“Absolute hospitality”? Absolutely not (yet)

Miroslav Volf is at the top of his game in his most recent book, A Public Faith. How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good. I have a feeling this has the potential of rising to the level of influence of Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture. I particularly appreciate the  scheme he sets up in the book, which is both simple and broad in its scope, and the very solid categories he puts forward in explaining how faith has tended to malfunction, but also, on the positive side, how faith should function in the public square. Hoping to submit a review after I finish it.

Here is a paragraph, vintage Volf, on the (moral) impossibility of “absolute hospitality”. The basic idea he forcefully challenges is post-structuralist’s notion that “any determination of the goal to be achieved (in and with the world – my comment) and any specificity about the agent of transformation already breeds violence.”

In simpler words, thinkers such as Derrida and Caputo argue that the only acceptable goal of desirable change is ‘absolute hospitality’, “a posture of welcoming the stranger without any preconditions.”

Here is Volf in a compelling and memorable paragraph:

 

“‘Absolute hospitality’ seems generous and peaceful, until one remembers that unrepentant perpetrators and their unhealed victims would then have to sit around the same table and share a common home without adequate attention to the violation that has taken place. In one crucial regard, the idea ends up too close for comfort to the Nietzschean affirmation of life, in which a sacred ‘yes’ is pronounced to all that is and in which ‘but thus I willed it’ is said of all that was, with all the small and large horrors of history. Absolute hospitality would in no way amount to the absence of violence. To the contrary, it would enthrone violence precisely under the guise of nonviolence because it would leave the violators unchanged and the consequences of violence unremedied. Hospitality can be absolute only once the world has been made into a world of love in which each person would be hospitable to all. In the world of injustice, deception, and violence, hospitality can be only conditional – even if the will to hospitality and the offer of hospitality remain unconditional. It takes radical change, and not just an act of indiscriminate acceptance, for the world to be made into a world of love.” (p. 47)