Miroslav Volf critiques ambition, love of status, and superiority, offering a Christ-shaped vision of agapic love and humble glory. “’And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ If you received everything you have as a gift and if your existence as the recipient is also a gift, all ground for boasting is gone. Correspondingly, striving for superiority over others, seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement, is possible only as an existential lie. It is not just a lie that all strivers and boasters tell themselves. More troublingly, that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world-negating form of the world.” In Lecture 5, the final of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a theological and moral vision that critiques the dominant culture of ambition, superiority, and status. Tracing the destructive consequences of Epithumic desire and the relentless “race of honors,” Volf contrasts them with agapic love—God’s self-giving, unconditional love. Drawing from Paul’s Christ hymn in Philippians 2 and philosophical insights from Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Max Scheler, Volf reveals the radical claim that striving for superiority is not merely harmful but fundamentally false. Through Christ’s self-emptying, even to the point of death, we glimpse a redefinition of glory that subverts all worldly hierarchies. The love that saves is the love that descends. In a world ravaged by competition, inequality, and devastation, Volf calls for fierce, humble, and world-affirming love—a love that mends what can be mended, and makes the world home again. **Episode Highlights** 1. “Striving for superiority over others… is possible only as an existential lie.” 2. “Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.” 3. “To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.” 4. “God cancels the standards of the kind of aspiration whose goal is superiority.” 5. “This is neither self-denial nor denial of the world. This is love for the world at work.” **Show Notes** - Agapic love vs. Epithemic desire and self-centered striving - “Striving for superiority… is possible only as an existential lie.” - Paul’s hymn in Philippians 2 and the “race of shame” - Rousseau: striving for superiority gives us “a multitude of bad things” - Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and pursuit of power - Max Scheler: downward love, not upward striving - “Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.” - Self-love as agapic: “I am entirely a gift to myself.” - Raphael’s *Transfiguration* and the chaos below - Demon possession as symbolic of systemic and spiritual powerlessness - “To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.” - “The world is the home of God and humans together.” - God’s love affirms the dignity of even the most unlovable creature - Love as spontaneous overflow, not moral condescension - “Mending what can be mended… mourning with those who mourn and dancing with those who rejoice.” **Production Notes** - This podcast featured Miroslav Volf - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give - Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.
Miroslav Volf critiques ambition, love of status, and superiority, offering a Christ-shaped vision of agapic love and humble glory.
“’And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ If you received everything you have as a gift and if your existence as the recipient is also a gift, all ground for boasting is gone. Correspondingly, striving for superiority over others, seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement, is possible only as an existential lie. It is not just a lie that all strivers and boasters tell themselves. More troublingly, that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world-negating form of the world.”
In Lecture 5, the final of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a theological and moral vision that critiques the dominant culture of ambition, superiority, and status. Tracing the destructive consequences of Epithumic desire and the relentless “race of honors,” Volf contrasts them with agapic love—God’s self-giving, unconditional love. Drawing from Paul’s Christ hymn in Philippians 2 and philosophical insights from Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Max Scheler, Volf reveals the radical claim that striving for superiority is not merely harmful but fundamentally false. Through Christ’s self-emptying, even to the point of death, we glimpse a redefinition of glory that subverts all worldly hierarchies. The love that saves is the love that descends. In a world ravaged by competition, inequality, and devastation, Volf calls for fierce, humble, and world-affirming love—a love that mends what can be mended, and makes the world home again.
Episode Highlights
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically, and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Miroslav Volf: My love for myself should be agapic, such that it both precedes and grounds any of my achievements as I'm part of the world. In loving myself, aga, I relate to the world and to myself with the same kind of love. Kierkegaard puts this idea precisely, and as in many cases, uh, he does it unforgettably. You shall love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbor.
When you love him as yourself, if you received everything you have as a gift, if your existence as a recipient is also a gift, what is the ground for boasting? Correspondingly striving for superiority over others. Seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement is possible only as an existential lie.
It is not just a lie that all strivers for superiority and bolsters tell themselves though, more troublingly that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world denigrating and world rejecting form of the world.
Evan Rosa: If we want to embrace unconditional love for the world, we have to contend with forces that will undermine that love. Just one of those forces is the near constant striving for superiority over others. This relentless pursuit of being better than others permeates our lives and all domains practically from cradle to grave, constantly undermining.
Our intrinsic human value trading it for a never ending game of one-upmanship. In this final 2025 Gifford lecture, Miroslav Volf offers a theological and moral vision that critiques the dominant culture of ambition, superiority, and status tracing the destructive consequences of this relentless race of honors, Miroslav contrasts it with God's self-giving, unconditional love, drawing from the apostle Paul's Christ Hymn, and Philippians two on philosophical insights from Rousseau, Nietzsche and Max Scheler.
