Book Review: Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996, 192 pp., no price given pbk.)
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| Author | Chris Brown |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298000290030813 |
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Millennium
920
questions pinpoint ed in the first part o f the b ook, however, are left larg ely
unaddressed in the second part which focuses more on the question of wh ether
sufficient ethical agreement already exists than on the questi on of the need and
scope for her meneutic-d ialogic constructio n of a common mora l world throu gh new
understand ings. Connec ted to this is the fact that all but o ne of the authors are
professors a t US universi ties, thereby raising the issue of how muc h can be
achieved witho ut c ontributions from alternat ive vo ices from other parts of th e
world outside the dominant liberal academic-moral tradition. Wider engagement
with cognate fiel ds in discourse analysis would also be fruitful (Habermas is no t
mentioned in this book ), as also ex ploration of the links between internatio nal
ethics, interna tional politics and internationa l law.
OLIVER RAMSBOT HAM
Oliver Ramsboth am is Head of the Department of Peac e Studies and Pro fessor of
Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution at the University of Bradford
Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity,
Otherness and Reconciliation
(Nash ville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996, 19 2 pp., no
price given pb k.).
This is a fasci nating boo k, and particularl y so for a card-carryi ng athe ist social
scientist to review, alt hough I should admit that I am, as it were, an d to adap t the
famous Belfast joke, a l ow-church, Pro testant a theist, and as such more or l ess
familiar with th e texts a nd metho ds upon whic h Mirosl av Volf base s his
evangelica l theology. Volf is a Cro at as well as a theologia n and he wrote this bo ok
partly in response to a challenge fro m his mentor, the German th eologian Jurgen
Moltmann. ‘But can you embrace a Cetnik?’ Volf ad mits that his initial rea ction
was that he could not emb race a Cetnik even while acknowledging that he thought
he should be able to, and much of the bo ok consists of an a ttempt to work th rough
the implications of this po sition fro m a C hristian pe rspective, which involves a
dialogue with other theologian s and the exege sis of a number of ke y Biblical texts.
This is be yond my capacity to critic ise, but what brings the bo ok as a whole within
range is tha t Volf also engages in a series of dia logues with non-theolog ical
sources, that is, the large number of social thinkers who have e ngaged with his
chosen topics, distance and belonging, exclusion and inclusion, gender identity,
oppression, violence, truth and justice.
This sec ond dialogue t akes the fo rm of a war on two fronts. First, he c onfronts
the liberal, rationalist, Enlightenment, modernist cast of mind tha t assumes that
these issues can be discussed in the context of a uni versal set of abstract rul es. In a
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