Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf (born September 25, 1956) is a Croatian Protestant theologian and public intellectual and Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale University.

Miroslav Volf was born on September 25, 1956, in Osijek, Croatia, which was then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

At the age of five his family moved to the multicultural city of Novi Sad, Serbia (then also part of Yugoslavia), where his father became a minister for the small Pentecostal community.

Growing up as part of that community, Volf lived doubly on the margins.

Religiously, Osijek was predominantly Catholic and Novi Sad predominantly Serbian Orthodox; in both towns, Protestants were a small minority and Pentecostals were "a minority of a minority".

Politically, Yugoslavia was dominated by Marxist ideology and Christian ministers were particularly suspect and carefully monitored.

Raised in a home marked by a deep and articulate faith, Volf was formed in a Christianity that represented a form of life foreign to the dominant culture around him.

As Volf later recalled about his childhood, he did not have the luxury of "entertaining faith merely as a set of propositions that you do or don't assent to".

In school, especially in his early teens, the faith of his parents and their community was a heavy burden; Volf's sense of being different from his peers and from the larger culture around him caused him "almost unbearable shame" and he rebelled against faith.

In his mid teens, however, he had a quiet conversion.

As the only openly Christian student in his high school, he had to explain why and how the Christian faith makes sense intellectually and is a salutary way of life.

This was the beginning of his journey as a theologian.

The experience engendered his abiding conviction that living and working on the margins may be an advantage for a theologian of a faith that itself was born on the margins.

Volf considers faith to be a way of life and theology to be an articulation of that way of life.

In many ways, his own theology is an articulation of the way of life he learned from his parents and his nanny.

His father found the God of love—or rather, God found him, as his father would say—in the hell of a communist labor camp.

His mother, a highly spiritually attuned woman with a yearning for God, had a rich and articulate interior life.

His nanny, a noble woman who practiced non-judgmental goodness, led a life marked by joy and hope.

In their own time and under their own constraints, each of them lived the kind of "theology" that Volf seeks to explicate and make plausible for diverse peoples living in today's globalized world.

The key themes of his work—God's unconditional love, justification of the ungodly, love of enemy, forgiveness, and concern for those who suffer—marked their lives as they lived under political oppression and economic depravation and endured life-shattering personal tragedies.

Among the earliest influences on Volf's intellectual development was Peter Kuzmič, an intellectual and educator and his brother-in-law.

He awakened in Volf a love of learning, especially in relation to philosophy.

The first present Kuzmič gave the 15-year-old Volf was Bertrand Russell's Wisdom of the West, an accessible history of Western philosophy (with a discernible anti-Christian bent).

Under Kuzmič's guidance Volf undertook an intensive regimen of theological reading (beginning with religious thinkers like C. S. Lewis and then continuing on to major 20th century theologians, such as Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Joseph Ratzinger).

From the start, Volf's theological thinking developed in dialogue with philosophy.

At first the major critics of religion—especially Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx—figured prominently as dialogue partners; later, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche exerted significant influence.

Volf studied philosophy and classical Greek at the University of Zagreb and theology at Zagreb's Evangelical-Theological Seminary.

He graduated summa cum laude in 1977 with a thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach.

He previously taught at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in his native Osijek, Croatia (1979–80, 1983–90) and Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California (1990–1998).

Having received two advanced degrees under the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, Volf has been described as a "theological bridge builder. The main thrust of his theology is to bring Christian theology to bear on various realms of public life, such as culture, politics, and economics. He often explores dialogues between different groups in the world—such as between denominations, faiths, and ethnic groups.

Volf has served as an advisor for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and for several years co-taught a course at Yale with former British prime minister Tony Blair on globalization.

He is a frequent commentator on religious and cultural issues in popular media outlets such as CNN, NPR, and Al Jazeera.

The same year he started working on his M.A. at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and graduated summa cum laude in 1979.

There he was introduced to liberation and early feminist theologies, both of which heightened his sense of the importance of faith's public dimensions.

During the interim year back in Yugoslavia between his masters and doctoral study, he continued studying philosophy at the University of Belgrade.

From 1980 to 1985 Volf pursued a doctorate at the University of Tübingen, Germany, under the supervision of Jürgen Moltmann (with compulsory military service back in Yugoslavia interrupting his studies from October 1983 to October 1984).

For most of this time he had an ecumenical scholarship from the Diakonisches Werk and lived in the famous Evangelisches Stift (whose former inhabitants included Johannes Kepler, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, and Georg W. F. Hegel).

His dissertation was a theological engagement with Karl Marx' philosophy of labor, and pursuing this project led him to study both German idealist philosophy and English political economy.

He graduated again summa cum laude, and the University of Tübingen awarded him the Leopold Lukas Nachwuchswissenschaftler Preis for his dissertation.

Volf won the 2002 University of Louisville and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Grawemeyer Award in Religion and his 1996 book Exclusion and Embrace was named by Christianity Today as one of the 100 Most Influential Books of the Twentieth Century.