War and the Christians: an interview with Miroslav Volf.

INTRODUCTION

As the war in Iraq proceeds, many original supporters of the invasion are now questioning the wisdom of their decision. Many Christians endorsed the invasion in 2003, but now that acts of torture have been revealed, support has turned to revulsion. This turn of events begs the question : how can Christians respond to any instance of war. Does violence always beget violence? How should Christians respond to any new suggestions for war, against threats real or imagined?

The Turning is pleased to feature an interview with Dr Miroslav Volf, the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale University. An internationally recognized human rights activist and theologian, his areas of specialty include ecclesiology, Trinity, and theological perspectives on economy and culture.

Following is an interview with Dr. Volf that appeared in the January/February 1999 during the Bosnian Conflict, though the issues raised in this piece remain relevant regarding the current War against Iraq. For Dr Volf, these issues are personal, not just theological, as he recounts his return to his homeland of the former Yugoslavia. Dr Volf addresses whether any Christian - including himself- can ever hurt or hate another, even when being personally affected by another’s violence. He was interviewed by Becky Garrison, who has graciously allowed us to reprint her interview here. This interview originally appeared in an issue of The Door, a Christian magazine.

BECKY GARRISON: What are your most vivid recollections growing up as a pastor's son in Novi Sad (Yugoslavia) under Marshall Tito's communist rule?

MIROSLAV VOLF: One recollection is particularly vivid. My face was all red, and I was stammering. I was standing in the classroom full of students and trying to respond to a series of questions addressed to each student consecutively by the teacher. The first ones were easy: "Your name?" "Your address?" But then came the difficult ones, at least for me, a pastor's kid in a communist country. "Your father's occupation?" I could get out of this one because my father, Dragutin Volf, was also working as an editor and publisher, not just as a pastor. I would conveniently skip his main occupation and highlight his side-occupation. But the relief was short lived. The next question was, "Where does he work?" There was no getting out of this one. "Christ's Pentecostal Church," I said, and then had to repeat it all over again because I stammered through my response and because the teacher never heard the word "Pentecostal." This was part of an annual ritual at the beginning of each school year. I dreaded it beforehand, and I always swore after the ordeal that, "I will never become a pastor or work for the church because I would never put my children through such humiliation."

GARRISON: Any other memories?

VOLF: There are, of course, other memories than just memories of ridicule and discrimination. In many ways the attitudes and the practices toward "the enemy" and "the persecutor" I learned in my dad's church and in our home, shaped profoundly my whole theological thinking. The "enemy" ought to be loved, his or her enmity notwithstanding. There is a whole way of life and a whole theological program contained in that simple command.

GARRISON: In 1992, you entered Croatia for the first time. What were your most profound impressions of your former homeland?

VOLF: First I breathed a sigh of relief and then I felt hemmed in. The sigh of relief came because I was now free in my own country. When Croatia was part of former Yugoslavia, one was almost expected to apologize for being Croat. Now I found myself in a space in which it was good to be what I was. But the longer I was in the country, the more hemmed in I felt. It was now not simply good to be Croat, but "Croatness" was, in a sense, expected to permeate most of my identity. But I am not just Croat. I am also Czech and German; I lived in Serbia where I acquired Serbian friends and learned to appreciate many things about Serbian culture. Also, I just moved from multicultural Los Angeles, where I enjoyed colorful diversity. In response to "ethnic cleansing" in Croatia at that time-things have changed now that the war is over-pure Croatian identity was pursued; my Croatian identity was not pure, and I did not want it pure. So in my book Exclusion & Embrace I sought to address not only the tension between the search for justice and the offer of forgiveness of which I spoke earlier but also the tension between identity and otherness. In fact what is unique to the book is that these two set of tensions are addressed together.

GARRISON: Given that your homeland's rife with ethic strife, we imagine that

Exclusion & Embrace (Abingdon Press, 1996) must have been a very difficult book for you to write.

VOLF: Well, my thought was pulled in two different directions. It was pulled by the blood of the innocent crying out to God, and it was pulled by the blood of God's Lamb offered for the guilty. My question was, "How do I remain loyal to the demand of the oppressed for justice as well as to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators?" That tension was difficult to sustain. The book is the result of my unwillingness to take myself and my reflection from within the field of this tension. Significantly enough, the book was not only difficult to write. The book is also a difficult book to have written, because now that it is out there it lays claim upon my life. I must do what the book tells I ought to do, and what the book tells I ought to do is not easy.