Melo makes a radical claim that striving for superiority isn't merely harmful, but it's fundamentally false. If everything you've received is a gift, and if your existence as the recipient is also a gift, then you have no ground for boasting. As the apostle Paul reminds the Corinthians, that means you're striving for superiority is an existential lie.
But the love that saves is the love that descends in a world ravaged by competition, inequality, and devastation. Miroslav calls for a fierce, humble, and world affirming love, a love that mends, what can be mended and makes the world home again. If you're only now joining us for this series, you might consider jumping back to the first lecture and join them in order.
Delivered by Miroslav at the University of Aberdeen for the 2025 Gifford lectures. This series is entitled Amor Mundi, and in it Miroslav considers God's love for the world and what that should mean for our love, our love of God, our love of all creation, and our love for each other. A special thanks to Paul Nimmo and Paula Duncan at the University of Aberdeen for allowing us to run these lectures in our podcast and for the support of the Templeton Religion Trust, which helped make the lectures possible.
Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy this final lecture of Miroslav Volf’s 2025 Gifford lectures, humility and the glory of love, St. Paul and Max Scheler on love and striving for superiority.
Miroslav Volf: I'm grateful for all of you to have come for. That have come to listen to this last, uh, lecture. Um, some of you have seen a different title, uh, than, uh, is the present one. Uh, something about being singed by the By ambition, um, by the Flame of Ambition. Um, actually the proper title is humility, or at least I decided after I've written the lecture actually that the proper title is Humility and Glory of Love.
In the passage from his first epistle, to which I referred in the first lecture, St. John writes, do Not love the world or Things in the world. And if you read only that, he would say, what kind of theologian are you? He then adds. That the love of God is not in those who love the world. In His gospel.
However, he insists not just that God created all things, but that God loves all created things without reservation. A contradiction. The key to reconciling first John, first epistle and his gospel and love for the world is the distinction he makes between things that come from God and things that do not.
Now, two quote unquote things in particular do not come from God, and each is not strictly speaking a thing, but a comprehensive mode of relating to things. These two qualify, therefore, the entire lived world, they give the world a specific form that should not be loved. So in the name of love, we refuse to love in a certain way.
The first thing that isn't from God is a particular form of desire. Epit Theia, as I have argued in lecture two, it places the self and its lack at the center of the self's world. Turning things into mere means. As it moves restlessly from one object to the to the next. Slacking, slacking, slacking, slacking is the right word.
Uh, the self thirst, epit, theia, I said garbages all things. The second thing that isn't from God is pride of possessions. Commenting on this cryptic phrase, AGA Augustine glosses it as a kind of pride in view, is the desire to promote oneself by honors, whether because of riches or because of some power to experience oneself as great, which I think always means greater than others.
On this reading, pride of possession is striving for superiority. In this feature of the world, the self and its thirst are once again at the center of the self's world. In the last lecture, I contrasted Evan's Ivan's, epithelial Love and Sima, unconditional Agapic love. And then noted the Simas love is an echo of God's unconditional love for all creatures.
In this final lecture, I will elaborate on Agapic love for the World by contrasting it with a world negating character of desire for superiority, striving, which is how I define it, not so much to be excellent according to some accepted standard, but to best a competitor like consumption. Broad construed, broadly striving for superiorities everywhere in contemporary world.
It is not just an aspiration of honor hungry individuals, though it is that too, as it evident these days on the world stage, more troublingly. Hmm. I'm not sure it's more troublingly, but uh, in some ways it is more troublingly. It is essential to the inner dynamic of most modern institutions. It is dominant in education and sports, in economy and politics, in entertainment and arts.
In all these domains, one climbs demonstrates oneself to oneself and to others. One's worth by besting the competition. Today we tend to associate striving for superiority with material and cultural progress with improved performance in all domains of life. We have forgotten its darker side, which thinkers like Adam Smit and especially Jean Drag Rousseau highlighted, and as I have learned this very evening, as Spinoza did as apparently as well.
Russo wrote that we owe to striving for superiority what is best and what is worst among men, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosopher, yes, philosophers. Yes. This both end statement gives the impression of a balance between advantages and disadvantages of striving for superiority, but that's not what rusal thought.
The same sentence concludes that we owe to striving for superiority, a multitude of bad things and the small number of good. In this thir. Uh, in the third lecture, I argued that striving for superiority is niche's main way of pursuing his chief. Good. Not the only way, but the main way in enhancing power.
