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87bb52f
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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. ..
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miroslav-volf
god-s-love
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Miroslav Volf |
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368ecfb
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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 fait..
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trinity
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Miroslav Volf |
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4410879
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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
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virtue
integrity
morality
faith
faith-without-works-is-dead
moral-knowledge
works
st-paul
romans
right-and-wrong
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Miroslav Volf |
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0be7f87
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Faith is the way we as receivers relate appropriately to God as the giver. It is empty hands held open for God to fill.
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Miroslav Volf |
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f5e7bbb
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the true God gives so we can become joyful givers and not just self-absorbed receivers.
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Miroslav Volf |
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043c1e0
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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 wi..
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Miroslav Volf |
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9dba461
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Love properly understood is God--the font of all creation and the ultimate goal of all desires; God properly understood is love.
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Miroslav Volf |
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96d1929
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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
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Miroslav Volf |
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6922e4e
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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.
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Miroslav Volf |
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dd95f42
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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 bein..
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Miroslav Volf |
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9177faa
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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,..
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religion
opiate-of-the-people
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Miroslav Volf |
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9984194
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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 ..
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Miroslav Volf |
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7128c8b
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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 "iden..
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Miroslav Volf |
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1410c6f
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If it is true that the dual command of love is the common ground of the two faiths, the consequences are momentous. We no longer have to say, "The deeper your faith, the more you will be at odds with others!" To the contrary, we must say, "The deeper your faith, the more you will live in harmony with others!" A deep faith no longer leads to clashes; it fosters peaceful coexistence." --
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Miroslav Volf |
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0caa6bf
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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.
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Miroslav Volf |
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e54a690
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Through my memory of the Passion, God can "purify" my memory of wrongs suffered because my identity stems neither from the wrongdoing done to me, which would require the perpetual accusation of my wrongdoer, nor from my own (false) innocence, which would lead me to (illegitimate) self-justification."
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Miroslav Volf |
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1068fd8
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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..
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Miroslav Volf |
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3ae0118
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This is a book about worshiping the true God and letting the true God act in us. It tells us as plainly as possible that the true God is a God who cannot stop giving and forgiving, and that our knowledge of this true God is utterly bound up with our willingness to receive from the hand of God the liberty to give and forgive.
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Miroslav Volf |
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20cb399
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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"
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Miroslav Volf |
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46c0440
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For those familiar with the early history of the Christian church--and for careful observers of young and vibrant Christian communities in the non-Western world--there is something odd about the present sense of crisis in the West. The early Christian communities were not major social players at all! They were not even among the cheering or booing spectators. Slandered, discriminated against, and even persecuted minorities, they were at mos..
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Miroslav Volf |
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fc63456
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When we forget that, we unwittingly reduce God's ways to our ways and God's thoughts to our thoughts. Our hearts become factories of idols in which we fashion and refashion God to fit our needs and desires.
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Miroslav Volf |
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0ebf0fa
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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.
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Miroslav Volf |
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8d06235
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G. K. Chesterton famously quipped that "those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves widows in the next."
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Miroslav Volf |
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af3de72
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To live in sync with who we truly are means to recognize that we are dependent on God for our very breath and are graced with many good things; it means to be grateful to the giver and attentive to the purpose for which the gifts are given.
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Miroslav Volf |
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b37624c
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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.
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Miroslav Volf |
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2a917f0
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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.
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Miroslav Volf |
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9a219d8
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The cure against Christian violence is not less of the Christian faith, but, in a carefully qualified sense, more of the Christian faith. I don't mean, of course, that the cure against violence lies in increased religious zeal; blind religious zeal is part of the problem. Instead, it lies in stronger and more intelligent commitment to the Christian faith as faith.
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Miroslav Volf |
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8a77122
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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, ..
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Miroslav Volf |
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5256df6
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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.
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Miroslav Volf |
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6c2ae65
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the central question was how to remember rightly. And given my Christian sensibilities, my question from the start was, How should I remember abuse as a person committed to loving the wrongdoer and overcoming evil with good?
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Miroslav Volf |