Exclusion and Embrace
Chapter Three
Reflection by Jayne Davis
In chapter 3, Volf writes, “Inscribed on the very heart of God’s grace is the rule that we can be its recipients only if we do not resist being made into its agents; what happens to us must be done by us.” (129)
Have we become the ultimate consumers - consumers of God’s grace?
The embrace of the father of ‘the prodigal son’ is a moment we long for, ache for even. The belonging, the identity. No longer a stranger in a strange land, but one who is truly known, and loved. We are amazed that the embrace is offered - again and again. And we reach out to receive it again and again.
But when it comes to offering the invitation of embrace, when it comes to being an agent of God’s grace, when it comes to embodying, in that moment, even a fleeting glimpse of the kingdom, do we not stand, instead, as the older brother with our arms tightly folded as a shield of righteousness? And this at the return of our brother with whom we have a history, one whom we presumably loved. Because we are tied to our ‘stuff’? To our image of ourselves? To the future we have decided we will have? We are hostile at his intrusion back into our ordered world instead of open to the new possibilities it might throw open for both of us. The novum of resurrection, Moltmann might say.
If one then who is a part of us cannot break through this dominant narrative that Volf lays out for us, if the return of one with whom we have at one time laughed and cried cannot be received as a gift of God bringing us to repentance and farther down the road from exclusion to embrace, if one in such close proximity to us cannot move us, how will we ever shed our indifference and our blindness long enough to not only see Christ in the mother of Jihad, but to be open to understanding her, to be willing to be changed by her?
I fear that we want the embrace of the Trinitarian love of God to close as a protective circle around us without offering ourselves in love to be transformed. Where does that leave us?
posted by tony @ 4:09 PM
1 Comments:
What an appropriate book for an emergent theological conversation! Tony, you should point all of your antagonists to this site and especially this book. The point is not to construct a rigid identity that restricts the embrace of others. When we start laying down broad-sweeping dogma, we do not make space for others, space that allows us to be changed by them. And, though justice is essential, "will justice ever be done if the ultimate goal is not reconciliation?" (Volf, 105).
So, on to the reason for commenting, Tony encouraged looking for Volf’s "third way" in contrast to modernity and post-modernity. Griping. I am convinced of the inadequacies of the modern vision, but Volf has piqued my interest in proposing to deconstruct deconstructionism.
In "Adieu to the Grand Narratives" (105), Volf critiques Lyotard, and it is upon Lyotard's post-modern thinking which I wish to reflect.
According to Volf, if we follow Lyotard's reasoning (pp.105-109), then "we are left with a pantheon of gods without hope of knowing how to decide between their competing claims because there are no criteria binding for all...Unable to settle their differences by reasoning, the gods will invariably fight" (Volf, 108). And, in the face of such, if we maintain Lyotard’s thinking (that there can be no way to measure or compare competing truth claims), then what we are saying is that what we are doing does not really matter. How can it? You lose a game and reassure yourself because in the end, it does not matter. You scold children for petty arguments because they are ridiculous and absurd. This may be one reason why so many are having a hard time with the lack of concrete truth claims being articulated by emergent.
It is not that truth claims are unimportant, it is that love is infinitely more imperative. There are a lot of superfluous concepts attached to the grand story of Love, however, you cannot remove the common ground of love. All claims can and must be judged on vulnerable love. Because if we cannot make judgments on validity, then nothing is valid. By clutching onto the schema of "incommensurable 'language games'", we partake in just that...games. And, Lyotard makes that somewhat explicit when "he interprets...this struggle [among gods] as 'play,'..." (Volf, 108). Post-modernism goes too far by seeking to annihilate all common ground. The third way does not reject all notions of validity but grounds them in embrace.
Eugene McCarthy said, "Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important." This quote inspired me. Personally, I struggled in my call to vocational ministry. There were a couple of avenues that fascinated me; one of those was politics. As I examined myself, I came to see that this inner tension between full-time vocational ministry and politics was rooted in my subconscious understanding of where power and truth are truly found. For me, to pursue a political career meant that I believed that political power is where true change happens and the seat of genuine power rests. However, Jesus Christ and the cross teach us that power is powerlessness and its seat lies squarely in the throne of God. It is not mine; it is not for humankind to peddle power nor use it to build walls. Rather, it is in this “vulnerable love” where meaning and the really important things of life are discovered.
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