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Last week I posted some thoughts on Miroslav Volf's work on reconciliation, peacemaking and questions of human identity and otherness. I omitted to give the quotation from Volf, incorporating his encounter with Jurgen Moltmann. Here it is.

" After I finished my lecture Professor Jurgen Moltmann stood up and asked one of his typical questions, both concrete and penetrating: "But can you embrace a cetnik" It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called cetnik had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches and destroying cities. I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a cetnik – the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify the embrace? Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. "No, I cannot – but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to".

That is one of the most courageous and honest theologically anguished exchanges I know in theological literature. Moltmann's own theology has been hammered out for decades, using the raw material of his own experiences in war and imprisonment, supplemented by deep reflection on the nature of hope, the meaning of the cross and the mystery of the Triune God. Volf's theology is equally born of profound suffering, experienced and witnessed, and passed through the lens of Christian theology and discipleship. For both men, what is believed has to be able to be lived, faith issues in action congruent with what is believed, convictions about God have decisive purchase on human behaviour, relationships and community.

It is one of the great ironies of Christian history and contemporary Christian existence that a faith tradition which proclaims a Gospel of reconciliation, is embodied in communities and alternative traditions characterised by grievance, suspicion, unhealed fractures and unresolved differences. It is difficult to maintain credibility when the forgiven resist the call to forgive, and when the reconciled build walls of self justification, and construct a rationale for defining identity over and against "the other". Yet it was ever thus, and it may be that the Gospel of Reconciliation entrusted to the church, and the ministry of reconciliation entrusted to those who seek to follow faithfully after Christ, together provide for all Christians an obvious mission imperative in a fractured world, divided by mutually hostile ideologies; a world in which peacemaking, community building, forgiveness and active compassion are to be given embodied presence through the witness of communities of reconciliation, from which attitudes and actions of willed vulnerability and hopeful courage flow outwards offering a radical alternative utterly earthed in the truth of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

All of which is idealistic – as most far reaching visions of human flourishing tend to be in their origins. The issue is whether these ideals find embodiment, commitment and the willed practices of a community resourced by the grace, mercy and peace of God who, like these his children, hungers and thirsts for righteousness.

Miroslav Volf is a theologian whose work has built into an impressive corpus of reflection on the nature of the church and its mission. He has consitently explored the relation between Trinitarian theology and the life of the Church, and the theology and practices of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace and graced living with which the followers of Jesus Christ are called to address the disturbingly compelling realities of human conflict, historic hatreds and the resort to violence.

Reflecting on the nature of forgiveness and reconciliation, and the consequent practices of peacemaking, conciliation and openness to the other, Volf offers at times a profound and demanding challenge to the contemporary Christian and the contemporary Church, whatever the Christian tradition. His  Exclusion and Embrace is a seminal work whose relevance and argument go beyond any narrow theological concerns. It grew out of his experience of violence fuelled by historic hatred, depersonalising mythology and these expressed in barbaric behavious in the Balkans in the 1990's.

It is a hard book to read – rigorous and determined theological reflection on the darkest and hardest human experiences, arguing towards a conclusion that those who follow Jesus ought to be able to forgive. But recognising that the human reality, emotionally, spiritually and therefore practically, is all but impossible for those who have witnessed such brutality or been the victims of such violence. This paradox, of categorical imperative and human incapacity lie at the heart of the dilemma – how can Christians love their enemies in obedience to Jesus' command when the person they are to embrace and welcome is guilty of atrocity against them or their family? What are the resources of the Gospel of reconciliation that would make such a miracle of embrace possible? Volf's book grew out of precisely that question, asked at a seminar where Volf was teaching and Jurgen Moltmann was present, and asked the question. Volf's account of it is better told by himself:

This poem by e e cummings is just the thing for weather like this! And it's a  sonnet, one of my favourite forms of poetry. Hard to read this and scowl, or frown, or moan – and notice where the higher case is used – not the first person singular, but the second person transcendent! Love it.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)