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. 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. 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.
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. Volf later recalled about his childhood that 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.
Early influences and education
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. The same year he started working on his M.A. at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and graduated summa cum laude in 1979. 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 Evangelisches Stift. His dissertation was a theological engagement with Karl Marx's 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.
In 1989 he received a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and started working on his Habilitation (a post-doctoral degree required by many continental European universities for a call to a professorship). The Habilitation was on "Trinity and Communion", a topic stimulated by Volf's long standing involvement in the official dialogue between the Vatican's Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the international Pentecostal movement. He was awarded this degree in 1994.
In 1979, Volf began his teaching career as a lecturer in systematic theology at his alma mater in Croatia. Doctoral studies and compulsory military service interrupted his regular teaching, though he continued to offer intensive courses at the same institution. After submitting his doctoral dissertation, Volf returned to full-time teaching. From 1984 until 1991 he served as professor of systematic theology at the Evangelical-Theological Seminary, which had by then moved to his native Osijek.
In 1991, Volf took a position as an Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller, succeeding his former teacher at that institution, Paul King Jewett. He remained in this position until 1997 when Fuller appointed him to a full professorship. Throughout this time, he continued to teach in Osijek, as his contract with Fuller included provisions for teaching two courses every year in Croatia. In 1998 Volf took the position of Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut.
Since Volf considers theology to be an articulation of a way of life, his theological writing is marked by a sense of the unity between systematic theology and biblical interpretation, between dogmatics and ethics, and between what is called "church theology" (e.g., Karl Barth and, later, Stanley Hauerwas) and "political/public theology" (e.g., Jürgen Moltmann and David Tracy). His contributions to theology have for the most part been topical; he has written on human work, the nature of Christian community, the problem of otherness, violence and reconciliation, the question of memory, and the public role of faith, to name a few issues. But in all his writings, he sought to bring the integrated whole of Christian convictions to bear on the topics at hand.
The systematic contours of Volf's theology are most clearly visible in Free of Charge. A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, commissioned the book as his 2006 Lent Book. Its immediate themes are giving and forgiving as two chief modes of grace, but the book is an accessible introduction and invitation to the Christian faith. In this work, the central themes of Volf's work that receive more in depth treatment in other texts—God as unconditional love, the trinitarian nature of God, creation as gift, Christ's death on the cross for the ungodly, justification by faith and communal nature of Christian life, love of enemy and care for the downtrodden, reconciliation and forgiveness, and hope for a world of love—come together into a unity. Because it contains frequent reflections on concrete experiences, the book makes visible that Volf's theology both grows out of and leads to a life of faith. Of all his books, Free of Charge bears the strongest mark of the young Martin Luther's influence.
The first phase of Volf's academic work began with his dissertation and continued through the eighties. His concern then was the relationship between Christian faith and the economy, and in particular the nature and purpose of human everyday work. In his dissertation he engaged Karl Marx and it was published in an abbreviated form as Zukunft der Arbeit—Arbeit der Zukunft: Der Marxsche Arbeitsbegriff und seine theologische Wertung (1988), making a contribution not just to a critical theological evaluation on Marx's philosophy, but also to Marx studies (notably with regard to the influence of Feuerbach on Marx' theory of economic alienation and affinities between the late Fichte's ideas and Marx' conceptualization of communist society).
In the process of writing the dissertation, Volf formulated an alternative theology of work, primarily situated in ecclesiology and eschatology, rather than in the doctrine of creation or of salvation, and associated with the Third, rather than the First or Second person of the Trinity. Volf breaks with the long tradition of Protestant thinking about work as "vocation" (both Luther and Calvin, as well as Puritans and later theologians, including Karl Barth, advocated it), and proposes "charisma" as the central theological category with the help of which human work is to be understood. This line of thinking provides a flexible theological account of work, suited for dynamic contemporary societies in which people engage in multiple kinds of work over the course of a life-time, and better coordinated with the multiplicity of ministries that each person can have in the church. Volf published the new, pneumatological account of work in Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (1991).