GARRISON: "Can one forgive those who have perpetrated particularly heinous crimes?"

VOLF: The answer is simple, "I must forgive." And if I cannot, I must be liberated from my inability-both from my inability to want to forgive and from my inability to actually do the forgiving that I may want to do. Forgiveness can be learned.

GARRISON: How so?

VOLF: As my former teacher and friend, Lew Smedes -- Mr. Forgiveness, you can almost call him -- has argued in many of his books, forgiveness is an art. It will help us master the art if we keep in mind that we all are sinners, not all equal sinners but all equally sinners. The world cannot be neatly divided into innocent victims and guilty perpetrators. There were periods in history when Croats were on the whole not victims in relation to the Serbs, but perpetrators; and during the most recent war not a few Croats acted as victim-turned-into-perpetrator in search for revenge. So we Croats will find it easier to forgive if we realize that we ourselves desperately need forgiveness.

GARRISON: What grounds, if any, are there for a "just war?"

VOLF: There is no such a thing as a "just war." There are theories, which specify under what conditions a war would be just. But even if one agreed that such conditions suffice to make a war just, I know of no wars that meet these conditions; indeed, it is hard to see how a war could be war and meet these conditions. Hence there are no just wars; all wars are unjust. And certainly a war cannot be justified from a distinctly Christian perspective. After all, Christians are followers of Christ who did not come to wage war but to give himself up for the salvation of the world. But does that mean that Christians should never engage in violent struggle? I don't think so. We live in a complex and ambiguous world, and there are ‘rare and exceptional situations’ in which they must get involved if they are not to "perpetrate" far greater evil by non-involvement than they would by involvement. But whenever they do, they must be aware that by engaging in violent struggle for the sake of justice they will inevitably commit injustice, that they will incur guilt by doing what is right, and that therefore they will have to be forgiven for what they were morally obliged to do. Is this a paradox? Maybe. But if we take the Christian faith seriously, if we are honest with ourselves and do not take flight from the complexity of the social world into artificial simplicity of black-and-white thinking, we'll have to come to some such conclusion.

GARRISON: Could you expound on this phrase, "A genuinely Christian reflection on social issues must be rooted in the self-giving love of the Trinity as manifested on the cross of Christ; all central themes will have to be thought through the perspective of the self-giving love of God" (p. 25, Exclusion and Embrace).

VOLF: If I were to be asked, "What lies at the center of the Christian faith?" I would surely have to answer, "The Cross of Christ." This is clearly evident in the New Testament writings, virtually all of them. And this is attested uniformly by the centuries of the Christian tradition. And if I were to be asked, "What ought to lie at the center of the Christian reflection on social issues?" I would surely have to answer, "Whatever lies at the center of the Christian faith must lie at the center of the Christian reflection on social issues." To claim that the "Cross of Christ" is relevant only to our inner and private lives and that we have to take recourse to something else to give us guidance for our outer and public lives, is to suggest that the Christian faith, at its core, is a private religion. But this is surely a mistake, for the simple reason that God in whom we believe is the God of all reality and that the crucifixion was a public and political act.

GARRISON: Gotcha.

VOLF: So I think there is no other way to have a genuinely Christian reflection on social issues than by rooting it in the narrative of the death of Christ, which is nothing but the narrative of the love of the divine Trinity turned toward the sinful world. This seems obvious, though strangely enough, theologians have often resisted doing the obvious. So, for instance, there is plenty of theological reflection about justice between peoples, but, until recently, virtually no theological reflection about reconciliation between peoples. And yet reconciliation is at the heart of the Christian faith.

GARRISON: Isn't there a danger that turning the other cheek could lead to violence and oppression?

VOLF: Sure there is such a danger. There is even a danger that the one who turns the other cheek will lose the head on which the cheek sits! But does this danger justify hitting the cheek of the one who has hit our cheek? Will the exchange of blows lead to peace and justice? I very much doubt that. And if it did, that peace would in fact be violence portraying itself as peace, and that justice would in fact be oppression parading as justice. It is important to underscore that Christians do not turn the other cheek because this is the most effective way to combat violence and oppression. If this were the case, once the effectiveness of this strategy no longer obtained, they could switch from commitment to non-violence to engagement in violence. So what then if turning the other cheek proves ineffective? The best response I know-a response that merits careful pondering-is the one given by the late John Howard Yoder: "The relationship between the obedience of God's people and the triumph of God's cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection."

