Abstract
Miroslav Volf teaches at the Divinity School of Yale University. Originally from Croatia, he reviews his confessional biography in this book as starting out then in a Pentecostal congregation and moving to the Episcopal Church today.
Volf characterizes his book as more a ‘programmatic essay’ (p. 3) than an academic monograph. Picking up on this lead, this review starts with the closing chapter. The deep ambiguity of religions that Volf is addressing is well illustrated by the opening paragraph of his ‘Epigraph: God, Nihilism and Flourishing’: while he was speaking about reconciliation at a prayer breakfast at the opening of a UN assembly on 9/11, the first aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center. His introduction is a corresponding personal reflection on the position from which he is doing theology and why reconciliation is at its centre. Volf starts with the memory of his upbringing in Croatia and the ambivalent role that religions played before and after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. A war started then in the region which was fuelled by confessional traditions, religions and ethnic identity politics which led to violence and destruction in the name of God. The fall of socialism as a worldwide economic and political alternative to the capitalist world was, however, a decisive point in the spread of the current dominating system defined as globalization as we know it.
Thus Volf places his theological reflection in the history of modern globalization and the dynamics of religions, and defines the objective of his book as an attempt to help the world’s religions exercise their influence to humanize globalization and to help human life flourish. This is pursued in the main body of the book. The chapters of the first part address ‘Globalization and the Challenge of Religions’ and ‘Religions and the Challenge of Globalization’. The second part has three chapters titled ‘Mindsets of Respect, Regimes of Respect’, ‘Religious Exclusivism and Political Pluralism’ and ‘Conflict, Violence, and Reconciliation’. Throughout, Volf takes a normative approach. He studies globalization and world religions as two forms of global movements. World religions have spread globally through their universal message, inviting potentially every individual on the globe and offering a vision of the unity of humankind. Thus globalization originated thousands of years ago in the religious imagination and influenced it before it became a political and economic project. The globalization of today brings people and societies worldwide into interdependent relations.
His approach that religious movements started globalization with such a universal vision needs to be critically reviewed. It would be more adequate to understand such religious visions of a universal humanity as emerging out of the interaction of the religious systems with various cultural formations they were confronted with while spreading over the globe. Another critique is that Volf is not addressing any political structure or offering a concrete programme. It is also not clear which are the ‘world religions’ that he is calling upon to influence the path of development of globalization positively. Volf concentrates on the ‘market-driven and market-values-embodying-and promoting’ form of interplanetary interconnectivity because he identifies the converging point of globalization and world religions as global movements in affecting and affirming daily life: the market provides goods to make life better and religions teach how to make just and good use of them. According to Volf, the world religions are concerned with the spread of a good life in this world, and hence are promoting market and globalization, while at the same time critiquing the market as creating an excessive desire to own and consume goods beyond normal needs. The market offers a ‘flat plane’ of life, whereas religions make everyday life flourish by embedding it in a transcendent order which questions human desires and criticizes idolatrous attitudes to goods.
In this essentialist characterization of globalization and world religions, the author identifies deep ambiguities in the centre of both movements. Both carry in themselves the danger of producing differences that create divisions and the tendency to solve the resulting conflicts by the power of the strongest. For globalization, for example, he notes that it has produced a general increase in prosperity and improved living conditions worldwide. But simultaneously the discrepancy between rich and poor has increased, resulting in the deprivation of ‘prosperous’ living conditions to about 1.5 billion of the human population. The world’s religions, on the other hand, are driven by the wish to offer salvation to all human beings, and in doing so succumb again and again to imposing their own perspectives as the only possible and correct way, with some even resorting to violence to reach that goal. Volf identifies as a source of violence emanating from religions the inner tension between the claim to know the truth for all and the realization that this truth can only be believed out of free will and conviction. If the claim of truth is connecting with identity politics or entering into alliances with systems of domination, the main religious groups as well as smaller dissenting groups are in danger of denying freedom of belief and of legitimizing oppression. The common task of the world religions in a global pluralistic world should, however, be to stand up for universal values. An open discussion about what serves the good life for all, and thus the growing together and flourishing of all, is needed.
For Volf, one of the most important resources of Christianity in the attempt is to make reconciliation possible in order to free the future from the guilt of the past. It may come as a surprise that in this regard this essay on world religions can be understood as a missiological book. It offers a vision for transforming the world, and calls for dialogue among believers based on the vision of flourishing life or the Christian vision, life in abundance for all. Volf’s challenge: it is reasonable and serves everyone when the world’s religions enter into a dialogue about their differences in how they want to cope with their inner ambivalences and how to contribute to humanizing globalization: ‘As I explained succinctly in the epilogue, the main thrust of my argument is that a vision of flourishing found in the quarrelling family of world religions is essential to individual thriving and global common good’ (p. 2).
Volf’s proposals to the quarrelling family of world religions are offered from a decidedly Christian position, hoping that the adherents of other world religions can be invited to join a ‘vital investigation’ to make globalization more human and thus secure the future. In his words: As a Christian, who believes that Jesus is the measure of true humanity, the incarnation of love and for God and for others, my normative assessment of globalization boils down to this. It is good to the extent that it helps me and others participating in the character and mission of Jesus Christ, and it is deficient to the extent that it doesn’t. Representative of the world religions would replace the name of Jesus Christ with that of the Buddha, Confucius, Muhammad or some other sage, saint or moral ideal. But for all of them, I submit, globalization would be assessed as a means of living out authentic humanity as defined by those sages. (pp. 16, 17)
This is a general approach, but Volf hopes that the dialogue would result in a political framework for common life, that religions will act in common agreement, and where they disagree negotiate their differences in a peaceful way.
One has to agree with Volf’s characterization of his book: it is an essay and it is a practitioner’s approach to how Christians and adherents of other faiths should approach some of the burning issues that globalization is at the same creating and attempting to solve. As essays do, Volf deals with the broad range of arguments in quite a general manner and apologizes for that to the specialists of the many disciplines he is drawing on and who will have some critical questions. Ultimately his book is a plea for differentiation: neither is globalization the vile enemy nor the promise of a golden future, neither are religions the source of violence and domination nor guarantors of universal peace. Volf invites reflection on what one’s own faith tradition is actually contributing to the flourishing of life on the globe. He challenges everyone to think through the inner tension between a universal message and the danger of dominating those who are not willing to accept it.