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Exclusion and Embrace:
A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
By Miroslav Volf
Nashville, Abingdon,1996. 336 pp. $19.95.
Theology is beginning to recover from modernity and hypermodernity. While much modern theology has absorbed the critique of Christianity, Miroslav Volf boldly turns the tables around. Twentieth-century violence calls tribalism, individualism, and their confluence in the neo-Nietzschean will to power to account before the bar of Christian reconciliation. Love must temper the demand for justice. Volf calls on Christian theology to reconstruct culture.
Exclusion and Embrace does for contemporary theology what, mutatis mutandis, Bernard of Claivaux did for the monastic tradition. If St. Benedict may be said to have insisted on an ordered life, St. Bernard may be said to have insisted on ordered love as the center of the Christian life. Similarly, while liberation theology calls for justice, Volf calls for Christian love in the pursuit of justice. Indeed, he says, justice without love may only serve to reinscribe violence in fresh forms.
The book stands on the hardest of all of Jesus' commands: love of enemies. Volf addresses victims of injustice, lest their suffering overcome them. If there is no possibility of noninvolvement in evil, neither will there be an end to evil and suffering unless reconciliation has the last word. The organizing motif is the model of the father of the prodigal...