Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more information, visit faith.yale.edu.
Miroslav Volf: If you want a picture of exclusion, there it is for you—those wide eyes that were captured in the picture as if there's triumph going on, and yet that is the greatest debasement of one's humanity that has been just enacted.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. This week we're featuring Miroslav Volf's recent interview with Lauren Green, Chief Religion Correspondent at Fox News. She invited Miroslav onto her podcast, Lighthouse Faith, to discuss Miroslav's book, Exclusion and Embrace, particularly in its application to the recent police violence against African-Americans—George Floyd, Briana Taylor, Rayshard Brooks—as well as the response of peaceful protests, riots, retaliating law enforcement, and political pressure from the federal government, law and order. It's very clear that the ideas in Exclusion and Embrace, which just came out as a second edition last fall, are very much relevant to life today.
Here are a few short clips of Miroslav from this interview, which covers his takes on sin, exclusion, identity and tribalism, religion at its most dangerous, and the hard journey of forgiveness that starts with the will to embrace:
Miroslav Volf: If I exclude you out of humanity, and if I give you names that describe you in subhuman terms, I've already prepared the soil by which domination, oppression will be justified because you do not belong to the same communities as I do. You are not; you're subhuman. Therefore, I can do whatever I want to do. We see that in the race relations. We've seen that in Rwanda. We've seen that in Germany. We've seen that in former Yugoslavia. So that you have this dysphemism, calling people names that are subhuman as the legitimation of oppressive, domineering, exterminating kinds of actions.
In recent week, we've had this reassertion of law and order, and the Christian faith was deemed to be implicitly as a religion of law and order. In some way, I would agree. I would say, "but it's a religion of law of love and not of rules that are applied in an arbitrary way. It's an order of peace but not peace marked by dread because it stabilizes oppression, but peace marked by joy because it embodies justice. Religion is most dangerous when it is superficial, when it serves to mark my identity as belonging to different group than you, and when it's a tool in a politician's hands to legitimize their power. Then, they just use religion to mark and to validate what they want to do in any case. In my experience, that ends up being really a kind of desacralization of faith. That which is holy has been completely turned to a means of a secular, profane end that bears no relation to the content of that which is holy. So it's a hard journey, but it's a journey for the beauty of our own souls, beauty of our humanity— if you want to put it in our Christian terms—for Christ likeness. What an incredible thing.
Evan Rosa: And here's the interview in its entirety. Thank you for listening.
Lauren Green: This is Lighthouse Faith Podcast, moving forward in truth and love. I'm Lauren Green, Chief Religion Correspondent for Fox News Channel and author of the book, Lighthouse Faith. So how do we get at the deep cause of really the sins that keep plaguing our country? I'm just talking about the last few weeks: killing of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Briana Taylor. All sins are spiritual at the root. This is a biblical lection of education about this. Yes, the action itself is sinful, but Jesus taught us that sins against our fellow human beings start in the heart, teaching his followers that while the commandments say, for example, do not murder, a mere grudge or angry thought is its seed. It starts first with a separation from God and only in loving God with all our hearts, mind, soul and strength, can we truly love our neighbors as ourselves. If we know this intellectually, why is it that George Floyd is dead? Why the violent protest and destruction?
In his landmark book, Exclusion and Exclusion and Embrace, Dr. Miroslav Volf tackles the answer to why we choose to be each other's enemies. We have a default mode, sin, that hides itself from us. It's based on the pride of identity. Identity based on race or ethnicity can be the most volatile, really, as we've learned in the last few weeks. And Dr. Volf originally wrote the book in the early 1990s to help him understand the Croatian War, the violent clashes based on religious and ethnic identities, conflict left thousands dead and much hatred still between groups today, between Catholic Croatians, Muslim Bosniaks and Orthodox Serbs. He had to ask himself could he forgive the group that killed and raped and destroyed his community. His faith said he must, but his heart said, "I can't." The book delves into the process by which we exclude others, and then, it shows a way to embrace them.
Dr. Volf is the Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. And he joins me now.
Welcome Dr. Volf. Would you want me to call you Miroslav?
Miroslav Volf: Miroslav. That will be much better. It's a pleasure and joy to be with you.
This is the question I want to start out with. lest we think the problem of racism, of these kind of sins is out there somewhere, one of the stark things you say in that book, Exclusion and Embrace, is there's a dormant beast that is within us all. What is that beast and what is it capable of?
There's something like the spirit of exclusion. And I think of that spirit, both as being out there gripping whole cultures, and I think of it as being inside of us so that this propensity when we are threatened —when the way in which we have construed ourselves, the way which we have used to behave is threatened—then we go into kind of the exclusionary mode. And if you look at the Bible, very beginnings of it —of course we always concentrate on, when we talk about sin, Chapter 3 of Adam and Eve desiring the forbidden fruit.
