Exclusion and Embrace

“After I finished my lecture Professor Jurgen Moltmann stood up and asked one of his typical questions, both concrete and penetrating, ‘But can you embrace a cetnik?’ It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called ‘cetnik’ had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities. I had just argued that we must embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a cetnik—the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify the embrace? Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. ‘No, I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.’

“…My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty. How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators? I felt caught between two betrayals—the betrayal of the suffering, exploited, and excluded, and the betrayal of the very core of my faith. In a sense even more disturbingly, I felt that my very faith was at odds with itself, divided between the God who delivers the needy and the God who abandons the Crucified, between the demand to bring about justice for the victims and the call to embrace the perpetrator. I knew, of course, of easy ways to resolve this powerful tension. But I also knew that they were easy precisely because they were false. Goaded by the suffering of those caught in vicious cycles of conflict, not only in my native Croatia but around the globe, I went on a journey, whose report I present in this book” (Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation by Volf Miroslav, preface).

I don’t know about you, but I think I am going to purchase and read this book.