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The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World

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Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award in Christianity and Culture 

How should we remember atrocities? Should we ever forgive abusers? Can we not hope for final reconciliation, even if it means redeemed victims and perpetrators spending eternity together? 

We live in an age that insists that past wrongs—genocides, terrorist attacks, bald personal injustices—should never be forgotten. But Miroslav Volf here proposes the radical idea that letting go of such memories—after a certain point and under certain conditions—may be a gift of grace we should embrace. Volf’s personal stories of persecution and interrogation frame his search for theological resources to make memories a wellspring of healing rather than a source of deepening pain and animosity. Controversial, thoughtful, and incisively reasoned, The End of Memory begins a conversation that we avoid to our great detriment. 

This second edition includes an appendix on the memories of perpetrators as well as victims, a response to critics, and a James K. A. Smith interview with Volf about the nature and function of memory in the Christian life.

353 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 9, 2006

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About the author

Miroslav Volf

46 books326 followers
Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and the founding director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. “One of the most celebrated theologians of our time,” (Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury), Volf is a leading expert on religion and conflict. His recent books include Against the Tide: Love in a Time of Petty Dreams and Persisting Enmities, and Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation—winner of the 2002 Grawmeyer Award in Religion.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
Profile Image for Marta.
143 reviews
July 15, 2016
This was equally thought provoking and frustrating. His ideas are interesting, but he's only engaging with philosophers and theologians (and not historians or archivists). I also found him equating (or confusing?) personal memory with societal memory and public history. There's an obvious difference between an individual forgetting a traumatic experience and a society forgetting a problematic past, but he floats between those two situations as though they're the same thing, which was both puzzling and obnoxious. I still found his ideas worthwhile, and I appreciate his thoughts on memory as a morally ambivalent entity, which is an idea that I wished we discussed more often.
Profile Image for Thomas.
638 reviews19 followers
December 25, 2020
Volf offers a clear, penetrating look at rightly remembering and how justice, redemption and our identity as God's image-bearers informs both remembering traumatic and difficult memories and even how it informs when it is appropriate to forgot such memories. Truly a remarkable work and worth reading for any Christian who has experienced trauma or who works with those who have. Highly recommended.
Profile Image for Jackson Brooks.
45 reviews1 follower
July 8, 2018
Incredibly pastoral as well as philosophical. It not only builds a foundation for a theology of remembrance, but also tears down the idol that memory can sometimes become. Thought provoking and practically challenging
7 reviews
July 11, 2010
I don't remember any other book rocking my world like this one did. A complete paradigm shift occurred for me because of it.
Profile Image for Ryan Ward.
387 reviews23 followers
March 1, 2021
Using his personal experience and wrestle to forgive his harsh military interrogation in the former Yugoslavia, Volf argues that remembering the wrongs done to us rightly, in all their difficulty and trauma, is a necessary precursor to the enactment of justice. Once we understand these wrongs in all their particulars we are in a position to offer forgiveness and begin the process of reconciliation, which then allows us to forget the wrongs in a newly-created community of love (possibly having to wait until the next life) with wronged and wrong-doers living together.
Profile Image for Brendan Griffith.
13 reviews
March 17, 2024
Volf argues that the injunction to 'remember!' injustice ought to be conditional. Whilst one should cultivate a truthful memory of injustice so long as we remain fallen (he qualifies even this), at the threshold of heaven the remembrance of suffering will be utterly effaced from our minds, bodies, and souls. Only thus may total reconciliation between perpetrator and victim be effected.

The argument is more or less cogent, though I can't say I found it persuasive or in any sense moving. I also really don't like the idea that in heaven we won't remember the cross - something in me just finds this wrong.

It's worth a read if you're interested in moral injury; otherwise, I'd probably pick up something else.
Profile Image for Monica.
9 reviews2 followers
December 10, 2017
A fascinating topic and the book contains some provocative and helpful ideas for integrating memory, particularly of injustice and trauma, into a Christian framework. However, the prose is rather convoluted / excessively dense (for example significant flaws in his logic are sometimes alluded to in asides but not picked up until much later), and lacks concrete engagement with the implications of Volf's ideas - how to apply the ideas in practical ways in response to injustice. Given how directly the topic could impact lives, that's a major flaw.

