To Embrace the Enemy
Is reconciliation possible in the wake of such evil?
interview with Miroslav Volf | posted 9/01/2001 12:00AM
Miroslav Volf is known for grappling with matters of grace and forgiveness in the face of great pain and transgression. His widely read 1996 book Exclusion & Embrace probed theological implications of reconciliation in a fractured world. A professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, Volf's interest in reconciliation is not simply academic. Born in Croatia, he came of age in communist Yugoslavia, where he witnessed the ethnic tensions between the Croats and Serbs. After the fall of communism in 1991, those tensions escalated into a bloody war.
Last week in New York City, while terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and thousands of innocent lives, Volf was only a few blocks away, speaking at the Annual International Prayer Breakfast at the United Nations on the importance of reconciling with our enemies. A week later, Christianity Today senior news writer Tony Carnes spoke to him about terrorism and forgiveness.
When did you discover that the World Trade Center had been attacked?
After my talk, as I was leaving the United Nations building. Some of the U.N. personnel informed us that there had been a major terrorist attack. As I walked out to Grand Central Station, I could see a large clowd of dust in the distance.
Were you afraid?
I felt very strange. I had been inside talking about reconciliation with our enemies at the same time that a terrorist attack was taking place and the World Trade Center towers were collapsing. You have to understand: I come from a country that suffered comparatively much greater damage—where one third of the land was captured and whole cities were leveled. Just one town, Vukovar, nearby my own home city was completely destroyed, and 30,000 people were either killed or driven out. We had about a million refugees out of a population of 4.5 million. Still, I was horrified and shocked by what happened here.
To see New York deserted and its people flocking out of lower Manhattan, like a stream of refugees, was jarring. You could see the fear and shock in people's eyes. Some were trying to make phone calls and could not. There was a huge sense of gloom and danger. I felt trapped. When I arrived at Grand Central Station, my train was not going. I had to wait about four hours before catching the train back to New Haven.
As many as 5,000 people may have been killed as a result of the attack on the World Trade Center. Does this kind of atrocity cause you to second guess your ideas about reconciliation with one's enemies?
One of the points in my talk at the U.N. was that we, as Christians, must develop a will to embrace and be reconciled with our enemy. This will to embrace is absolutely unconditional. There is no imaginable deed that should take a person outside our will to embrace him, because there is no imaginable deed that can take a person out of God's will to embrace humanity—which is what I think is inscribed in big letters in the narrative of the Cross of Christ.
A tragedy like last week's comes close to the sort of offense that one could imagine would put its perpetrators beyond our will to embrace them, but it does not. And it does not simply because Christ already died for all of us.
But reconciliation is the last thing on the minds of most Americans—including Christians. We are angry.
The first thought on many of our minds was that such vicious acts demand revenge. When I realized what happened, I felt a sense of shock and grief for the loss of life and the major disruption that had taken place. But then I felt we needed to go after them, that they needed to pay.
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