Miroslav Volf: But equally important, I think, almost in a sequence of the featured models of sin that we find in those early biblical texts, is the conflict between Abel and Cain. And you have there, one person was for whatever reasons was deemed more acceptable; the other person felt threatened. And the response was not let's figure out how do we readjust our identity? How we think about ourselves? How do we embrace one another? The response was let's go out in the field. The response was you cannot exist if I'm going to preserve my own identity and sense of myself, my own pride, if you want. So I find that there is this spirit of exclusion that grips one in situations and it's against that spirit that we have to fight both outside and inside.
Lauren Green: And the problem is that we are blind to that spirit within our own hearts. Right?
Miroslav Volf: Yeah. Sometimes we don't see it, right? So we prefer to see ourselves as a righteous. One of my teachers used to say that a stable feature of sin is that it doesn't like to be sin, that it portrays itself as different than what it actually is. So you have Satan portraying himself as an angel of life. Not just excuses that we make for when we do something that we know is wrong, but we want to portray it in the best possible light. So there's this kind of blindness that you described.
But there's also a kind of impotence that we have. We know what is right. That's what Apostle Paul speaks about in Romans 7. We know what's right. And yet we find ourselves impotent. We're gripped with something that seems to be stronger than ourselves. And that kind of both to know and to have power—those are challenges that we are facing at a very personal and deeply spiritual levels.
Lauren Green: I want to go to the background of the book, because it's now been translated into ten languages—two more on the way. And there's not a second edition available too. Tell me about the background of this book and why you wrote it.
Miroslav Volf: It arose out of the conflict, as you mentioned earlier, in former Yugoslavia. I am a Croatian myself, have lived for many years in Serbia, grew up there. And there was this conflict between Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks. Religion was also involved and in the process, a third of my country, Croatia, was occupied, hundreds of thousands of people driven out of their homes. In my hometown, Osijek, was shelled for many, many months. Nobody could get in or out except for one kind of exits way. And I found myself asking, "How do I respond to this? How do I respond as a Christian." I knew how I responded at a kind of a gut level. At a gut level, it was give me a few B-52s and we're going to resolve this very quickly.
But then I looked at myself in the mirror and I asked, "Well, is that who I really want to be? What does God want of me? What does the God who revealed Himself in the crucified Christ--what does that God want of me?" And that's where tension arose, right? Between something that I felt ought to be done or needed to be done to resolve it, and something that I felt that it is my moral Christian spiritual duty to actually do. And something that I knew at a deeper level was also the right way to deal with a situation.
I haven't answered your question actually. And so in order to resolve this issue for myself, I wrote the book. So the book was totally written for myself and not for anybody else. And I find that this is one of the books of which I liked the most because it is least sparing of me. It always wags a finger at me. But you made an argument in your book, so how come you aren't? So it's this kind of discipline that this book required of me to write it. And it's this kind of discipline that it deposes upon me.
Lauren Green: How did you get to the title of exclusion? What was it about exclusion that got to the heart of what the problem was?
Miroslav Volf: Well, in former Yugoslavia, at that time, the term ethnic cleansing was invented. That term stems from that conflict. And in many other situations, there's a kind of sense of purity. In Nazi Germany, racial purity. And in other situations, I then realized that there is a kind of drive to purity, a drive to exclude the other from my own space. And I also thought that this is the kind of exact opposite almost of what one finds that Jesus Christ did for sinful humanity on the cross. It was one grand gesture, one grand reality of embracing the sinful humanity. And one of the ways we know what sin is is doing the opposite of what God does. When God embraces sin, He is the one that excludes; and he himself Christ was excluded on account of his activity of embracing. So that's how it came about. But actually the embrace metaphor comes from the story of the prodigal son and the father who embraces the prodigal when he returns and the older brother who excludes.
Lauren Green: Right. I do think that's missing in the prodigal son. A lot of people focus on the son who squandered his father's wealth, but not on the son who stayed at home. A lot of people identify with that, but in the story, there are actually two prodigal sons.
Miroslav Volf: Yes. That's exactly right. And in some ways the thrust of the story is not so much on what we call prodigal. The thrust is on the second prodigal, in your terms, right? Because it was told to people who weren't able to rejoice over sinners coming to God. And the story illustrates just such a self-righteous exclusionary prodigal. And I think it's very important to keep that in mind. I think you're exactly right, two prodigals.
