Christian Witness in Turbulent Places / Miroslav Volf with Mike Cosper

Mike Cosper, host of Cultivated, a podcast about faith and work, interviews Miroslav Volf about his vocation as theologian. They discuss Miroslav's youth in Croatia and his family's influence on his spirituality and theology, as well as the urgent need for faithful witness in our turbulent times. Original air date: November 2, 2020. 

Show Notes

• “I had parents who were extraordinary spiritual human beings, not in a sense that they were total exemplars of holiness, but there was kind of an honesty about the spiritual life”
• His father “experienced God’s love in the midst of Hell” on a socialist death march
• “A vivid representation of what faith can do, what God can do”
• Volf’s early experience of the Church via his father’s ministry
• “Oh, what an incredible thing. To devote one’s life to helping people who are so much on the margins”
• Volf traveled as a translator: “I realized there that one could be cool and the believer as well”
• “To my shame and chagrin, it's the being possible to be cool and a believer that opened up space for me to enter. And then slowly I was getting deeper into faith”
• “How am I supposed to behave and how should I speak to these people? That made it a little theologian in me”
• “I haven't regretted a single time, single date, single hour, the choice that I've made”
• He studied with Moltmann in graduate school 
• “We became friends and he proved very important in my life”
• “He said to me, Miroslav, take something that moves people and shine the light of the Gospel on it”
• While teaching at Fuller, he started to think about Exclusion and Embrace
• Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, a Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
• The fall of the Berlin Wall, how to address a war about religious identity? 
• Luke 15:11-32, The Prodigal Son, family, community, and belonging
• Forgiveness, victimization, and community
• The importance of boundaries: “they define who we are”
• The political division underneath the racial division, are we able to build bridges? 
• Can we enter into the position of the other? 
• Hannah Arendt - “forgiveness is the only way to reverse the flow of history” 
• How we deal with forgiveness – we must name the wrong as wrong 
• “Trump is an embodiment of paganism” - Volf 
• Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan
• Pagans don’t like to sacrifice for others, Trump thinks: ‘I do what benefits me ‘
• “Trump’s God is my Devil” –Volf 
• Evangelical paganism
• Is this new or is this an unmasking?
• “The problem is not that people commit sin. It's the pretense of holiness when there's exactly otherwise happening”
• “Jesus has become a moral stranger to us, everything that mattered to him seems not to matter to us, and everything that matters to us as a culture seems not to have been important to him”
• Reclaiming morality 

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Introduction from Cultivated, featured on Christianity Today

(Click here to listen on ChristianityToday.com.)

Miroslav Volf’s writing is considered some of the most significant theological work of the last century. He was born into a family of Pentecostal Christians in Croatia, under oppressive Communist rule, and a “minority of a minority” (as he would later describe it). For almost four decades, his writing has been a testament to the power of the gospel for reunification and healing in the aftermath of war and political turmoil, as well as a vision for human flourishing in an experience of Trinitarian love.

On this episode, we talk about his emergence as a theologian, the development of his work, and his perspective on the turbulent times we’re experiencing today.

Cultivated is a production of Christianity Today.

This episode was produced by Mike Cosper

It was edited by Mark Owens.

Theme song is by Roman Candle

Music is by Dan Phelps and Roman Candle