I am currently reading (or attempting to read for the third time in three years) Exclusion and Embrace:A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation by Yale Divinity School theologian Miroslav Volf. Writing out of his experiences as a Croat who suffered with his people at the hands of the Serbs (although there is scant mention of the Croation war against Slovenia, which was waged to regain territories lost to Serbia) and as a former professor at Fuller Theological Seminary during the 1992 LA riots, he seeks to explore (not so much to answer) the issues of human particularity and the recent outbreak of war-making tribalism and the role of Christian faith in perhaps untangling the knot of deadly identity politics. I have to admit that, while there is much depth and erudition, and much to commend - Volf is familiar not just with recent theological scholarship, but recent modernist and postmodernist philosophical thought as well - there are aspects of the book that raise red flags for me.
First, he flirts far too much with the continuing European tendency to dialectical thinking. That is, he raises the inevitable contradictions and conflicts of existence to transcendent categories of reflection. The issue of "culture", of "identity" is too often discussed without reference to the concrete experience of cultures and identity. While such abstraction is often useful as a first movement - it helps to define one's categories and one's perspective - if one stays at the level of abstraction, one ends up saying little with reference to the real lives and struggles of people to make sense of the ambiguities and inevitable conflicts of identity. By reducing the discussion to a question of social agency, rather than social arrangement, he neglects the fact that social agents are formed by social arrangements as much as form them. By emphasizing the priority of a particular reading of the Gospels and Pauline texts, which in their turn prejudice certain readings in the Old Testament, particularly the call narrative of Abraham, rather than the way such readings are interpreted within given communities struggling with these very texts in the light of the struggle with identity and the scandal of particularity we are entering questionable theological territory - the imposition of a particular view of the cross, reconciliation, and human agency without reference to any real particularities that might force questions to these interpretations.
To give Volf his due, he does site specifically feminist critiques of certain soteriological views the give pride of place to self-negation and the independence of the "I" from any cultural and other ties. He nevertheless seeks to transcend these critiques by insisting that the self-negation standing behind reconciliation is one of reciprocity, without deconstructing the very real disparities of power in the relationships between men and women, people of color and the dominant white social structure, and American power and the rest of the world. It is also important to recognize Volf's critique of the religious buttress too often given to violence in the name one's own particularity. To deny this reality - a reality we live with on a day-to-day basis as we read so-called "Christians" rant about death to Muslims and the threat to our way of life posed by those we deem "others" of the wrong religion - is to deny an ever-present scandal to those of us who insist that Christian faith and life entail as acceptance of these very others whose existence is a question to our own confidence and faith.
At the heart of Volf's work, however, is the very real problem of the scandal of particularity in all its varied guises. Our identity is always specific, even if it is plural. We are male or female, Americans or Mexicans or Croations. We are white or black or Hispanic. We are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, atheist. We are father, sister, niece, sister-in-law. We are often several of these at once, although in any specific context, one takes pride of place. Unraveling the Gordian Knot of identity is an important part of making sense of our lives today. While it is early in the work for me, I do believe that Volf's struggle, regardless of its success or failure, is important for us today. As long as it is accompanied by a chastened call on the part of Christians to seek the forgiveness of those whom we have injured by our hubris, blindness, bigotry, and hatred - as long as the first move of reconciliation is ours toward those we have actively sought to exclude; as long as such reconciliation is sought not just in word but in deed as well - then it seems we are far down the road to seeking a new way of being particular in a world that ever more clamors for our adherence to universal ideologies.
Virtual Tin Cup