Lauren Green: How do we transfer this issue of exclusion onto what is happening in America today, and what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. And Minneapolis is my hometown. So this is very personal to me. He was killed a matter of a few blocks from where my mother still lives, where I grew up. So this is very personal to me of what happened there? How do you transfer the idea of exclusion and embrace into an area like that where there is obviously going to be a lot of strife, a lot of conflict, which didn't just happen. There was a lot of stuff happening before that. But how do you create that?
Miroslav Volf: Well, it seems to me that it embodies some of the most extreme forms of exclusion, an exclusion that has been both in the individual hearts of people, but it has been baked into history, so to speak. And it's there, lives in certain structures that make it possible for it to be perpetuated. I never want to play personal and systemic against each other. Bible doesn't do that. Sin is kind of transpersonal power, but sin is also a very personal thing. And two things go together. And I think both of these things one can see in the history of racism in this country and both of these things, you can see. You can see the triumph of of evil exclusion in the eyes of the policeman who was for nine minutes kneeling on the neck of George Floyd. If you want a picture of exclusion, there it is for you, those wide eyes that were captured in the picture as if there's triumph going on, and yet that is the greatest debasement of one's humanity that has been just enacted.
Lauren Green: Exclusion as domination. It dominates you.
Miroslav Volf: Right. But of course it's predicated on the exclusion as removing you out of my world. Right?That's an exclusion of I don't want you to be part of my world. You muddy the worlds which I in habits. The likes of you should be outside of the borders that define who I truly am. And to me, that's one of the most egregious of sins. There are many egregious sins, but that's one of the most egregious sins, especially for those of us who believe in the one God of all humanity.
But I think for me, and in Exclusion and Embrace even more importantly--for those of us who believe that every single human being is so precious that God send God's own son to die for our sins, God who loves the ungodly, how that kind of exclusion can be then justified on Christian terms is completely unimaginable to me. It's a distortion of Christianity that is in and of itself already a sin. And that's the sin of kind of exclusive construction of my own identity with regards to the other person.
And a lot of things then follow from that. If I exclude you out of humanity, and if I give you names that describe you in subhuman terms, I've already prepared the soil by which domination, oppression will be justified because you do not belong to the same communities as I do. You are not. You're subhuman, therefore, I can do whatever I want to do. We see that in the race relations. We've seen that in Rwanda. We've seen that in Germany. We've seen that in former Yugoslavia, so that you have this dysphemism, calling people names that are subhuman as the legitimation of oppressive, domineering, exterminating kinds of actions.
Lauren Green: And it's all based on sort of identity. And we all kind of carry that around with us because our identity then becomes a source of pride in sort of excluding the other person.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah. Identity is this ambivalent concept. Very often, it served as an occasion for exclusion. But on the other hand, I come from a small nation of 4 million people. We have a language that we speak. I think it's a good that there is a Croatian language. I think that it's good that there are Croatians. But in order to have Croatians and Croatian language, you kind of have to have a culture that nurtures that. You have to have a certain form of identity. And I take it that that applies to many cultures and subcultures. There's kind of a goodness in our shared identity. It becomes problematic when we want to exclude, when it seeks to be pure, when it closes itself off for interchanges, or when not just that it seeks to be pure, but when it sees itself as superior to others. And that's what the book tries to enact, which is a kind of celebration of identity that is enriched by the presence of the others.
Lauren Green: I want to get back to this idea of identity because identity is really-- as I understand, you're talking about that it is really a good thing. It can be a good thing. We're not saying that everybody doesn't have an identity. But the identity, when you're talking in the sense of racism, has been turned into sort of its evil counterpart. Is that what you're saying?
Miroslav Volf: I think that's what I'm saying. In some ways, you can also put it this way. And by the way, you can see that very clearly illustrated in today's debates in Europe, around the New Right, where our common humanity ends up being secondary to our identity. And I think that's already--for me at least as a Christian, and the way I understand Christian faith, that's already to transgress in a misconstruction of identity and in exclusionary direction of it, namely, because then, primacy belongs to what we, as a group, are together, who we as a group are together, rather than who we as entirety of human community are. And that's why then the conflict can very easily arise that cannot be adjudicated in any other way than through sheer power, right? Because what's more valuable is my own identity than our shared humanity.
Lauren Green: And you're talking about sheer power. And I've always felt that law is such an insufficient way to gain peace. I mean, it gets you order and it gets perhaps even the absence of violence, but it does not bring true peace. It doesn't bring reconciliation. Laws can't do that. Right?