I suggested also that he thinks. That it hinders him from properly affirming, let alone loving almost anything in the world. In the present lecture, I will show how agapic love is not just a co compelling alternative to Epit, Theia desire for goods, epitome desire for goods, but also equally to epitome desire for superiority over others.
I will explain why sin Paul rejected striving for superiority in favor of agapic love and how he exposed boasting that results from striving successful striving for superiority. As an existential lie, mark Schiller will help me to reinforce Paul's position, especially to highlight the nobility of Agapic lie.
Unconditional neighborly love and renunciation of status were two cardinal values of the early Christian ethic. Love of neighbor was more, more is more basic, but the renunciation of status and consequent. I think rejection of striving for superiority is more surprising in Paul's thought, though the two are intimately related, the rejection of striving for superiority follows from the affirmation of unconditional love.
Both are rooted in the example of Christ. We find them seamlessly united in his hymn to Christ. Paul uses the hymn to underwrite the following advice to his congregation in the Philippi. Do nothing out of rivalry or wain vain glory, but in humility regard others is more important than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.
In ancient Rome colonists like Philippi, as in Rome itself. Honor was paramount, an important road to glory. Invol involved coming to occupied ascending order of offices. This was known as Corus on Ray of honors. In reconstructing honor in Roman Philippi, Joseph Hellman proposes that the story of Jesus Christ in Philippians two is about a very different race, about K Pum race of shames referring to Jesus Christ.
Paul writes who though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasp, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness, and being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death. Even death on the cross.
Now, each stanza describes a step in Christ's abdication of status. Heliman explains Jesus descends in puum from equality with God status level one, through taking on of humanity and status of a slave status, level two, to public humiliation of death on the cross status level three. Now I'm gonna make some comments about Philippian, but about kenosis and I, I, I feel like I might be bringing some lousy clothes.
Uh, Kohls to Newcastle. Uh, there are people here who have written on this subject, uh, very eloquent, uh, books and some of them I dipped in, but, uh, not properly read. So my apologies to Paul and Bruce and uh, other folks here. Jesus Christ starts at the very top of the honor scale. He existed in the form of God and was in fact equal to God.
Now, kings and rulers of the period sought to use her equality with God in order to achieve the highest superiority and exercise uncontested rule. In the hymn to Christ. The contrast to such as patient of equality is not that Jesus did not aspire to equality with God. He had no need for this because he actually, he was God in contrast.
The contrast is rather that he sought neither to hold to his equality grasping nor to exploit it for his own benefit. Instead, he gave up the outward appearance of Divinity that would manifest his superiority to humanity and legitimize his rule as God. He became human as human. He took the form of slave as slave.
He was obedient to the point of death, and the death unto which he willingly went was the most shameful execution of all here. Then we have the extreme, and for us, mere mortals, un atail number form of the stance, Paul is exhorting Philippian Christians to take Jesus Christ. The one with unmatched status acted as if even the least important human and most wicked person were superior to him.
He looked not out for their interest rather than his own. Now there's a sharp break in the middle of the Hyn. Christ's will journey downward ended with the death on the cross From then on, obviously he's no longer in the agent of his own story. God the Father is therefore God exalted hymns highly. One common way to understand the link, to understand the therefore between the two parts of the poem is to think of the exaltation as the reward for Christ's self abasement.
The way to get to the highest honor is to run the race of shame instead of as one would expect a raise of honors On this reading, God confers honor on those who do dishonorable service. Nietzche Luke 1814, improved with them. Be indicated. He who humbles himself wants to be exalted. Now the quotation in Jesus is will be exalted, right?
So Nietzche translated that in humility as a mode of self elevation. It seems however, more plausible that with the exaltation of the crucified Christ, his entire journey from not grasping the holding onto equality with God to dying on the cross was declared as exalted. Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point than he had been either before the journey started or after.
He was almost highly exalted. His exaltation, which he's about, his public acknowledgement, is a declaration of the glory of God, God's radically other regarding love. His entire journey then reveals what it means to be the most high being God, who is by definition, free from pressure to outdo anyone in anything.
Christ acts as though the seemingly most insignificant person is more important than he. In their own and limited way. Human beings are empowered to regard one another as though the other were more important than they themselves and to look for the interest of others and not primarily their own. This is neither self-denial nor denial of the world.
This is love for the world at work. In the letter of Philippi, Paul was writing to a church that was willing to go where he was leading them in the church in Corinth, some 350 kilometers to the south. FA Paul was facing outright rebellion against him, his opponents to his opponents, making the crucified Christ the cornerstone of spirituality.