GARRISON: Do you have any concerns that exhibiting self-giving could manifest itself quite easily as selfish martyrdom?

VOLF: I certainly do. I think there is a danger you describe - a danger for all of us. But as a theologian I operate with a very basic rule: "Never let the potential misuse determine the content of your theology." Nothing you come up with will be immune to misuse; there is no "fool-proof" theology, and if there were one I think we would shudder at the sight of it. Moreover, often, the better and the truer a way of life, the easier it is misused.

GARRISON: Why do you see exclusion as a sin?

VOLF: Because the ultimate goal of human life is a community of love in the embrace of the Triune God. Any action or institution that seeks to eliminate, assimilate, and dominate or simply abandon the other - any exclusionary practice-is sinful; it transgresses against the goal for which God has created humanity and therefore against the will of God. Both the goal for which God created humanity and God's will are expressions of the very nature of God. Because Christians believe that God is love they must believe that exclusion is sin, a fundamental and not merely a marginal sin.

 

GARRISON: How did Jesus' earthly ministry address the issue of exclusion?

VOLF: If I read the Gospels rightly, Jesus pursued a dual strategy of renaming the behavior that was falsely labeled sinful and remaking the people who have actually sinned or have suffered misfortune. The strategy of renaming of what was falsely labeled "sinful" or "unclean" aimed at abolishing the warped system of exclusion - what the powers that be call unclean and sinful - in the name of an order that God has made "clean" and pronounced "good." The strategy of remaking sinful people aimed at tearing down the barriers created by wrongdoing in the name of God whose love knows no boundaries. By this double strategy Jesus condemned the world of exclusion-a world in which the innocent are labeled evil and driven out and a world in which the guilty are not sought out and brought into the communion.

GARRISON: How does exclusion bring about evils such as the atrocities committed in your homeland?

VOLF: "Ethnic cleansing," which was pursued with such brutal force in the former Yugoslavia, is one particularly deadly form of exclusion. The practice of exclusion operates with a logic of purity: the blood must be pure, the territories must be pure, the origin must be pure, goal must be pure. Whatever muddles the purity must be removed. We want a pure world and we push "others" out of it; we want to be pure ourselves and we eject "otherness" from within ourselves.

GARRISON: Why are the categories "oppression/liberation" ill suited to bring about reconciliation and sustain peace between two warring factions?

VOLF: Let me make clear that I do not argue that we should discard categories of "liberation and oppression." They are indispensable because many people are oppressed and they need to be liberated. I argue that the categories of "liberation and oppression" are "inappropriate" as an overarching framework around which to organize Christian social thinking. The categories of "oppression and liberation" presuppose a clear cut division between "oppressed" ("victims") and "oppressors" ("perpetrators"). But it is not at all clear that in most situations such clear division obtains, though certainly it does in some. And since it does not, each party easily finds good reasons for claiming the higher moral ground of a victim and therefore see itself as justified in engaging in the struggle for liberation. As a result, categories of "oppression and liberation" are good for fighting, but bad for making peace and building a community of love.

GARRISON: How do you interpret that relationship between the cross and the new covenant?

VOLF: There are three important features of the new covenant that God made with humanity on the cross that are of immense significance for the way in which we go about strengthening social covenants that are fragile, repairing those that are broken and keeping social covenants from being undone. First, God renews covenant on the cross by making space for sinful humanity in God's self. Second, God renews covenant by an act of self-giving, by being willing to suffer because the fact that the covenant is "eternal" because the loving God is unable to give the covenant partner up. For human beings who are called to imitate God this translates into a vision of a world in which people keep readjusting their identities in interaction with one another, in which those for those who have not broken the social covenant are willing to do the hard work of repairing it, and in which people refuse ever to let the social covenant be undone.

