Part One: Chapter One, pages 35-43

Chapter 1: Distance and Belonging

Complicity


To begin his foray into the reality of exclusion, Volf looks at the complicity of the Christian church. It is a harsh truth, but a truth none-the-less, that the church has been involved in some of the worst atrocities committed during the past two thousand years. The involvement was at time direct, and at times by allowing violence to occur, but in all cases the church's involvement was incredibly damaging. As Volf says, "We have had our share of complicity in the imperial process."

One of the challenges that we, as the church, face, is that we are people of the cultures we live in. We are formed by where we live and how we live, and it is very difficult to step out of that mindset and see it as something other than absolute. For instance, missionaries from Europe and the United States often taught western culture along with the Christian story, even though Jesus was a Jew raised in a Middle Eastern culture. The missionaries were unwilling, or unable, to separate the norms of their western European culture from the message of salvation for all.

The struggle for the church to be aware of the prevailing culture but not enslaved by it is not new, but it is a struggle we often ignore and turn our backs on. It is easier to be uncritical of the culture we live in, and instead enmesh the positives of our faith and our lifestyle to suit our needs. This enmeshing leads to new lines being drawn between groups, and being reinforced with the strength of our beliefs behind them. Volf says, "The answer lies... in cultivating the proper relation between distance from the culture and belonging to it."

Departing...

Our model and mentor for the work of departing our surrounding culture is Abraham. Just remind yourself of the beginning of Abraham's story: he left family, friends, home, land, people, and everything he knew to travel to a new place, to make a new home, to start a new people, to begin without any preconditions coloring his relationship with God. "If he is to be a blessing he cannot stay; he must depart, cutting the ties that so profoundly defined him."

As our role model, Abraham teaches us that "to be a child of Abraham and Sarah and to respond to the call of their God means to make an exodus, to start a voyage, become a stranger." This is an important challenge for us today, who as American Christians tend to identify first with our country and second with our faith. This is not what God calls us to, and has never been what God calls us to. "At the very core of Christian identity lies an all-encompassing change of loyalty, from a given culture with its gods to the God of all cultures... Departure is part and parcel of Christian identity."