[hold on to the center]

Miroslav Volf, speaking about I Peter, says it sums up "the New Testament teaching about how a marginalized group of Christians ought to be situated in the world"

Here's an excerpt from the part where he talks about the sectarian character of the church:

Often people think in terms of sect, or church, of someone who's really close to the power or to the margins of the power.

...

What I found interesting in 1 Peter is how it cuts across -- how it completely muddles these distinctions. I think it muddles these around the central commitment to Jesus Christ.

And so it's not that I orient myself over and against the social groups by drawing boundaries, but rather, I am oriented around the center and boundaries fall as they might, as they will.
And the difference ends up being much softer then, as I don't have to shore up the boundaries to be distinct; I can hold on to the center and it guarantees sufficiently my distinctness.

Wouldn't that make a big difference? Wouldn't that help us move away from the dominant view of the church and Christians as being against rather than being for something?

View the entire 8 minute video: Honor Everyone, which includes discussion of differences, being on the margins, honoring everyone, and clashes between religions and between the sacreds, etc.

See also Adam Ericksen's article about being secure in oneself rather than one's identity being found in hostility toward the other.

museum, hospital, or ? [pt. 2]

The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners.

In the first part, I expressed my dislike of both the museum of saints and the hospital for sinners analogies.

so what are some alternatives?

The other "place-oriented" alternatives that come to mind are personal ones. This means that they might work for me, but you may have a very different experience of the same kind of place and thus, it may mean nothing to you or in fact have negative connotations.

These often depend on a personal experience that might mean the world to the person who experienced it, and very little to others, as it is especially hard to capture and describe those magical things that make the experience what it is.

Consider a night with friends at the pub. Some only associate this with excessive drinking. Others think of hanging out with friends to watch the game. For me, it meant spending time with others in a context of acceptance, honesty and trust, regardless of what we talked about.

Many churches have small groups, and these can be amazing for some, boring for others, and downright toxic for a few. The same could be said for most other place-oriented analogies. So what else is there?

museum, hospital, or ? [pt. 1]

The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners.

The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners.

After hearing this saying in a recent sermon, I realized I don't like "hospital for sinners" anymore than I like "museum for saints".

But first, here's what the point of this saying seems to be: Rather than the church being for those who are perfect and do not need to change anymore, the church is for those who need God and His healing.

As Fr. Peter Daly said, "A broken world needs a place to bring its spiritual injuries. We need an emergency room more than a courtroom. We want healing more than judgment."

More on this perspective from the National Catholic Reporter.

I get that. That makes sense. So what's there not to like?

For starters, I don't like hospitals.

In fact, I don't think most people like hospitals.

And I'm not sure if people who are not part of a church culture think of themselves as sinners. (Do those who are in a church culture think of themselves as sinners? Or are sinners "the people out there?")

But more than that, while all analogies break down at some point, this one breaks down very quickly. Here's a little destruction for your day:

A hospital is run by professionals.
Professionals are not sick like you.
Professionals know what's best for you.
They prescribe medications and treatments.
They focus on the problem, not the person.
They usually don't care about the rest of your life.
There is no personal relationship between you and them.
The other patients are simply that, other patients.
There is little or no relationship between you and the other patients, unless you are in long-term care.
Once you are better, you leave, hoping not to have to come back.

And then there are bigger words, like power and privilege.

Hospitals are built on them.
And therefore, hospitals are othering.

No thanks.

---

[part 2]

[God's partiality]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace:

Consider, second, God’s partiality. In the biblical traditions, when God looks at a widow, for instance, God does not see “a free and rational agent,” but a woman with no standing in society. When God looks at a sojourner, God does not see simply a human being, but a stranger, cut off from the network of relations, subject to prejudice and scapegoating. How does the God who “executes justice for the oppressed” act toward widows and strangers? Just as God acts toward any other human being? No. God is partial to them. God “watches over the strangers” and “upholds the orphan and the widow” (Psalm 146:7-9) in a way that God does not watch over and uphold the powerful.

Why is God partial to widows and strangers? In a sense, because God is partial to everyone—including the powerful, whom God resists in order to protect the widow and the stranger. God sees each human being concretely, the powerful no less than the powerless. God notes not only their common humanity, but also their specific histories, their particular psychological, social, and embodied selves with their specific needs. When God executes justice, God does not abstract but judges and acts in accordance with the specific character of each person. Do we not read, however, that God’s Messiah will “not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth” (Isaiah 11:3-4). But should we conclude that his eyes will be closed when executing justice? To the contrary. He will judge truly because he will not judge by appearances and hear-say. God treats different people differently so that all will be treated justly.

Volf, pp. 221-222

[the Eucharist]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace:

Inscribed on the very heart of God’s grace is the rule that we can be its recipients only if we do not resist being made into its agents; what happens to us must be done by us. Having been embraced by God, we must make space for others in ourselves and invite them in – even our enemies. This is what we enact as we celebrate the Eucharist. In receiving Christ’s broken body and spilled blood, we, in a sense, receive all those whom Christ received by suffering.