The primary weakness is that forgiveness overall is treated almost entirely as an individual act to love one's enemy--even arguing that reconciliation with the enemy is necessary for full healing -- (although Volf acknowledges that this isn't always possible), minimizing the complexity and social embeddedness of others' crimes. Near the end of the book he also acknowledges that wrongdoers rarely name the truth of their crimes and addresses this major flaw with his emphasis on individual reconciliation by "reconciling" with his abuser through the act of imagination.

While reconciling within one's imagination is a helpful tool for therapeutic relief, the book fails to responsibly engage with the questions it raises about our concrete decisions in response to pervasive abusive behavior in social contexts. Egregiously missing from the book is any engagement with the most common examples of such behavior - domestic abuse, emotional abuse, etc., and the havoc this wreaks on families - and the danger of "reconciling". A subtle implication of the book is that reconciliation in most cases should be the goal of the victim, implicitly emphasizing a victim's responsibility to be the primary agents of their oppressors' healing, to be "Christ" to them, failing to equally emphasize the perpetrator's responsibility to turn to Christ. Volf even argues that a victim is prone to be "unjust" to their oppressor by exaggerating their crimes -- subtly and dangerously implying that a wounded person's natural rage "exaggerates" their experience so much that it can legitimately be called an injustice just like the crime - so in effect healing is only possible by the victim "toning down" their 'distorted' pain. These implications minimize the actual divide between oppressor and victim, failing to do justice to the objectively different effects of trauma on a victim, as well as the deep-rooted nature of abusive psychology and mental illness that typically leads to abusive behavior. A responsible engagement with trauma requires a deeper engagement with the pyschology of abuse and the effects of trauma on the body - effects that aren't curable simply by an act of mental volition to remember 'rightly' - than is presented here.

Similarly, Volf fails to deeply engage with the fact that our "enemies" typically benefit from a web of social relationships that support their bad behavior, so his overall portrait of forgiveness is one of therapeutic relief to the person tormented by painful memories and the perpetrator tormented by guilt. This vision lacks practical, actionable ways to respond to violence and abuse.

So overall, despite provocative and at times moving reflections, the book lacks a sustainable vision of Christian community that does justice to the nature of violence and mistreatment of others, one where the community of faith can genuinely embody a place of healing and new beginnings. Instead, it subtly places more burdens on survivors of great evil. A better work on this topic is Gregory Jones' Embodying Forgiveness, which is a more clear and responsible approach, including similar insights as Volf within a much more practical framework.
Profile Image for Jared.
99 reviews13 followers
May 16, 2019
In this work, Volf continues the project begun in “Exclusion and Embrace” and “Free of Charge,” which is to offer a theological account of the idea of Christian forgiveness as it relates to contemporary culture. His specific goal in this work is to discuss the place of the memory of wrongs in the context of forgiveness. Perhaps the simplest way to summarize the argument is as an explanation and defense of the old saw, “forgive and forget,” as an accurate picture of Christian forgiveness.

For Volf, the problem to be solved is the fact that, if it means anything, the Cross of Christ means that BOTH victims AND perpetrators can find forgiveness and reconciliation…not just with God, but with one another. This, of course, requires that the wrongs that exist between them must be “done away with.” Volf sets himself to explain, in detail, how this process works in a way that does not violate morality (by gutting the action of its “wrongness”) or justice (by letting the action go unpunished). As one would expect, theologically and ethically, this is a rather involved question.
One move that Volf makes at the beginning is to ground the whole discussion in traumatizing experience he had in the Yugoslavian army of being interrogated by a captain in the security service (known throughout the book as “Captain G”) for anti-Communist sympathies. The accusations were eventually dropped, but the wounds from that experience remained. This book, then, is not some sterile “thought experiment” but a sort of testimony to the way in which Volf has worked through his own status as victim to come to forgive and reconcile with his victimizer. Volf’s honesty about his own struggles provides the work some very necessary “groundedness” to make the discussion relatable and the argument compelling.