Miroslav Volf: I think that's exactly right. And that's why I think that, in recent week, we've had kind of this reassertion of law and order and the Christian faith was deemed to be implicitly as the religion of law and order. In some way, I would agree, but it's a religion of law of love and not of rules that are applied in an arbitrary way. It's an order of peace but not peace marked by dread because it stabilized oppression, but peace marked by joy because it embodies justice, right? So, yes law and yes order, but law of love and law of peace, then you have something that is a fruit of the Christian faith rather than almost I would say, pagan imposition through power and control; it's pacification but not peace.
Lauren Green: Yeah. I know you know this is probably—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And he was writing basically it to the Klu Klux Klan. These were people who shared the Christian faith. They were both Christians. And instead of telling them to abandon the faith--because somehow they construed Christianity as a way to enforce segregation--he said, "Please go deeper into your faith; let's go deeper into a level which will allow you to throw out this sort of racist ideas so that you can embrace me as your brother." We're kind of in that same situation today.
Miroslav Volf: I couldn't agree with you more. I admired that letter. Obviously, it's such a historic document and that move that you described. To me, I must say I'm an outsider; I'm a naturalized American citizen, so I want to learn; I don't want to necessarily teach anybody anything. I would share my experience. But that, to me, is exactly, what's right.
One of the things that I noticed in my experience--and actually it is experience in former Yugoslavia and the war, but experience around the world and not just with Christianity, but with other religious traditions as well--is this: that religion is most dangerous when it is superficial, when it serves to mark my identity as belonging to different group than you, and when it is a tool in a politician's hands to legitimize their power, then they just use religion to mark and to kind of validate what they want to do in any case. In my experience, that ends up being really a kind of desacralization of faith. That which is holy has been completely turned to a means of a secular, profane, and that bears no relation to the content of that which is holy. They're very beautiful examples—terrible examples, I should say—of that for many parts of the world.
One that I know the most is Serbian soldiers when they're riding on the tanks and they flashed the three fingers sign. That's a kind of botched victory sign with the thumb sticking out. But actually it was the sign of Holy Trinity. It meant we cross ourselves with three fingers, and two fingers folded. I can't now illustrate it on the podcast. Whereas the barbarian Westerners crossed themselves with a whole open hand, two fingers cross below mean two natures of Christ. Three fingers above the thumb and the index finger and the middle finger, together represent Holy Trinity, and making a sign of a cross with that, which is again, crucifixion of Christ, center of our salvation.
But now these become a sign of my identity. Everything that's contained in this sign, completely evacuated. And it becomes mere symbol. And that's how I interpreted what you were talking earlier, Martin Luther King's letter to Ku Klux Klan members. You've got to go deeper into your faith. If you stay on this superficial level, you are going to be completely misusing it and bastardizing, secularizing that faith. Go deeper. There, you're going to find me as your brother. There, you're gonna find love of enemy, love of the other and so forth.
Lauren Green: So let's move to this idea of embrace. We've been talking about exclusion for the most part, but how do we move to embracing the other? How do we do that in this kind of environment today and be aware of it today?
Miroslav Volf: Yeah. Sometimes I think it takes event like the death of George Floyd and other recent instances to make it obvious to us so that it stares us in the face what it means to exclude, to kind of wake us up, and to begin the journey towards embrace. Often, it's very difficult for us to recognize this. We kind of see ourselves as self-righteous. We see ourselves as kind of in the grip of something. And it's very hard to move in that direction. When my book, Exclusionary and Embrace, which was written in English, was translated into Croatian, I was at a book event, and I spoke at the book event about embrace. And I make much in the book about the will to embrace. You kind of have to have this will to embrace. And I was describing how important that will to embrace is because then the journey can begin.
And there was a person in the back of the room and he was restless. I looked at him; I knew when I finished, he's going to come and talk to me. And so a number of people were there and he was there still standing behind everyone else. So he's waiting until everybody else has done. And that's exactly what happened. He came to me and kind of looked me straight in the eyes. And he said, "But how do I get it?" And I said, "How do you get what?" And he said, "How do I get the will to embrace? How do I get the will to embrace the one who has done with so much harm?" And, as we talked about at the beginning, this was also my own struggle. Somewhere deeply buried, I felt that there is this will to embrace, but I almost didn't dare to look at it and dare to take it into my hands to do something with it. And, as a Christian, I think, this is the Spirit of God, Spirit of God working through our conscious, knocking and saying, "Open yourself up, open yourself up to something that may seem scary, that may seem unacceptable, and yet it's a journey full of promise, journey full of hope." And that's how I see the will to embrace. That's how I see practice of embrace.