GARRISON: How did Jesus' teachings on wealth and violence illustrate the social relevance of repentance? (Matt. 6:24 and 5:44)

VOLF: The key question to ask is, "What could the injunction of Jesus not to serve the wealth and to love one's enemies mean for those who are rather poor and powerless, as the majority of Jesus original listeners and followers was"? The answer is, I believe, that they were tempted by envy and enmity. But why bother with such attitudes on the part of the poor and powerless? I found the answer in Zygmunt Bauman's comments on envy. He writes, "The most seminal impact of envy consists ... in transforming 'the ideas of the dominant' into the 'dominant ideas.' Once the link between the privileged position and certain values has been socially constructed, the disprivileged are prompted to seek redress for their humiliation through demanding such values for themselves-and thereby further enhancing those values' seductive power." The same applies to enmity. Together, envy and enmity keep the disprivileged and weak chained to the dominant order-even when they succeed in toppling it. Hence the need to break the hold of envy and enmity over the hearts of the poor and the powerless. It goes without saying that envy and enmity are wrong in the rich and powerful, and that rich and powerful are the prime candidates for repentance. But my interest were in showing that even those who think that the biblical traditions are biased toward the poor and powerless, as I think they are, ought not shy away from the idea of the need for repentance of the poor and powerless. Indeed, advocating the idea of repentance of the poor and powerless is the only way of honestly and genuinely being biased toward them.

GARRISON: We can see why the oppressors would need to seek repentance for their actions buy why should the victims need to repent as well?

VOLF: One of the controversial arguments in the book Exclusion & Embrace is the argument for repentance of the victims. What do victims have to repent of? Have they not been violated? But if one is careful not to blame the victim for being victimized, I think a good argument can be made for the need of victims to repent too. If we do not make the mistake of understanding the social world as a black-and-white world of the innocent on the one side and the guilty on the other, then victims are not innocent and they have to repent in order to insure not being shaped in the image of their perpetrators as they fight their own victimization, "indeed becoming even worse than their perpetrators." I call this "the politics of the pure heart." I think the idea that victims may be proper agents of repentance is entailed in the command of Jesus to love one's enemies and to pray for those who persecute you. This is what they-this is what we as victims-ought to do. If we don't, then we'd better repent.

GARRISON: What was your reaction to Pope John Paul's recent apology and the response of the Jewish leaders regarding the Catholic church's silence during the

Holocaust?

VOLF: I think that it is good that the document "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," was issued by the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews was published, but I also think that a better document could have been published. Above and beyond the fact that in the document the Catholic church officially addresses the issue in a sustained manner, what I find good about the document is that it makes careful distinctions in the sources of the sentiments that brought about Shoah, in particular that it distinguishes between general anti-Jewish attitudes and practices over the centuries in "Christian" Europe and the specific form of anti-Semitism practiced with such brutality by the Nazis. What I find problematic about the document is the unwillingness to admit to a significant connection between general anti-Judaism and specific anti-Semitism. Shoah, we are told, "was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity." But we are not told that this anti-Semitism fed on anti-Judaism. Though I am not a historian and an expert on the issue, I think that this disjunction is implausible and unfortunate. Hence it is no accident that toward the end of the document the act of repentance offered is general rather than specific. The Church expresses her "deep sorrow for the failure of her sons and daughters in every age," we read. But there is no admittance of wrongdoing and asking of pardon for specific acts of specific people. My sense is that a general repentance is so deficient that it comes close to pretty much being no repentance at all.

GARRISON: Often certain Christian religious leaders like Pat Robertson claim that their perceptions on a particular social issue are accurate because they are speaking the word of God. Why would you disagree with claims of this nature?

VOLF: There are issues on which I would say, "This is wrong because the Word of God says that it is wrong." But this is different than saying that on this or that matter I am speaking the Word of God and that therefore I must be right, indeed that my rightness is underwritten by God. This would be to confuse ourselves with God. And when we do so we are not only foolish but tend to disrespect those who disagree with us. Though we may believe that we are right, we ought not exclude the possibility that we are in fact wrong about what we think the Word of God says or implies for a particular situation.

GARRISON: How then do Christians justify their moral convictions about what they feel is true and just in the eyes of God?

VOLF: That depends on what you mean by "justify." We are not primarily called to justify our moral convictions in a sense of offering water-tight arguments for why these and no other moral convictions are good or even why these ones are better than all others. Instead, we are primarily called to give witness to our moral convictions. Our moral convictions will be "justified" if they are perceived as salutary for social life and therefore start "making sense." So we need to make them plausible as guidelines about how to live a good life "and we need to manifest in practice that they are salutary." Such a posture of witnessing, rather than of "justifying" and "imposing," is appropriate to the character of those moral convictions themselves. The chief moral conviction of Christians is that they should love others as Christ has loved them and gave himself up for them. The only way the Christians can properly assert themselves in social life is by following the example of Christ.

Recommended Readings and Links:

An interview with Dr Volf regarding the war in Iraq, from NPR.

Books by Miroslav Volf: