Miroslav Volf > Quotes

“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of
humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one
can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without
overcoming this double exclusion — without transposing the enemy from the
sphere of the monstrous… into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from
the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When
one knows [as the cross demonstrates] that the torturer will not eternally
triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and
imitate God’s love for him. And when one knows [as the cross demonstrates]
that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of
God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.”
― Miroslav Volf

“The difference between justice and forgiveness: To be just is to condemn the fault and, because of the fault, to condemn the doer as well. To forgive is to condemn the fault but to spare the doer. That's what the forgiving God does.”
― Miroslav Volf

“Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion. One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the Triune God- a "foursome," as it were-- for the Christian God is not a private deity. Communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God. Hence one and the same act of faith places a person into a new relationship both with God and with all others who stand in communion with God.”
― Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity

“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans and myself from the community of sinners.”
― Miroslav Volf

“Whatever the reasons, when forgiveness happens it is always a miracle of grace. The obstacles in its way are immense”
― Miroslav Volf

“To live with integrity, it is important to know what's right and what's wrong, to be educated morally. However, merely KNOWING is not enough. Virtuous character matters more than moral knowledge. The reason is simple: like the self-confessing apostle Paul in Romans 7, most of those who do wrong know what's right but find themselves irresistibly attracted to its opposite. Faith idles when character shrivels”
― Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good

“The principle cannot be denied: the fiercer the struggle against the injustice you suffer, the blinder you will be to the injustice you inflict. We tend to translate the presumed wrongness of our enemies into an unfaltering conviction of our own rightness.”
― Miroslav Volf

“Christ has not come with a blueprint for political arrangements; many kinds of political arrangements are compatible with the Christian faith, from monarchy to democracy. But in a pluralistic context, Christ’s command “in everything do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12) entails that Christians grant to other religious communities the same religious and political freedoms that they claim for themselves.”
― Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith, How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good

“The sufferings of Christ on the cross are not just his sufferings; they are “the sufferings of the poor and weak, which Jesus shares in his own body and in his own soul, in solidarity with them” (Moltmann 1992, 130). And since God was in Christ, “through his passion Christ brings into the passion history of this world the eternal fellowship of God and divine justice and righteousness that creates life” (131). On the cross, Christ both “identifies God with the victims of violence” and identifies “the victims with God, so that they are put under God's protection and with him are given the rights of which they have been deprived”
― Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

“In the minds of most people, Christianity is supposed to be about love of God and neighbor (even though it is true that at the heart of Christianity does not lie human love at all, but God’s love for humanity24”
― Miroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian Response – A Provocative and Timely Theology of Islam, Muslims, and Dialogue for the Twenty-First Century

“Faith is the way we as receivers relate appropriately to God as the giver. It is empty hands held open for God to fill.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“Love properly understood is God—the font of all creation and the ultimate goal of all desires; God properly understood is love.”
― Miroslav Volf, Allah: A Christian Response – A Provocative and Timely Theology of Islam, Muslims, and Dialogue for the Twenty-First Century

“We know it is good to receive, and we have been blessed by receiving not only as children, but also as adults. Yet Jesus taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35), and part of growing up is learning the art of giving. If we fail to learn this art, we will live unfulfilled lives, and in the end, chains of bondage will replace the bonds that keep our communities together. If we just keep taking or even trading, we will squander ourselves. If we give, we will regain ourselves as fulfilled individuals and flourishing communities.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“the true God gives so we can become joyful givers and not just self-absorbed receivers.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“She loved him for his own sake, and therefore she would rather have suffered his absence if he flourished than to have enjoyed his presence if he languished; her sorrow over his avoidable languishing would overshadow her delight in his presence. For a lover, it is more blessed to give than to receive, even when giving pierces the lover’s heart.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“Two false images of God are particularly irresistible to many of us – mostly unconsciously. The first I’ll designate as God the negotiator and the other, God the Santa Claus. Though we have fashioned both to serve our interests, they are each other’s opposites. With one, we want to make advantageous deals. From the other, we want to get warm smiles and bagfuls of goodies. We run from one to the other. Some of their features are reminiscent of the God of Jesus Christ. But we’ve drawn these images of God mostly from two currents of the culture in which we swim – the current of hard and unforgiving economic realities, in which we exchange goods to maximize benefits, and the current of soft, even infantile, desires, in which we long to be showered with gifts simply because we exist.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“The practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance.”
― Miroslav Volf

“Here is what we do as worshipers of a Santa Claus God: We embrace the conviction that God is an infinitely generous source of all good, but conveniently forget that we were created in God’s image to be in some significant sense like God – not like God in God’s divinity, for we are human and not divine, but like God “in true righteous ness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24), like God in loving enemies (Matthew 5:44). To live well as a human being is to live in sync with who God is and how God acts.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“God doesn’t give in order to acquire. God loves without self-seeking; that’s at the heart of who God is. God gives for the benefit of others.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“Sin is here the kind of purity that wants the world cleansed of the other rather than the heart cleansed of the evil that drives people out by calling those who are clean “unclean” and refusing to help make clean those who are unclean. Put”
― Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

“In his early text, somewhat cumbersomely titled 'Towards a Critique of Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT,' the young Karl Marx famously noted that religion - the Christian faith, he meant primarily - is 'the opiate of the people.' It's a drug, and it's a 'downer' or 'depressant' insulating people from the pain of oppressive social realities and consoling them with a dream world of heavenly bliss. Alternatively, religion can function as an 'upper,' a 'stimulant' energizing people for the tasks at hand - a function of religion Marx failed to grasp.”
― Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good

“All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover him at their side. To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting his way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology.”
― Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

“G. K. Chesterton famously quipped that “those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves widows in the next.”
― Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith, How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good

“it is hard for theology to persist when it has forgotten its purpose: to critically discern, articulate, and commend visions of the true life in light of the person, life, and teachings of Jesus Christ.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Slowly and imperceptibly, the one true God begins acquiring the features of the gods of this world. For instance, our God simply gratifies our desires rather than reshaping them in accordance with the beauty of God’s own character. Our God then kills enemies rather than dying on their behalf as God did in Jesus Christ.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“Engagement is not a matter of either speaking or doing; not a matter of either offering a compelling intellectual vision or embodying a set of alternative practices; not a matter of either merely making manifest the richness and depth of interior life or merely working to change the institutions of society; not a matter of either only displaying alternative politics as gathered in Eucharistic celebrations or merely working for change as the dispersed people of God. It is all these things and more. The whole person in all aspects of her life is engaged in fostering human flourishing and serving the common good.”
― Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith, How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good

“God’s gifts aim at making us into generous givers, not just fortunate receivers. God gives so that we, in human measure, can be givers too.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“Notice that, in making ourselves available, we are not doing God any favors. We give ourselves for God’s use to benefit creation, not to benefit God.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

“Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture”
― Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

“Some theologians claim that all God’s desires culminate in a single desire: to assert and to maintain God’s own glory. On its own, the idea of a glory-seeking God seems to say that God, far from being only a giver, is the ultimate receiver. As the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth disapprovingly put it, such a God would be “in holy self-seeking . . . preoccupied with Himself”10. In creating and redeeming, such a God would give, but only in order to get glory; the whole creation would be a means to this end. In Luther’s terms, here we would have a God demonstrating human rather than divine love.”
― Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace