Miroslav Volf may not be a household name for most Anglicans but this gripping work will provide a welcome introduction to his oeuvre. What prompted a young Yale theologian to write on the subject of memory? The year 1984 became for Volf a re-enactment of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

As a Ph.D. candidate in the communist Yugoslavia of 1983, he was called up to compulsory military service, exchanging the company of his American wife for rough barracks where fellow soldiers spied on him mercilessly. Charges and grim threats left a deposit of pervasive fear as his unbidden companion. Senseless interrogation under the blinding scrutiny of the power-drunk “Captain G” became the crucible for Volf’s investigation of memory.

“To be human is to be able to remember,” writes Volf and yet too many of us have memories whose deep colours darken the shade of every moment, shadowing even the future. Recent years have witnessed the call for public revelation of hidden acts, sexual abuse or ethnic atrocities. But this call to tell all is dangerously one-sided. Volf conjoins us to “remember rightly,” to do the hard work required of truthfulness, considering what is just not only for the victim, but also the wrongdoer, and the wider community. This is no simple matter.

Volf pits his own bitter experience against such scriptural injunctions as “love your enemies” and “overcome evil with good,” provoking a stream of questions, the primary one being, “How should the one who loves remember the wrongdoer and the wrongdoing?” (p. 9). For the Christian, how can memory, justice and love meet? These questions drive the book’s pursuit of justice ever deeper into the crevices of the heart and mind, leaving no corners hidden from the author’s penetrating gaze. No longer the victim of absurd interrogation, Volf now forms the questions thoughtfully as a means to freedom for those caught in the web of traumatic memory.

The confusion of ends and beginnings is suggested in the cover art of a thick yarn shaped into a loose circle, its “ends” unidentifiable as start or finish. Is there some need for “endless” repetition to make sense of the memory circuit? The book’s title, The End of Memory, reveals a play on “end,” meaning in one sense “termination” and in another “goal.” It cleverly encapsulates Volf’s conviction that remembering rightly–holding the details in truthful (if imperfect) confession–involves extending the gift of forgiveness

to wrongdoers. This is a goal that necessitates violators owning their transgression as they receive forgiveness in an act of reconciliation, made possible by the work of Christ who alone extends grace. It is this total process that creates the possibility of terminating memory, whether in this life or the next.

Given Volf’s academic proficiency--the prolific writer is today the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and Director of the Yale Centre for Faith and Culture--it comes as no surprise that his deliberations dip into the literature of philosophy, theology and psychology. But the performance is never gratuitous, each writer referenced serving as an illumination or foil towards puzzling out an intricate dilemma. For example, the explication of Goethe’s character, Margarete, in his Faust, is prepared by Luther’s famous treatise The Freedom of the Christian. Here Luther locates our identity as “in God;” therefore our memories have no power to define us (199).

Kierkegaard picks this up in his Either/Or in the discussion of Faust. Thus, Margarete, abandoned by Faust, can look beyond her source of selfhood in this lover (where Faust was in a sense her god) and find freedom from Faust in God as her true genesis of being and identity. Thus her “forgetting” of Faust is not a loss of identity but a new discovery of her real identity in God.

This invitation to “release of memory,” of “not coming to mind,” is no cliché of Christian sentimentality. Volf wrestles hard with how to ingest the medicine of memory without being sickened by its poison. Resentment, retribution, anger and betrayal are not lightly glossed over in working towards an ultimate reconciliation. Nor is therapy, however insightful, the ultimate solution in bringing healing. The high point of the book is the working out of Romans 3.26: “Christ’s death pointed beyond the struggle for retributive justice for victims to the wonder of transforming grace for perpetrators and reconciliation of the two.” This “scandal of justice” acclaims that “under certain conditions, the affirmed claims of justice should not count against the offender” (111).

The theological framing of forgiveness, however unique in its clarity and truth, is not original with Volf. It is his relentless pursuit of any gaps in the arguments, any slippage in the tight net of complex application that makes it remarkable. While never losing sight of the living affliction of the victims, he moves to the processes of the sufferer who is able to acknowledge her own wrongdoing and need of grace. Both victim and perpetrator stand at the foot of the cross. As Christ suffered with all victims, so all can participate in his victory, both now and in anticipation of a future redemption that spills over into the present.

Even as this hope for grace and reconciliation is extended to all, Volf acknowledges that this free gift must be received in the context of mutuality: “victims can be fully liberated and healed from the

wounds of wrongdoing only if the perpetrators genuinely repent and the two parties are reconciled to each other” (119). Our participation in the Eucharist remembers each other as reconciled to God and each other; “we remember ourselves as what we shall be” (119). This eschatological dimension is a necessary completion/end to the incompleteness of our earthly lives.

Beautifully written in accessible and engaging prose, Volf’s book succeeds in offering substantive hope through the amazing uniqueness of Christ’s death, resurrection and future glory. Its compelling quality lies in the author’s astute empathy stemming from the flames of his own fear and suffering at the hands of his Communist interrogators. Moreover his refusal to accept anything pat or trivial that would minimize the magnitude of responsibility, diligence, and transformation required of both wronged and wrongdoers raises the discourse of memory and violence to new standards. Moving beyond the limits of therapy or individual rights, he points to the possibility of true personal and communal freedom both in this world and the next.

Roseanne Kydd, Ph. D., is Minister of Music at

St. Philip’s on-the-Hill Anglican Church, Toronto.

Her experience with friends traumatized by

memory prompted her interest in this book.