Volf is kicking my butt

I read a lot. Part of the reason is simply that I love reading. Another part is that reading is part of my job as a campus pastor. I believe all of us pastors need to be continually learning and growing, thinking through new ideas and poring over difficult texts. If I am not learning, how can I teach?

I finally started a book this week that I have wanted to read for a long time. It is Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace. Volf teaches theology at Yale and is originally from Croatia, having firsthand experience of the war (and ethnic cleansing) that took place in Yugoslavia. The book is, as the title indicates about the problem of exclusion and the answer of embrace. Maybe when I get further than page 57 I can offer more explanation.

But already in the first chapter Volf has said some challenging stuff. I'll leave some quotes that I have been pondering over, figuring out how they relate to my life and ministry.

"Our coziness with the surrounding culture has made us so blind to many of its evils that, instead of calling them into question, we ofer our own versions of them, in God's n ame and with a good conscience" (36).

"The ultimate allegiance of those whose father is Abraham can be only to the God of 'all the families of the earth,' not to any particular country, culture, or family with their local deities" (39).

"Christians can never be first of all Asians or Americans, Croatians, Russians, or Tutsis, and then Christians. At the very core of Christian identity lies an all-encompassing change of loyalty, from a given culture with its gods to the God of all cultures. A response to a call from that God entails a rearrangement of the whole network of allegiances" (40).

"Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture. In order to keep our allegiance to Jesus Christ pure, we need to nurture commitment to the multicultural community of Christian churches. We need to see ourselves and our own understanding of God's future with the eyes of Christians from other cultures, listen to voices of Christians from other cultures so as to make sure that the voice of our culture has not drowned out the voice of Jesus Christ, 'the one Word of God'" (53-54).