Family and Early Life
Miroslav Volf was born on September 25, 1956, in Osijek, Croatia, which was then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A 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 Roman Catholic and Novi Sad predominantly 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 the state was openly hostile to all religious expression; Christian ministers were particularly suspect and carefully monitored. Raised in a home marked by a deep and articulate faith, Volf was formed in a Christianity that represented a form of life foreign to the dominant culture around him. As Volf later recalled about his childhood, 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 and is a salutary way of life. This was the beginning of his journey as a theologian. The experience engendered his abiding conviction that living and working on the margins may be an advantage for a theologian of a faith that itself was born on the margins.
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