Two interrelated points about forgiveness/reconciliation seem to ground the entire work:
1) That forgiveness requires, first of all, full admission of the wrong action on the part of the perpetrator. “Forgive & forget” is often a code-phrase for repression of painful memories which is the precise OPPOSITE of what Christian forgiveness requires. For forgiveness and reconciliation to occur, evil must be fully exposed to light.
2) That forgiveness is a lengthy process that cannot be fully completed until the Final Reconciliation (Volf’s term for the end of human history that encompasses both the “Last Judgment” so popular in Christian eschatology and Volf’s proposed “Final Embrace”).
Within that broad framework, Volf makes a number of other significant points about the forgotten aspects of forgiveness such as, for example, the victim’s tendency to elide their own shortcomings/wrongdoings in their attempt to vilify the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s tendency to avoid confessing the evil of their actions by contextualization. All in all, Volf demonstrates the multitude of ways in which human sinfulness can “derail” the conciliatory process and how the Cross of Christ, when fully understood disallows these shortcuts.

There were a couple elements that caught me by surprise. One was Volf’s approach to the question of “universalism.” Fair warning: there’s a better than fair chance Volf is a universalist. But he attempts to artfully dodge the question by referencing Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “Dare We Hope that All Men Be Saved?” I could wish he would have staked out that ground more clearly, even if, in the end, I would have been forced to disagree with his conclusion. Another surprise was the way in which he demonstrated how the contemporary focus on the need for permanence of memory related to Modernity’s “anthropological” shift. In brief: if identity is found “within” (provided by an individualized sense of purpose) rather than “without” (provided by the communities with which one is associated), then memory becomes identity’s essence—to forget a wrong, then, is to become a “shrunken self” (Volf’s phrase). But the claim of Christianity is that our identity is not found within US but within CHRIST…which is what makes it possible to forgive—and ultimately forget—evils and wrongs.

Volf, as always is remarkably clear, remarkably well- and widely-read, and remarkably practical while not sacrificing theological depth or logical rigor. It is a work both inspiring and convicting, challenging us with a grand vision of the hope of reconciliation that must once again grasp our hearts, if we are to truly see the coming of God’s Kingdom in this broken and violent world.
Profile Image for Josh Olds.
1,012 reviews108 followers
December 31, 2021
We live in a world where we would rather move on from the atrocities of our past, where a common cultural religion tells us to “forgive and forget.” Amid all of that, Miroslav Volf calls us to remember. Drawing upon his own traumatic past and difficulty in forgiving his military interrogators in the former Yugoslavia, Volf argues that correctly remembering the wrongs done to us—with all their trauma and pain—is a necessary precursor to justice. It is only within the context of remembering rightly that we can begin the process of reconciliation.

The End of Memory draws particularly upon the Exodus and the Passion as examples of remembering and, indeed, sacralizing, traumatic events. In both cases, remembering a traumatic experience shapes the covenantal community. “For you were slaves in Egypt” is a constant refrain in the Old Covenant Law. Reflection on the death of Jesus is endemic to the New Covenant, where the common-union of believers is celebrated by remembering Christ’s death.

Volf also advocates for the hope of reconciliation. There is no vengeance in remembrance or in justice. Rather “since the memory of the passion is an eschatological memory of the anticipated final reconciliation, I will remember every wrongdoing in the light of that hopeful horizon of future reconciliation with the wrongdoer” (pg. 123). Though it is painful, The End of Memory asks us to recognize our wrongdoers through the eyes of Christ, as one whom Christ loves and desires reconciliation with. The struggle to forgive permeates the book as Volf calls readers to do the hard work of loving one’s enemies.

Yet Volf also concedes that certain memories, under certain conditions should indeed be purged—that forgetting can be a gift of grace that we should embrace. This third part of the book seems almost a paradoxical twist to the argument that Volf has built, but what The End of Memory has done has shown us when memory should end. Volf’s thesis is that, in the world to come, we will not remember those traumas. This is an even greater struggle than what Volf presents in the book’s second part.

In a postscript, Miroslav Volf imagines what reconciliation between him and his interrogators would look like. It’s a very personal, therapeutic fiction that exemplifies the hope of reconciliation and the freedom in forgetting that comes with a restored relationship. It’s an intensely raw and emotive conclusion that shows just how personally invested Volf is in this topic. While The End of Memory is an academic work, its pathos is incredibly personal.

