Chapter Three, pages 99-105

Embrace

Having spent some time examining the basics of Exclusion, Volf is now going to shift focus to exclusion's corrective, Embrace. "The central thesis of the chapter is that God's reception of hostile humanity into divine communion is a model for how human beings should relate to the other." As God has done with us, so we are to do with one another. Sound familiar?

Volf opens this section with the important reminder that we always have a choice. "We should not forget that to destroy the other rather than to be destroyed oneself is itself a choice... If there is will, courage, and imagination the stark polarity can be overcome." I believe this is key to being able to move forward and seeking ways to turn exclusion into embrace. As long as we hide behind the words "I had no choice, it was me or them," then we will continue to choose methods of exclusion over options of embrace. Recognizing that there is always a choice, even when the choices all seem to be bad, is the first necessary step for us.


The Ambiguities of Liberation

Liberation theology has made important contributions to the discussion of who God is and how God would have us live as faithful people in the world. This focus on liberation from economic, governmental, and religious oppression has shifted instead to equating liberation with freedom.

"Freedom is the most sacred good," Volf says, and for us in America, he has nailed it. We hold onto our freedoms no matter what, and often quote "freedom" as the end that justifies the means. As long as freedom is intact, almost anything else can be ignored.

The difficulty in equating liberation with freedom begins almost immediately. A business owner is free to charge a set price for goods and to pay a set price for the work of employees. An employee is free to stay with a particular business owner, or seek another job if the working conditions are not satisfactory. But it's never that easy. The business owner may feel that laws governing living wages and safe working conditions are oppressive, while the employee may feel that the same laws don't offer enough protection, leading to oppression. Neither one is liberated, regardless of the assumption that both are free.

So how can we move forward with a discussion of liberation? Volf first says that we have to recognize that "more often than not, conflicts are messy." Just as exclusion is never a clean-cut issue, conflicts around what it means to live free of oppression are just as unclear. An important piece of this messy situation is the fact that there is almost never a blameless victim. When it comes to systems of oppression, each person bears a portion of blame for being a part of that system. No one is completely innocent.

The second challenge rears its ugly head when one side wins. If the oppressed are now liberated, what will they do with their newfound freedom and power? The course of history suggests that those who were once oppressed very quickly turn into oppressors when the tables are turned. There are a few exceptions, but only because of hard work, intentional effort, and constant retuning.

This raises the question as to whether freedom can be an ultimate goal. Instead, Volf agrees with liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, who said that love needs to be first and foremost. "To make love tower over freedom does not mean abandoning the project of liberation... But to insist on the primacy of love over freedom means to transform the project of liberation, to liberate it from the tendency to idealogize relations of social actors and perpetuate their antagonisms. We need to insert the project of liberation into a larger framework of what I have called elsewhere 'a theology of embrace.'"