Life at the beginning of the twenty-first century presents us with a disturbing reality.
Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard to day, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of
embrace as a theological response to the problem of
exclusion. Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we "learn to live with one another," but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God.
"One of a mere handful of genuinely significant books in systematic theology from the last decade. Into the midst of riot and conflict, God on the cross, with outstretched hands, points us to a theology of embrace. Has implications for all Christian social ethics,"---Princeton Seminary Bulletin
Average Rating: 5 out of 5 stars(5 out of 5 stars)
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5 out of 5 stars
Reviewed by Rodolfo Galindo (Grand Rapids, MI), April 11, 2008
This book deserves five stars. Volf is a wonderful thinker, but also a pastoral presence in this book as he identifies and seeks to understand the concept of forgiveness. The concept of forgiveness is elusive and ambiguous in todays culture. Ask 10 people what the word means and you get different answers. Volf explores and tries to understand what forgiveness is and accomplishes and how it changes everything in our lives if we allow the power of Christ within us to forgive when to worlds says forget or revenge.
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