Miroslav Volf - Early Influences and Education

Early Influences and Education

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 constrains, 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, a brilliant 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. 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 Diakonishes Werk and lived in the famous Evangelishes 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 lead 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 Nachwuchwissenschaftler 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. During his Tübingen years, Moltmann became a significant influence, especially the engaged character of Moltmann’s thought and the importance of the Trinity for the shape of social life. Also, while doing a Croatian translation of Martin Luther’s Freedom of the Christian, Volf discovered the young Luther, who from then on shaped his thought in major ways (as discernible most clearly in his book Free of Charge).