As a second edition, this volume includes an additional chapter on the memories of perpetrators and victims, offers a reflection on fifteen years of reflection and a response to criticism of the first edition. Finally, it records an interview with James K.A. Smith, in which Volf expands a clarifies some of his comments. These additions show that The End of Memory is a living theology. It’s growing, adapting, and being refined. Volf doesn’t claim to have it all figured out, or to perfectly follow what he believes he has figured out, but acknowledges his own imperfections and the movement of his thought on the topic through the years.

In the end, Volf’s plea is this: Work at discerning what kind of remembering is worthy of our shared humanity. The End of Memory is a difficult work, both in theory and practice, but it presents a Christlikeness that balances the “easy forgetfulness” that leads to continued pain and the “never forget” mentality that leads to ungodly vengeance and inhibits growth.

My one concern about the book is that Volf keeps the conversation in the philosophical and does little work in the practical. Recall that the culmination of his own traumatic experience comes in the form of an imagined and not a realized reconciliation. This is a good word for those who are separated from their abusers and whose reconciliation is mental or distant, but what of those actively enduring abuse? Because The End of Memory is so personal to Volf and because his own trauma happened decades ago, it is perhaps easier for him to advocate on behalf of the abuser (in a sense) than it is for those who are actively or recently enduring abuse. The book could better have balanced an understanding of the psychology of abuse with the theological goals of reconciliation. Regardless, Volf’s perspective makes one pause and consider if, in remembering, we are harming ourselves and others.
Profile Image for Michael Austin.
Author 138 books297 followers
September 3, 2018
Volf's The End of Memory is not an easy book to read. It is academic theology that engages intensely with other academic theologians and with non-religious philosophers (or, at least with religious philosophers writing about non-religious things). Volf is a rigorous intellectual writing theology within a rigorously intellectual tradition. However, unlike the vast majority of books for which these things are true, this book is actually important. Beneath all of the rigorous theology and academic philosophy lie questions that matter and that need answers.

Here, if I am reading correctly, is the most important of these questions: How do we stand as a witness to horrible and evil events--both historical (genocide, war crimes, mass murder) and personal (abuse, neglect, assault)--without creating the conditions that cause more horrible and evil events to occur?

This is not an abstract, academic question. It is a necessary avenue of analysis for anyone trying to make sense of the cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Holocaust, the crimes of Stalin and Mao, the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, and elsewhere. Volf experienced some of these events first hand, as a Croatian theologian living in Yugoslavia as it fragmented and produced a decade of civil war and genocide among its Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim inhabitants. These were events that, most people would say, must be remembered (so that they don't happen again). But they were also events that were caused by people remembering earlier wars, massacres, and genocides.

Memory has been sold to us in the modern world as the key to preventing holocausts. And the rationale for this is rational and important. But memory has also been the cause of holocausts. How do we remember without perpetuating the cycle of retaliatory violence.

It depends, Volf says, on both how, and why, we remember. Remembering correctly is necessary, but not sufficient. We also have to remember purposefully, with the objective of healing, and, ultimately with the objective of redemption and reconciliation. Volf is entirely aware how dangerous it is to even suggest that victims of evil, whether of the world-historical or the intensely purposeful kind, forgive or try to reconcile with the people who inflicted the evil. He does not advocate it, or say that it is always appropriate, or suggest that anybody feel compelled to do it. But he does suggest that it is part of what it means to take the Christian message seriously.

This is the scariest, but also the most beautiful part of The End of Memory. Volf works from the assumption that Christ is real--and that this is not irrelevant to the way that we deal with difficult questions. It means that God loves all of humanity, that people have an identity independent of their suffering, that there really is an afterlife, that the Kingdom of God is possible, and that redemption and atonement are real. He believes that these ideas are true and that they matter, which is a very different thing than believing that they are true but don't matter, because we should just go living our lives as though the otherworldly things that we believe most have nothing to do with how we should approach important thisworldly questions.

The result is a book that is powerful, but not a little bit disturbing. Volf definitely does not say that evil and violence should be forgotten, or repressed, or ignored. They must be remembered, but they must be remembered ethically, in a context that can draw lessons for the future that help people prevent evil and violence--and not in a way that makes more evil and violence inevitable. There is no way to do this without invoking assumptions that are at least broadly theological. We can't just remember that--we have to remember so that. And the purpose to which we dedicate our desire to remember matters a lot.
Profile Image for An Te.
386 reviews26 followers
May 26, 2019
Reading Professor Volf's book has been a slow-burning revelation. What are we to do when we recall past injustices? Volf is concerned with answering this question here. Volf envisions a way of recollecting the wrongs and how we can do both justice to the wrong and yet maintain it for future posterity. It simply cannot be convey in memories of the self, which is fleeting, subject to bias and fractious.