Painful as it often is, almost impossible. And, I make one step forward one-and-a-half step back, and then two steps forward, three steps back. Right. That's the story also with forgiveness. I forgive during the day; at the middle of the nights, I say, "What did I do?" And then, I take everything that I've given. So it's a hard journey, but it's a journey for the beauty of our own souls, beauty of our humanity, if you want to put it in our Christian terms, for Christ likeness--what an incredible thing.
Lauren Green: And it has to be. One of the problems even for the most devout Christian is to start with ourselves. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about, "evil doesn't exists out there; it exists in our own heart and wants to destroy our own heart." And Hannah Arendt's coverage of the Nuremberg trials, where she thought she was going to see this monster in the form of Eichmann--Adolf Eichmann. And she looked at this whom she thought was going to be this monster and he looked incredibly ordinary. And that was very scary thinking. And as she wrote, the banality of evil that we think that monsters are things that we can see, and yet looking at him, she realized the monster is just terribly ordinary. And that's the scariest part. If we can identify the monster within ourselves, we can then sort of start that journey back to embracing the other, embracing people and forgiving.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah. And we also nurture in ourselves that ordinariness. If we were to decide to take time for solitude to examine the hearts very carefully, we might often see there're things that are much more monstrous than we normally want to admit. And often we nurture the ordinariness because it serves us well. We are just like everybody else. There's nothing special here. This is the normals. And that's what you have with Eichmann, right? He was just doing orders. But in some ways that ends up being the mode of hiding from who we truly are, not seeing it, not wanting to recognize, and portraying ourselves, again, as much better than we are, that there is the kind of "looks banal." And what's right about it is everybody can be tempted. Just put the person in the right circumstances. I hope it wouldn't happen to me, but I would want to make sure that I'm aware of who I am and how I respond so that I can keep this purity of heart, which I think that's why it's so important.
Lauren Green: In how we deal with racism in today, how important is forgiveness? Not when you feel like it, but just start the hard work of forgiveness.
Miroslav Volf: Let me speak for myself and my own situation. I think each situation has its own dynamics so I can bear witness to something. I wouldn't want to tell something, especially tell something to forgive. I can bear witness that Christian faith invites us to a journey of forgiveness, but I've come to realize that forgiveness either happens as almost like a miracle of grace or doesn't happen at all. So that to force somebody, to put somebody under the law of you ought to--you must--forgive, that doesn't result in forgiveness. It results in maybe fake forgiveness. It results in kind of even more resistances. And so, I would say my experience was for myself in interpersonal relations but also at the large scale of ethnic conflicts, a kind of sense of forgiveness was absolutely essential to me, absolutely essential to the idea that I did not want to have the oppression, have violation inscribed in the character of my soul and act in a kind of reactive way to it, even when I thought, "Oh, this may be the only solution." I felt and that's the greatness of Christ. I think I felt that stance of sovereignty toward what is happening even what's happening to me in being violated is so incredibly important. And again, I'm bearing witness to what I've experienced rather than making demands on anybody.
Lauren Green: I want to thank you so much, Dr. Miroslav Volf, and I want to, again, just thank you for writing the book, Exclusion and Embrace. What would you like to end with and what would you like to say that perhaps you think it's important that you leave us with today?
Miroslav Volf: Well, I think especially today with identity being so prominent in the minds of everyone, I would want to encourage us to kind of find the treasure in somebody who is different than us. Discover in that person a beautiful creature of God, even when those features of beauty are sometimes distorted. And to me, that's the most fundamental thing that I have benefited from, that I have been given hope by the sense that there is a primacy of goodness. That goodness is primordial. And that goodness is primordial because God is love. To discover God of love and the way of love as a risky but deeply human way. There's this parable that Jesus says about the merchant who found a treasure, and then sold everything to acquired this treasure. Now my experience is that discovery of God's love is worth selling everything you have to be gripped by that and move into future with that as your guiding light.
Lauren Green: I want to thank you so much for those words. Dr. Miroslav Volf, Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. I want to thank you so much for being on Lighthouse Faith and sharing your thoughts and educating us on the issues of exclusion and embrace. And I hope that everybody runs out and gets the book because it really is powerful.
Miroslav Volf: Lauren, thank you so much for having this conversation with me. I enjoyed very much.
Lauren Green: And thank you very much. And this is Lauren Green. Thank you for much for listening to Lighthouse Faith Podcast.
Evan Rosa: That's it for our show today. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with new episodes this coming week.
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured theologian, Miroslav Volf in conversation with Lauren Green, Chief Religion Correspondent at Fox News. Special thanks to Lauren Green and her producer, Nicole Ribon at Fox News. For more information about the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. You can subscribe by any podcast app and new shows drop every Saturday with the occasional midweek episode. Thanks for listening, friends.
