Saturday, March 15, 2008
Volf, M. (1996). Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation.
Volf
How should we live as Christian communities today faced with the ‘new tribalism’ that is fracturing our societies, separating peoples and cultural groups, and fomenting vicious conflicts? What should be the relation of the churches to the cultures they inhabit? The answer lies, I propose, in cultivating the proper relation between distance from the culture and belonging to it pp37
The mission of Jesus consisted not simply in re-naming the behaviour that was falsely labelled ‘sinful’ but also in re-making the people who have sinned or have suffered misfortune. 73
Jesus condemned the world of exclusion.
Were Jesus simply demanding a ‘ radical alteration of the course and direction of one’s life, its basic motivations, attitudes, objectives as repentance is sometimes described …. But he demanded more than a radical alteration. To repent means to make a turnabout of a profound moral and religious import 113
Victims need to repent because social change that corresponds to the vision of God’s reign – God’s new world – cannot take place without a change of their heart and behaviour. 114
To repent means to resist the seductiveness of the sinful values and practices and to let the new order of God’s reign be established in one’s heart 116
At the heart of the cross is Christ’s stance of not letting the other remain an enemy and of creating space in himself for the offender to come in.
There can be no justice without the will to embrace – to agree on justice you need to make space in yourself for the perspective of the other, and in order to make space you need to want to embrace the other. 220
There is an irremovable opaqueness to our knowledge of things divine 270
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How should we live as Christian communities today faced with the ‘new tribalism’ that is fracturing our societies, separating peoples and cultural groups, and fomenting vicious conflicts? What should be the relation of the churches to the cultures they inhabit? The answer lies, I propose, in cultivating the proper relation between distance from the culture and belonging to it pp37
The mission of Jesus consisted not simply in re-naming the behaviour that was falsely labelled ‘sinful’ but also in re-making the people who have sinned or have suffered misfortune. 73
Jesus condemned the world of exclusion.
Were Jesus simply demanding a ‘ radical alteration of the course and direction of one’s life, its basic motivations, attitudes, objectives as repentance is sometimes described …. But he demanded more than a radical alteration. To repent means to make a turnabout of a profound moral and religious import 113
Victims need to repent because social change that corresponds to the vision of God’s reign – God’s new world – cannot take place without a change of their heart and behaviour. 114
To repent means to resist the seductiveness of the sinful values and practices and to let the new order of God’s reign be established in one’s heart 116
At the heart of the cross is Christ’s stance of not letting the other remain an enemy and of creating space in himself for the offender to come in.
There can be no justice without the will to embrace – to agree on justice you need to make space in yourself for the perspective of the other, and in order to make space you need to want to embrace the other. 220
There is an irremovable opaqueness to our knowledge of things divine 270
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