Volf envisions this. Wrongs are committed but we, in God's resplendent love, welcomes the victim and perpetrators to the same table. By affirming our falleness and the beautiful exchange of Christ, we are in blessed union with God (triune) straining forward to what is joyous and good, letting all that is evil wither and die for what it is really is.

For me, it really is a beautiful thing. We are given the momentary and momentous powers to construct good and evil wherever we go. I may have baggage to contend with before becoming a Christian, but in striving to live in Christ, evil is singled-out for what it truly is, parasitic and a deviation in God's goodness (though not completely absent of it for it has a quasi-existence whilst God allows it to be so in the 'inaugurated eschatological' period- I shan't meander on this matter but it could be expanded further...). Thenceforth, I can now affirm Christ's salvific power and identity which affirms God's faithfulness and goodness, no longer strengthening the past hurts and grievances. We will be so captivated by God's presence that past hurts will simply slip out of our minds. In the eschaton, things, as anyone will know who tries to speak on these matters, are less clear. Forgiveness is a divine gift and memory is deeply tied to its operation. However, the mechanisms and purposes remain a mystery to us, as the Incarnation and the Trinity seem to elude human comprehension.

Theory heavy at times, it is a tome worth exploring for anyone who has a mottled past or cannot see eye to eye with another. It is a helpful 'sense-maker' for God's forgiveness. A deeply serious, imaginative and important work. An inchoate work (as ever will be on divine matters this side of heaven) but God has gifted Volf with insights into His embracing character; that as much is what I sense.
Profile Image for Frazer.
458 reviews37 followers
July 20, 2021
As someone whose research revolves around memory, I valued the contribution of this book but was also tempted to skim ahead when stuff became too familiar or predictable.

I liked the way there was a strong autobiographical element. The book wouldn't have been half as convincing if the author was just speaking in a theoretical sense the whole time.

Clearly it's a Christian book, and naturally focuses on the great potential for using the 'meta-memory' of the last supper as a point of reconciliation, but I think he did a disservice to the conciliatory imperative of memory in the Hebrew scriptures. To say that because the OT contains the command to remember to destroy the Amalekites and that therefore remembering is given an 'ambiguous' position in the OT is disingenuous. This ignores the polyvalence of memory in the NT, and the abundance of other instances in the Hebrew scriptures where rememebering is enjoined for the purposes of healing rather than causing wounds.

There was occasional (intentional) confusion of 'remembering' with just 'being conscious of'/'perceiving' in the moment. I feel his struggle with how difficult it is to manipulate the slippery concept of memory.

As with so much nonfiction, I feel like this could have been condensed into an essay very easily. There was an awful lot of hand-wringing, caveat-giving, and hand-holding, much of which was justified, but some of which was excessive.

Some very valuable stuff, and my criticisms pale beside the significance of the book as a whole.
Profile Image for E..
Author 1 book34 followers
October 7, 2019
A profound theological exploration of remembering and forgetting.

Volf was at one time a prisoner of the communist forces of his native Yugoslavia, where he underwent interrogation that was a form of psychological torture. What should he do with those memories? What should all people do with memories of pain, trauma, and suffering?

A deeply personal book that draws from the rich wells of the Christian tradition, literature, and philosophy, Volf considers how we should remember and remember well and when and how we should forget, including how forgetting is connected to forgiveness and reconciliation.

