For the Life of the World Quotes

“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

“Theology is in crisis, largely because it has lost its nerve and forgotten its purpose to help discern, articulate, and commend compelling visions of flourishing life in light of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Love of enemies is a central moral conviction of the Christian faith; theologians who see their work as a mode of Christian life ought to love their intellectual “enemies”: to respect them as human beings, even to seek their friendship, and certainly not to let a personal squabble rob them of a good and productive argument with them.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“theologians do not create the “treasure” but present it ever anew; instead of “proclaiming” themselves and their theologies (see 2 Cor. 4:6), theologians proclaim, each in his or her own way, Jesus Christ, who has become for them “wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). At their best, theologians’ visions unite with their lives in seeking to be what Paul called “the aroma of Christ,” who himself is the true life (2 Cor. 2:15).”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“A theological articulation can be fruitful in one place at one time but not at that same place at a different time or at a different place at the same time.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“We also give up on the quest for truth when we marshal all forces—in exegesis and history as well as in philosophical, moral, and practical theology—to “discover” and corroborate predetermined dogmatic stances.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Sunday worship services are too frequently no more than a communal version of such energy-boosting, performance-enhancing, or get-well morning exercises.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Peace is the substance of life going well. Joy is the substance of life feeling as it should.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“requires going beyond the controversies that occasioned the letters to identify claims undergirding Paul’s theology that are so fundamental either for Paul or for both Paul and his audience that they are assumed and therefore referenced merely obliquely and relatively rarely.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“What is needed is a biblically rooted,30 patristically guided,31 ecclesially located, and publicly engaged theology, done in critical conversation with the sciences and the various disciplines of the humanities, at the center of which is the question of the flourishing life.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“The problem with Luther’s account of the Christian faith and of theology is that he distinguishes too sharply between the “inner person” and the “outer person”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“To change the world, we need an “I have a dream” speech, not an “I have a complaint” speech.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“To exaggerate a bit: academic theology today is composed of specialists in an unrespected discipline who write for fellow specialists about topics that interest hardly anyone else.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Creeping meaninglessness is a private cost of making the nature of the flourishing life a mere matter of taste.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“For us, theology was about the unbreakable tie between human transcendent longing and our mundane strivings, about the power of Jesus Christ, the Word of God and the Lamb of God, which stood in irreconcilable contrast to the power of soldiers, ideologues, bureaucrats, and secret service agents; it was about the right of persons—about our right, too, of course—to determine the shape and the direction of their individual and social lives, rather than, like some wound-up tin soldiers, to simply march in unison to the drumbeat of a failing revolution. Theology was about a new world coming from God and in God’s way, a new social order whose creation and survival wouldn’t demand thousands on thousands of dead as did the order in which we were born—my own father having come a hair’s breadth from becoming one of them. In short, theology was about the truth and beauty of human existence in a world of justice, peace, and joy.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference

“Living toward a world in which these identities no longer divide, but living in a world fundamentally structured by them, Paul takes up and lays down various identities for the sake of the gospel. Though free, he has made himself a slave. For the sake of the gospel, he lives sometimes as one under the Jewish law, other times as one free from it—all while recognizing the truth of his situation as one no longer under “the law” but nevertheless under “Christ’s law.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Karl Barth imagined the Christian theologian in the role of John the Baptist in the painting of Matthias Grünewald: he is standing to the side of the cross, holding the open Hebrew Scriptures in one hand and pointing with a finger of the other to the crucified Christ.67 A theologian ought to draw attention to the way of life and to the one who originally embodied it, not to the intellectual prowess, fertile imagination, or dazzling rhetoric of the theologian.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Virtuous theologians work as God’s stewards building God’s home (1 Cor. 3:9), not masters building their own little empires.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Our theology is insufficiently Christian—and less revealing of the truth than it should be, if Christian claims are indeed true (as we believe them to be)—when we repeat in religious idiom normative stances that nontheologians advocate, often with better arguments and greater rhetorical power.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Many ministers are more the church’s institutional managers than its theological guides; correspondingly, many read more management (“leadership”) books than they do works of academic theology.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference