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Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
By Miroslav Volf
Abingdon
336 pp.; $19.95, paper

If you've browsed lately in a seminary bookstore, you will have noticed the shelf-straining quantity of new or recently published works of systematic theology and the even greater volume of biblical commentary—including many books in both categories by evangelicals. And a few blocks away in the mall, the Christian bookstore will be well supplied with popular guides that offer practical application of Christian principles to every manner of concern, from child-raising to love-making to managing your finances. But where do you go to find books that bridge the gap between the seminary and the mall—books in which theological reflection and biblical interpretation are brought to bear on our common lives with clarity and intellectual rigor?

Miroslav Volf displays such ability in his powerful new book, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Volf's concerns about the dynamics of exclusion and embrace are significantly shaped by his identity as a Croatian. He was once asked whether he could embrace a cetnik, one of the notorious Serbian fighters who were destroying his country and his people. He knew immediately how he wanted to respond: "No, I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to."

Exclusion and Embrace provides a poignantly honest and profoundly theological account of the moral significance of both sides of that response. As Volf puts it in his preface,

The tension between the message of the cross and the world of violence presented itself to me as a conflict between the desire to follow the Crucified and the disinclination either simply to watch others be crucified or let myself be nailed to the cross. An account of an intellectual struggle, the book is also a record of a spiritual journey. I wrote it for myself—and for all those who in a world of injustice, deception, and violence have made the gospel story their own and therefore wish neither to assign the demands of the Crucified to the murky regions of unreason nor abandon the struggle for justice, truth, and peace.

The book is moving and insightful as a record of a spiritual journey, a journey that Christians from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds can travel with Volf. After all, Volf begins his reflections by invoking hatreds that have led not only to the shelling of Sarajevo, but also to the racial tensions and riots in Los Angeles, and to Neo-Nazi skinheads marching in Berlin. These cities have particular significance for Volf, for they represent the country of his origin, the location of his residence (he teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary), and the place where, in 1992, he gave a lecture on the social and cultural upheavals in Europe. Such cities, close to Volf's own experience (he has lived and taught in Germany as well as in Croatia and the United States), are emblematic of so many of our communities, near and far, which harbor legacies of divisiveness. Whether the news is coming from Africa or the former Soviet Union, from Brooklyn or from Paris, it drives home the harsh realities of cultural and ethnic conflict.

As Christians, we wonder how we ought to respond to such situations. We know somehow that we ought to invoke God's love and forgiveness, and we recognize our dismay or even horror at the effects of sin and evil in our world (no less than in our own hearts). But, we wonder, can our responses do justice to the pain and suffering of others, or do we tend to offer cheap grace? Further, how should we respond when Christians are so often found on both sides of cultural and ethnic conflicts? Perhaps most pointedly, in a world in which we are often more marked by our cultural identities than our Christian faith (for many of us, we are Americans first, Christians second), we are forced to ask whether Christ really has "broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us," so that we are "no longer strangers and aliens," but rather "citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God" (Eph. 2:14, 19). No longer strangers? Or estranged as a result of hostility?

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April 28 1997, Vol. 41, No. 5