Volf's ideas are filled with hope and healing for a broken world. I found the book not only intellectual stimulating, but personally helpful.
Profile Image for Ann.
359 reviews8 followers
August 18, 2025
This book is clearly directed to readers who have undergone deeply disturbing experiences or the people called to help them cope with memories of such experiences. Not being in the target readership myself, I nevertheless hoped to gain a better understanding of the subject and the author's insight. I read about one-third and found it slow-going, detailed and repetitive, as if the author felt he had to recap all his previous arguments before adding one more step to his reasoning process. While I concede that this approach is effective for many, I finally decided to return it to the library and move on. I see from other reviews that it's an excellent book and my third star is an acknowledgment of that. I apologize to the author for rating a book I didn't finish.
Profile Image for VJ.
126 reviews1 follower
July 10, 2021
I am astounded by how much this book has enriched me spiritually, and how it forcefully reshaped my understanding of the importance of remembering 'rightly' or 'truthfully,' and its power to reconcile the wrongdoer to the victim and vice versa, through the transformative power of forgiveness and God's own restorative love and justice through the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which not only vindicates the victim but also restores the wrongdoer.

I highly recommended this book, which [personally] is an incredible resource on transformative spirituality and restorative justice.
Profile Image for Rachel Gray.
270 reviews3 followers
October 21, 2024
What a great book that left me so much to think and pray about. I’ve read Volf’s “Free of Charge” and “Exclusion and Embrace,” and I highly recommend that you read those in conjunction with this book. The themes overlap and build upon each other. End of Memory seems to really flesh out some areas that I wrestled with in reading Exclusion and Embrace. What is memory? How do we remember rightly? Can we live with hope in spite of wrongs done to us? Is reconciliation ever possible?

This is not a light read but a theological exercise. It was hard work, but I know I’ll be pondering the themes in the years to come.
72 reviews
May 13, 2021
A difficult read and not at all what I expected; honest, challenging, painful, genuine! So, what do we do with those painful memories?
My favorite quote is at the end of the book:
“We will not ‘forget’ so as to be able to rejoice; we will rejoice and therefore let those memories slip out of our minds! The reason for our non-remembrance of wrongs will be the same as its cause: our minds will be rapt in the goodness of God and in the goodness of God’s new world, and the memories of wrongs will wither away like plants without water.”
Profile Image for Jill B.
30 reviews
July 20, 2023
An in depth look at the question of "How should the one who loves [with Christ-like love] remember the wrongdoer and the wrongdoing?", especially when we are the recipient of the wrongdoing.

A thought provoking thesis. He paints a beautiful, but challenging picture of reconciliation.

One thought that pulled me in to this book was his statement of "To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned."
Profile Image for Brian Virtue.
152 reviews1 follower
December 1, 2023
Challenging book to read (it's dense in terms of thought, philosophy, and theology) and challenging to grapple with in its arguments and conclusions. Volf gives teeth to the cliche "forgive and forgive" and rescues Christian forgiveness from both naive and contemporary cultural and typical church understandings. He offers a needed foundation as well as hope for those both awaiting justice or trapped in victim postures. He brings together memory, forgiveness, forgetfulness, and identity in thought-provoking ways with significant implications for moral, spiritual, and social formation.
Profile Image for Tim  Goldsmith.
502 reviews9 followers
November 23, 2017
Volf has had the traumatic experiences required to speak about a topic like this with authority coupled with the academic capacity to look at deep questions with genuine rigour.
I read through this book with the staff from my church. It is sometimes repetitive, but a wonderful book to digest and meditate on.
If you wonder how you might move beyond a traumatic experiences, or whether you should feel guilty for "moving beyond" something, this could be a helpful book to read.
Profile Image for Ricky Schille.
24 reviews
July 24, 2023
What is the possibility of Christian forgiveness in the face of horrific evil? Does forgiveness mean that those who commit heinous acts are left unpunished? It is easier to forgive when a slight is minor, but when a most egregious evil is committed? Volf takes an honest look at reality and, through a beautiful sacramentology and eschatology, he shows what it takes for a Christian to be able to forgive in the face of abuse.
Profile Image for Jeremiah.
47 reviews
September 12, 2017
This was probably one of the best books I would NOT recommend. He asks and answers his questions about remembering rightly wonderfully, but it is his writing style, what I call a casual PhD dissertation, that punches you in the gut just a bit in its readability.

It's good, but find someone who has already read it and get the CliffNotes version from them.
Profile Image for Aaron Carlberg.
524 reviews34 followers
April 27, 2021
I really wanted to give this more than 3 stars (maybe it should have been 3.5). I found the book very hard to walk through with out getting bored. Volf takes most of the book before I (feel) he gets to his point. The book could have been much shorter as chapter 9-10 seemed the culmination and the most practical.

