Miroslav Volf Quotes
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Love properly understood is God—the font of all creation and the ultimate goal of all desires; God properly understood is love.
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The significance of the crucifixion is not only what God does for us; consistently throughout the New Testament the crucifixion is portrayed as the pattern that we are to follow. It is a model of social behavior toward the other as well as a statement about what God has done for us.
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The difference between justice and forgiveness: To be just is to condemn the fault and, because of the fault, to condemn the doer as well. To forgive is to condemn the fault but to spare the doer. That's what the forgiving God does.
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Christ's indwelling presence has freed us from exclusive orientation toward ourselves and opened us up in two directions: toward God, to receive the good things in faith, and toward our neighbor, to pass them on in love.
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In a way, fraud in business is no different from infidelity in marriage or plagiarism in scholarly work. Even people committed to high moral standards succumb.
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Whatever the reasons, when forgiveness happens it is always a miracle of grace. The obstacles in its way are immense
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Christians believe that there will be a Judgment Day at the end. And it is my belief that on that day justice will be done and there will be a reconciliation between those who have profoundly injured one another takes place.
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To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life.
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Some Jews and Muslims accuse Christians of being idolatrous for believing in the Trinity. My response to both groups is that they fundamentally misunderstand the Christian understanding of the Trinity.
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Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion. One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the Triune God- a "foursome," as it were-- for the Christian God is not a private deity. Communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God. Hence one and the same act of faith places a person into a new relationship both with God and with all others who stand in communion with God.
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God is the utterly loving giver. God doesn't just love. God is love.
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There is no more effective way to radicalize American Muslim youth than for political leaders to make public displays of prejudice against all Muslims. Suspicion will undermine their sense of identification with America and alienate some from both the culture and from politics.
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For Christians, faith is a precious good, the most valuable personal and social resource. When it is left untapped, the common good suffers - not just the particular interests of Christians.
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I do believe that Muslims and Christians and Jews pray to the same God. And yet they understand who God is in significantly different ways.
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Theology is not only about understanding the world; it is about mending the world.
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In good relationships, we are happy to grow as the other person becomes part of us and who we are.
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There is no greater mystery to me than that of light traveling through darkness.
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For many Americans, Osama bin Laden is the paradigmatic Muslim, an absurd conviction for anyone who has lived with Muslims.
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After my engagement with Muslim friends, I pray more than I used to pray. My prayer life has been enriched by my encounter with some Muslims, encouraged by their devotion and also enriched by the ways in which they pray. Have I compromised in this way at all? No, to the contrary, I've gone deeper in my faith and I think my love for God has been deepened and made more intelligent in a sense, more rich by that very encounter.
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If no one remembers a misdeed or names it publically, it remains invisible. To the observer, its victim is not a victim and its perpetrator is not a perpetrator; both are misperceived because the suffering of the one and the violence of the other go unseen. A double injustice occurs-the first when the original deed is done and the second when it disappears.
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If you take the 'love your enemy' out of Christianity, you've 'unChristianed' the Christian faith.
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We lead our lives well when we love God with our whole being and when we love neighbors as we (properly) love ourselves.
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If I say, 'I forgive you,' I have implicitly said you have done something wrong to me. But what forgiveness is at its heart is both saying that justice has been violated and not letting that violation count against the offender.
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Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans and myself from the community of sinners.
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For Christian faith not to be idle in the world, the work of doctors and garbage collectors, business executives and artists, stay-at-home moms or dads and scientists needs to be inserted into Gods story with the world. That story needs to provide the most basic rules by which the game in all these spheres is played.
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Christ came to transform us from never enough people - to more than enough people; that through his poverty we may become rich.
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There is no space in which worship should not take place, no time when it should not occur, and no activity through which it should not happen.
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Prejudice is a form of untruthfulness, and untruthfulness is an insidious form of injustice.
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We will not "forget" so as to be able to rejoice; we will rejoice and therefore let those memories (of wrongs suffered) slip out of our minds!
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If we can exit a relationship, pressure to reconcile lessens; if we must live with those who have wronged us, we are pushed to reconcile.
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