Volf, p. 129

Interesting. Though Volf frames it the other way around, this quote reminds me of the verses in Matthew 6 and Matthew 18 that speak about God forgiving us if we forgive those who sin against us:

"If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins." Matthew 6:15-16, NLT

[the view from there]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace:

In The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel suggests that in order to know the world adequately we must “step outside of ourselves” and ask “what the world must be like from no point of view” (Nagel 1986, 62)…. Nagel concludes: “One must arrange somehow to see the world from nowhere and from here, and to live accordingly” (86). This seeing “from nowhere” and “from here” he calls “double vision.”

I suggest that we keep the double vision, but that, at least when it comes to knowing the social world, we replace “the view from nowhere” with “the view from there.” …

Seeing “from here comes naturally…. But what does it take to see “from there,” from the perspective of others? First, we step outside ourselves…. We examine what we consider to be the plain verities about others, willing to entertain the idea that these “verities” may be but so many ugly prejudices, bitter fruits of our imaginary fears or our sinister desires to dominate or exclude. We also observe our own images of ourselves, willing to detect layers of self-deceit that tell us exalted stories about ourselves and our history. To step outside means to distance ourselves for a moment from what is inside, ready for a surprise.  

….

Second, we cross a social boundary and move into the world of the other to inhabit it temporarily (MacIntyre 1993, 78). We open our ears to hear how others perceive themselves as well as how they perceive us. We use imagination to see why their perspective about themselves, about us, and about our common history, can be so plausible to them whereas it is implausible, profoundly strange, or even offensive to us….

Third, we take the other into our own world. We compare and contrast the view “from there” and the view “from here.” Not that we will necessarily reject the view “from here” and embrace the view “from there”; nor even that we will find some compromise between the two. These are two possible outcomes but other outcomes are possible too…. The only thing we must do as we take others into our world is to let their perspective stand next to ours and reflect on whether one or the other is right, or whether both are partly right and partly wrong.

Fourth, we repeat the process. Before the movement away from the self to the other and back starts, we inevitably possess explicit or implicit judgments about the rightness or wrongness of the view “from here” and the view “from there”; it would be both impossible and undesirable to suppress these judgments…. We can never presume that we have freed ourselves completely from distortions of others and deceptions about ourselves, that we possess “the truth.” Every understanding that we reach is forged from a limited perspective: it is a view “from here” about how things look “from here” and “from there.”

Volf, pp. 250-253 (selections)

[the self of the other matters more than my truth]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace:

But what about those who in the name of truth oppress the weak? This brings us to the second implication of the encounter between Jesus, Caiaphas, and Pilate, which must always complement the first: the self of the other matters more than my truth. Though I must be ready to deny myself for the sake of the truth, I may not sacrifice the other at the altar of my truth. Jesus, who claimed to be the Truth, refused to use violence to “persuade” those who did not recognize his truth. The kingdom of truth he came to proclaim was the kingdom of freedom and therefore cannot rest on pillars of violence. Commitment to nonviolence must accompany commitment to truth otherwise commitment to truth will generate violence. The truth is a shield against the violence of the strong against the weak, I argued earlier. If the shield is not to turn into a deadly weapon, it must be held in a hand that refuses to do violence, I want to add here.

Volf, p. 272

[flexible order and changing identities]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace, discussing the prodigal son:

For the father, the priority of the relationship means not only a refusal to let the moral rules be the final authority regulating “exclusion” and “embrace” but also a refusal to construct his identity in isolation from his sons. He readjusts his identity along with the changing identities of his sons and thereby reconstructs their broken identities and relationships. He suffers being “un-fathered” by both, so that through this suffering he may regain both as his sons (if the older brother was persuaded) and help them rediscover each other as brothers. Refusing the alternatives of “self-constructed” vs. “imposed” identities, difference vs. domestication, he allows himself to be taken on the journey of their shifting identities so that he can continue to be their father and they, each other’s brothers. Why does he not lose himself on the journey? Because he is guided by indestructible love and supported by a flexible order.

Flexible order? Changing identities? The world of fixed rules and stable identities is the world of the older brother. The father destabilizes this world—and draws his older son’s anger upon himself. The father’s most basic commitment is not to rules and given identities but to his sons whose lives are too complex to be regulated by fixed rules and whose identities are too dynamic to be defined once for all. Yet he does not give up the rules and the order. Guided by the indestructible love which makes space in the self for others in their alterity, which invites the others who have transgressed to return, which creates hospitable conditions for their confession, and rejoices over their presence, the father keeps re-configuring the order without destroying it so as to maintain it as an order of embrace rather than exclusion.

