Chapter One, pages 43-50

...Without Leaving


This section continues Volf's train of thought, which began with "Departing..." Here he contrasts the Apostle Paul to Abraham. Abraham was called to leave his home, leave his land, leave his livelihood, leave his people, leave everything, all in order to follow God. Paul, on the other hand, was called to open up the promise of salvation to all people, by interpreting Jesus' life, death, and resurrection from within his culture, but applying it to all those outside of his culture.

This can be seen as a move from the particular--a particular people called Israel, a particular blood-line, a particular language, a particular set of rituals and laws--to the universal--salvation is for all, grace is for all, mercy is for all, Christ is for all. No longer will God's saving work be understood as applicable only to one selected people and their children, but instead is open and available to all across the whole earth.

In order to accomplish this shift in understanding who God is and who God's people are, Volf says that Paul does three things. First, "in the name of the one God Paul relativizes the Torah." This means that a man must no longer be circumcised in order to follow Christ. The kosher laws are no longer mandated for those who join the Christian community. In other words, the Torah is for Jews, but you don't have to be a Jew to be a Christian, and you don't have to follow the Torah to follow Jesus.

Second, "for the sake of equality Paul discards genealogy." John the Baptist himself did this in the Gospel accounts of his preaching in the wilderness, telling the Pharisees that God could raise up sons of Abraham from the rocks, and that the blood that flowed in their veins was no protection from God's just judgment. No longer do you have to be born of a Jewish woman in order to belong to the Jewish faith or follow the Jewish God. Because God is one, God is one for all people.

And third, "for the sake of all the families of the earth Paul embraces Christ." In Christ, all are made equal and one, all divisions are put aside, and all are effectively brought into the family of Abraham, while the name of Abraham belongs to all people.

How can Paul say that all people are made one in Christ? How can he claim this universality from the life and death of a particular person, a Jewish man born at the turn of the centuries who is arrested and wrongly condemned? Either all become the same under Christ, a boring homogenous mixture of people losing their unique identities, or the work of Christ really does not touch all peoples, everywhere and in every time.

Volf answers this by taking us to the sometimes uncomfortable heart of our faith, the cross. "The 'One' in whom Paul seeks to locate the unity of all humankind is not disincarnate transcendence, but the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ." God, in Christ on the cross, comes into our realm of being as a fully fleshed human being and experiences the most unifying experience that humanity can know: suffering. By experiencing a particular suffering on behalf of all people, Christ is able to bring all the glorious differences of humanity into one meeting point, making us one with God and with each other.

Volf goes on to describe how the act of suffering, the language of "the body of Christ," and our understanding of baptism all lead to a new membership in this community of God where somehow we are bound together without losing our selves or our stories. If taken seriously, this challenges the foundation of how we describe ourselves as Christians, especially in America.

When we apply the notion of "departing without leaving" to our lives in the United States and our membership within the body of Christ, we begin to see the radical nature of Volf's work. In our baptism, we put all other memberships and allegiances behind us. We leave our country and our culture, no longer allowing those facets of our lives to be the foundation for our identity. But we leave without departing. We are still citizens of our country and still living within a particular culture, even as we are now first and foremost Christians and part of the body of Christ.

Volf continues to explore this theme in the following section, but a way of thinking about it is through the lens of a well-known saying of Jesus. The saying admonishes us to remove the log from our own eye before worrying about the speck in a neighbor's eye. Of course, if we have a log in our eye, we really can't see it. We may not even be aware that it's there. Departing our country and culture without leaving is like finding a mirror or a helper to be able to see the log in our own eye, stepping back and beginning to differentiate between what is truly Christ-like and what popular culture has decided is Christ-like. This is a difficult task, to say the least, and one that we must always be beginning again.