueness no less than equality are rooted in the one God. Simultaneous affirmation of human equality and differences is a feature of all monotheisms, but it is especially congruent with versions of trinitarian monotheism in which divine unity and differences are equiprimordial.” (source)

“What turned the pain of suffering into agony was the abandonment; Jesus was abandoned by the people who trusted in him and by the God in whom he trusted. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (source)

“More specifically, what does the cross tell about the character of the Christian self in relation to the other?” (source)

“I will explore what kind of selves we need to be in order to live in harmony with others” (source)

Product Details

• Title : Exclusion and Embrace, Revised and Updated: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
• Author: Volf, Miroslav
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Publication Date: 2019
• ISBN: 9781501861086

About Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf, is Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. He is also the Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He is a member of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. as well as the Evangelical Church in Croatia.