Volf, p. 165

[sin as exclusion]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace:

An advantage of conceiving sin as the practice of exclusion is that it names as sin what often passes as virtue, especially in religious circles. In the Palestine of Jesus’ day, “sinners” were not simply “the wicked” who were therefore religiously bankrupt (so Sanders 1985), but also social outcasts, people who practiced despised trades, Gentiles and Samaritans, those who failed to keep the Law as interpreted by a particular sect (Dunn 1988, 276-80). A “righteous” person had to separate herself from the latter; their presence defiled because they were defiled. Jesus’ table fellowship with “tax collectors and sinners” (Mark 2:15-17), a fellowship that indisputably belonged to the central features of his ministry, offset this conception of sin. Since he who was innocent, sinless, and fully within God’s camp transgressed social boundaries that excluded the outcasts, these boundaries themselves were evil, sinful, and outside God’s will (Neyrey 1988, 79). By embracing the “outcast,” Jesus underscored the “sinfulness” of the persons and systems that cast them out.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from Jesus’ compassion toward those who transgressed social boundaries that his mission was merely to demask the mechanisms that created “sinners” by falsely ascribing sinfulness to those who were considered socially unacceptable (pace Borg 1994, 46-61). He was no prophet of “inclusion” (with Johnson 1996, 43f.), for whom the chief virtue was acceptance and the cardinal vice intolerance. Instead, he was the bringer of “grace,” who not only scandalously included “anyone” in the fellowship of “open commensality” (Crossan 1991, 261-64; Crossan 1994, 66-70), but made the “intolerant” demand of repentance and the “condescending” offer of forgiveness (Mark 1:15; 2:15-17). The mission of Jesus consisted not simply in re-naming the behavior that was falsely labeled “sinful” but also in re-making the people who have actually sinned or suffered misfortune. The double strategy of re-naming and re-making, rooted in the commitment to both the outcast and the sinner, to the victim and the perpetrator, is the proper background against which an adequate notion of sin as exclusion can emerge.

Volf, pp. 72-73

[self-perceived goodness]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace:

In a profound reading of the Gospels in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche underscored the connection between the self-perceived “goodness” of Jesus’ enemies and their pursuit of his death; crucifixion was a deed of “the good and just,” not of the wicked, as we might have thought. “The good and just” could not understand Jesus because their spirit was “imprisoned in their good conscience” and they crucified him because they construed as evil his rejection of their notions of good (Nietzsche 1969, 229: Westphal 1993, 262f.).

“The good and just,” insists Nietzsche, have to crucify the one who devises an alternative virtue because they already possess the knowledge of the good; they have to be hypocrites because, seeing themselves as good, they must impersonate the absence of evil. Like poisonous flies, “they sting” and they do so “in all innocence” (Nietzsche 1969, 204). Exclusion can be as much a sin of “a good conscience” as it is of “an evil heart.” And Nietzsche’s warning that “whatever harm the world-calumniators may do, the harm the good do is the most harmful harm” may not be entirely out of place (Nietzsche 1979, 100).

Volf, p. 61

n.b. calumniator means "someone who makes malicious or false statements or charges"

[space for others]

From Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace:

Chapter III develops the basic argument, best summarized in the Apostle Paul’s injunction to the Romans: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you” (15:7). To describe the process of “welcoming,” I employ the metaphor of “embrace.” The metaphor seems well suited to bring together the three interrelated themes that are central to my proposal: (1) the mutuality of self-giving love in the Trinity (the doctrine of God), (2) the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross for the “godless” (the doctrine of Christ), (3) the open arms of the “father” receiving the “prodigal” (the doctrine of salvation)….

The most basic thought that it seeks to express is important: 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. The will to embrace precedes any “truth” about others and any construction of their “justice.”

Volf, p. 28-29

[quotes from volf]

I have been reading Miroslav Volf’s book Exclusion & Embrace over the past few months. It has made for fascinating and challenging reading which I am enjoying despite the tough slog it is to get through. While the subtitle of this blog relates to the title of his book, this blog is not about his book and there are significant differences between the two. For starters, Volf is much much smarter than I am. Secondly, his book is subtitled “A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation” and his personal experience that relates to this comes from the conflict between Serbs and Croatians. My blog, on the other hand, uses cartoons to explore issues of church, community, gender, poverty, sexuality and so on in the context of exclusion and embrace, rejection and acceptance.

One of the book’s endorsements, by Lewis Smedes, describes it well:

Exclusion and Embrace is a stunningly brilliant analysis of the toughest Christian challenge of our time: how to understand the persistent alienation of peoples in our world, alienation that is rooted in the strangeness of the other, in tribal memories of ancient wrongs, and the self-deceits of all – even the most victimized – groups in the conflict. It is a magnificent blend of insightful theology, historical vision, and human insights, one that is enriched by the author’s own multinational identity.

I will periodically be posting quotes from his book that seem to relate to the bigger issues involved here. They will be labeled “quotes from volf”.

If you are interested in reading the book yourself, here’s the reference:
Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
Miroslav Volf (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).

You might like to watch some videos of Volf sharing some of his thoughts. The Work of the People has seven videos. More can be found on YouTube.

See all posts with quotes from Volf.