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Miroslav Volf, director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, recently published The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. As Volf calls Christians to remember with redemptive purpose, he recounts his personal struggle to cope with memories of interrogations by Communist officials in his native Croatia, then part of Yugoslavia. CT associate editor Collin Hansen sat down with Volf in his office at Yale Divinity School.

What makes memory an especially urgent theological topic?
Part of the interest in memory is because we live in such a fast-paced culture, in which we have a hard time remembering what's transpired only a few days or a month ago. We're glued to this ever-shifting and changing present, so we feel that memory is slipping away from us. We want to hold onto memories, because we rightly believe that part of our identity is what we remember about ourselves and our interactions with others. Part of our identity as a nation depends on what has happened to us in the past.

Why is this topic especially important to you?
Much of the conflict in the world, whether between individuals or between communities, is fueled by memory of what has happened in the past. So on the one hand, we have to remember to preserve our identity. We have to remember in order not to allow similar violations in the future.

Yet when we remember, our memory is not innocent in our hands. I use the term "shield of memory." But so quickly, the shield mutates into a sword. Memory played a significant role in the recent conflict in my native Croatia. My interest was to find ways in which we can prevent memory from mutating from a shield into a sword—indeed, finding ways in which memory can become a means of reconciliation. That's why I'm interested not just in memory, but in remembering rightly.

The book is both theological and personal—why?
The narrative backbone of the book is my interrogations by the secret service of Yugoslavia and the Communist army. Immense suspicion arose from the sheer facts that I was a theologian, I studied abroad, and I was married to an American. They had to find out whether I was a subversive element. I narrate the story of my interrogations and my relationships with my interrogators in order to illustrate what memory does to us, how we can deal with memory, and what the light of Christ's truth and Christ's person can do to help us remember and reconcile in healing ways.

What is the biblical purpose of remembering?
God's purpose with humanity as a whole is reconciliation with God and reconciliation with one another in a new heaven and new earth. Given that we have sinned, reconciliation is what needs to happen to get us there. That's also the goal of remembering rightly. Memory ought to serve that grand vision of reconciliation God is working to create—as Jonathan Edwards has said, the "world of perfect love," love of God and love of neighbor.

What is Christianity's unique contribution to remembering rightly?
To remember rightly we need to put on certain glasses. We put on glasses of the memory of the Exodus of the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt. Christians in particular remember the death and the resurrection of Christ. The apostle Paul says one has died for all. Now what does that mean for the wrong that a person has done to me?

Well, I have to remember it as a wrong of a person for whom Christ has died, even if that person isn't receiving that redemption personally. Then I look at myself. Christ died for my sins, too. I can't remember transgression against me as one who is purely innocent. It's not as if I stand in the light and the other person [stands] in the darkness, and he or she has to do all the changing, while I bask in my self-righteousness.

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May 2007, Vol. 51, No. 5