This quoted by Gorman, (page 97), from one of the most profound and important theological works of the last 20 years.
"the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me". No "hegemonic
centrality" closes the self off from the other…For Christians, this
"de-centered centre" of self giving love – most firmly centered and
most radically open – is the doorkeeper deciding the fate of otherness
at the doorstep of the self…The Spirit enters the citadel of the
self, de-centers the self by fashioning it in the image of the
self-giving Christ, and frees its will so it can resist the power of
exclusion in the power of the Spirit of embrace."
From Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace. A Theological Exploration of
Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996),
71, 92.
Miroslav Volf lived with his family through the violence, ethnic cleansing and orchestrated hatred of the Balkan conflicts in the 1990's. He is one of the Christian church's most authoritative and persuasive voices on the subject of living humanely in a pluralistic world, fragmented by fear, hatred, guilt, religious demonisation of the other, and the deep memories that can embed such toxic responses in nationalist and ethnic conflict.
His book Exclusion and Embrace is hard reading – (1) Volf doesn't have an easy style and can be like a mountain guide, sometimes impatient with those who don't keep up; (2) he is dealing with areas of human experience not many of us are ready to examine, such as the origins of hate and enmity, the relations between fear and prejudice, our capacity to turn on our neighbour, the terror of community validated violence against some of its own members who happen to be different; (3) he isn't content with social and psychological analyses of the problem of ethnic conflict and religiously driven hatreds. He insists on a Christian theological exploration of the root causes in sin, communal and individual, banal and radical, and the even more radical cure of new creation in Christ; and he does so by constructing a theology that centres on what God has done, is doing and will do in Christ by the power of the Spirit.
The book is a theologically determined, philosophically sophisticated and biblically insistent study of the existential collision between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and our all too human addictions to the preservation of the self, the will to power and personal security, and thus the elimination of any "other" perceived as threat. Volf is a frequent conversation partner in chapter 4 of Gorman's book entitled 'While we were enemies. Paul, the Resurrection and the End of Violence'. I'll do a separate post on that chapter where Gorman makes an explicit link between non-violence and kenosis. That's a connection I hadn't before made, but now seems so obvious – turning the other cheek as a kenotic act?
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