Our memory shapes us, but doesn't need to be what defines us.
Profile Image for 5greenway.
487 reviews4 followers
October 2, 2020
4.5. An engaging, thoughtful exploration of what divine forgiveness/reconciliation might mean. Lots to chew over here, ideas to return to.
Profile Image for Dylan Worrell.
28 reviews
January 4, 2022
Difficult read, but incredibly interesting to read how Volf has worked through his own personal journey and how it affects his view of forgiving your enemies.
Profile Image for James Korsmo.
531 reviews28 followers
August 3, 2011
Miroslav Volf is an evangelical theologian and professor at Yale Divinity School. He also grew up in the former Yugoslavia and its communist rule. And it is precisely his experiences in Yugoslavia during his year of mandatory military service that provide the focus for this book, a sustained reflection on the meaning of memory and grace with regard to wrongs committed against us.

Volf sets up his reflections by recounting his memory of the sustained interrogations to which he was subjected by "Captain G." during his year of military service. Because of his training in America, his background in theology, his critique of Marxism, and his marriage to an American, he was a person of suspicion. This resulted in sustained interrogations, threats of detainment, and psychological torture. This background leads him to the question, What does it mean to remember these wrongs done against us?

The first stage of his argument deals with the question of if we should remember. In today's culture, especially in the wake of the Holocaust and other attrocities of the past century, the answer seems an obvious yes. And Volf echoes this answer, marshalling the call of such people as Elie Wiesel, who rally around the cry, Remember! It is important to acknowledge wrongdoing, and to recognize both those who are wrong and those who have been wronged. But, he also turns us to wrestle with the question of how we should remember.

Memory is important, but it is also ambiguous. Memory can be put to many uses. It can help us to prevent further wrongs or atrocities, but it can also lead us to perpetrate wrongs out of self-interest (say out of the desire to not be a victim again ourselves). So the first facet of memory that Volf emphasizes is that we must remember truthfully. This means honestly seeking as complete an understanding of events as possible, admitting the points of view of others than ourselves, and acknowledging the complexities that are often inherent in these situations. It is often easy in situations where we have been wronged to make out the perpetrator as the "evil" party and ourselves as the "good" or "innocent" party. But the facts often reveal a more complex picture. While the evil can still be named as such, there is often more to it, such as the fact that Captain G. was operating within a system that condoned and encouraged his behavior toward Volf and other suspects. A second important facet of our remembering is that it is to be in service of reconciliation. We are to strive to bring a full and accurate account of events to mind so that we can fully acknowledge the situation, along with the perperatator, and then offer forgiveness and grace to that person, and, when it is received, enter into a new and reconciled relationship with them, beyond the roles of perpetrator and victim, where the wrong is forgotten.

This brings us to the third major theme of Volf's book. Beyond memory, and beyond a certain type of remembering in service of grace, comes forgetting. We should strive toward and look forward to a grace-filled world in which wrongs are fully acknowledged and then forgotten. In light of Jesus' death on the cross, a death which dealt with all evil, we look forward in hope to a time when that grace will embrace our situation. Volf is careful to remind that this forgetting is always on the other side of acknowledgement, forgiveness, and reconciliation, but it is still an end. We should (though it is not easy) long for a time when perpetrator and victim can come together without those labels, when a new and reconcilied relationship has forgotten completely those earlier roles, and draws them together as friends and companions. This is Volf's vision of the life to come, on the other side of the final judgment, a life that we can begin to experience here and now through a drive for reconciliation (as opposed to retribution).

Volf's End of Memory is an honest wrestling with the true nature of Christianity, the atonement, and grace. It helps paint a fuller picture of grace by looking beyond what grace means for me personally to a look at what grace should mean for my enemies, as well. He makes a convincing case for the importance of memory, a truthful and just type of memory, but then qualifies this memory as provisional. We instead look toward the end of memory, that time when all things will be made new, all wrongs remembered and then forgotten, and all eyes turned from past hurts to fulfillment and joy in Jesus Christ. It is a great and challenging vision of a grace-filled life. And is also a deep reflection what shapes our identity (hint: it's not our history, though that plays a role; who we are is ultimately grounded in God.)
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