The Injunction To Honor Everyone Contains A Promise…

One of my influences as a Christian / pastor / thinker / writer is Miroslav Volf – the Croatian theologian, author, and professor of theology at the Yale Divinity School. Three of his books, in particular, have shaped my views: Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Otherness, Identity, and Reconciliation, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, and The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World.

There is a beautiful video on The Work of the People’s  website featuring a short interview with Volf. Here are some quotes…

1 Peter 2.17 “Honor Everyone”

The injunction to honor everyone is really revolutionary and extraordinarily significant.

I think it also contains a promise – a promise of possibility – of living with others in a way that doesn’t betray my own identity, the sturdiness of my own identity, and yet doesn’t always parasitically strengthen that identity by pushing the other away, by denigrating the other, by not being able to see the good in the other as a person or the multiplicity of gifts that this other person might have.