Theology of Gifts and Creation

Miroslav Volf explores agapic love, creation’s goodness, and God’s grief—an alternative to despair, power, and world rejection.

“When a wanted child is born, the immense joy of many parents often renders them mute, but their radiant faces speak of surprised delight: ‘Just look at you! It is so very good that you are here!’ This delight precedes any judgment about the beauty, functionality, or moral rectitude of the child. The child’s sheer existence, the mere fact of it, is ‘very good.’ That’s what I propose God, too, exclaimed, looking at the new-born world. And that unconditional love grounds creation’s existence.”

In this fourth Gifford Lecture, Miroslav Volf contrasts the selective and self-centered love of Ivan Karamazov with the radically inclusive, unconditional love of Father Zosima. Drawing deeply from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Genesis’s creation and flood narratives, and Hannah Arendt’s concept of amor mundi, Volf explores a theology of agapic love: unearned, universal, and enduring. This is the love by which God sees creation as “very good”—not because it is perfect, but because it exists. It’s the love that grieves corruption without destroying it, that sees responsibility as mutual, and that offers the only hope for life in a deeply flawed world. With references to Luther, Nietzsche, and modern visions of power and desire, Volf challenges us to ask what kind of love makes a world, sustains it, and might one day save it. “Love the world,” he insists, “or lose your soul.”

Episode Highlights

1. “The world will either be loved with unconditional love, or it'll not be loved at all.”
2. “Unconditional love abides. If the object of love is in a state that can be celebrated, love rejoices. If it is not, love mourns and takes time to help bring it back to itself.”
3. “Each is responsible for all. Each is guilty for all. Each needs forgiveness from all. Each must forgive all.”
4. “Creation is not primarily sacramental or iconic. It is an object of delight both for humans and for God.”
5. “Agapic love demands nothing from the beloved, though it cares and hopes much for them and for the shared world with them.”

Show Notes

• Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s visions of happiness: pleasure and power as substitutes for love
• “Love as hunger”: the devouring nature of epithemic desire
• Ivan Karamazov’s tragic love for life—selective, gut-level, and self-focused
• “There is still… this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me”
• Father Zosima’s universal love for “every leaf and every ray of God’s light”
• “Love man also in his sin… Love all God’s creation”
• Sonya and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: love as restoration
• “She loved him and stayed with him—not although he murdered, but because he murdered”
• God’s declaration in Genesis: “And look—it was very good”
• Hannah Arendt’s amor mundi—“I want you to be” as pure affirmation
• Creation as gift: “Each is itself by being more than itself”
• Martin Luther on marriage, sex, and delight as godly pleasures
• The flood as hypothetical: divine grief replaces divine destruction
• “It grieved God to his heart”—grief as a form of agapic love
• “Each is responsible for all. Each is guilty for all.”
• Agape over erotic love: not reward and punishment, but faithful presence and care
• “Agapic love demands nothing… It is free, sovereign to love, humble.”
• Closing invitation: to live the life of love, under whatever circumstances

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.