A mounted to an ideology of losers. They wanted to be winners and they prefer the theology of glory to theology of humility at the center of the dispute between the parties, where the radically different assessments of striving for superiority. And behind that dispute was a divergence about the importance of AIC love.
The position against which Paul's adversaries were, were rebelling is the core of what Paul is about, both as a person and apostle, the gospel he proclaims unapologetically and without eloquent wisdom can be some dump in one ignominious phrase. The word of the cross. Christ crucified is a stumbling block to the Jews who demand signs and foolishness to Gentiles who desire wisdom to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, that very weak and foolish Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
And we might add that very Christ is agapic love of God incarnate two kinds of love, two kinds of power. Two kinds of wisdom are clashing, wisdom, power, and love, as understood by the present, fleshy and therefore perishing form of the world and wisdom, power, and love as redefined by the crucified and resurrected Lord.
What from perspective one appears as wisdom, power, and love looks from the other as folly, weakness, and a kind of distortion of love. Whatever God's intentions might have been with the crucifixion of Christ. The Corinthians wanted a God of the resurrection, not Paul's humble God of crucifixion to them.
To make them rethink. Paul appeals to their own social status when they embrace the gospel. Consider your own called brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. For Paul, God's liberation of those who are pushed aside or exploited as inferior in that whom others treat as inferior and who often eternal, internalized such treatment and see themselves and inferior God's treatment of them is pragmatic of how the humble and glorious agapic love works.
As the songs of three prominent women, Miriam, Hannah, and Mary, attest the God of the Bible is on the side of those whom others discard and mistreat as inferior as nobodies. In pulse words, God who loves all equally chooses the things that are not. I'm quoting him now, chooses the things that are not to reduce to nothing.
Things that are things that are being here above all those who make themselves into some something by diminishing others. God's love is unconditional. Agapic moved by the need or by any kind of predicament of the beloved. This is the first half of Paul's case and Corinthians are likely to be with Paul up to this point.
Nodding heads in the congregation here. Applause. Even that's the kind of God worth having. God who puts to shame those who are superior and brings them to nothing the same. God Corinthians thought elevates those who are inferior to the position of superiority, but there's something deeply incongruous, inconsistent.
In the Corinthians position, theirs was an ideology of losers who crave the tables to be turned a stance that spring from Reman. As Nietzche has so powerfully argued, they themselves are strivers for superiority who do not seem to have, in principle anything against inferior rising others. Their love is erotic and epitome, greedily fixed on qualities.
Uh, they have been socialized to regard as marks of superiority precisely at this point. Paul's argument makes a very sharp turn, at least from the Corinthians perspective. Why does God turn somebodies? Those who are according to ordinary standards are generally recognized to be somebodies into nobodies why Paul responds so that no one might boast in the presence of God.
No one means not just those who are deemed superiors and seek to maintain their superiority, but also those who are deemed inferior and aspire to achieve what has come to count as superiority. God's action undercuts. But Louisa Short has called the structure of bragging that motivates striving for superiority at any stratum of social hierarchy.
Now, God does elevate the inferior and does bring down the superior the God of the Hebrew Bible does. God of the gospel does as well. But if God only did that, we might be tempted to think that God is the God of the weak and resentful this nature argued perhaps that God is even their invention. But God does more than that.
God changes the standards according to which infer the inferiority. Superiority scales are set most notably by revealing the crucified Christ to be and his agapic love to be, to be sorry, declaring the crucified Christ with his ic. Love to be the Lord of glory rather than the Roman emperor. And yet. If God only set up new standards of value, God would be the God of radical moralists and strivers for moral superiority.
God in fact, does more than even that paulists in getting rid of the practice of boasting. God cancels the standards of the kind of aspiration whose goal is superiority. However, one construes, what makes people superior? The goal isn't just for tables as they're set to be turned to make the strong weak and weak strong leaving the structure of bragging intact.
The goal isn't even just to have the table set entirely differently, to redefine what it means to be strong so that one can strive for the right kind of superiority. The goal is to have tables that do not need to be turned or reset for each unique member in the social body to have equal ho, honor and receive the same care.
This is exactly what Paul goes on to argue later in that same episode, the kind of reordering of social real is chief effect of the practice of a garic love.
Now, so far I'm explored Paul's argument against striving for super superiority that leans on the character of love as evident in the story of God's saving people mending the world. In one Corinthians four, he delegitimizes boasting by building on character of love, evident in the story of God's creating the world.
His argument is terse but powerful. It takes form of three rhetorical questions. Who makes you different, meaning better from another? What do you have that you did not receive? And then if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? Corinthians boasting implies that each would answer the first question, what makes you something special?
In roughly the way a striver for superiority would, they might answer, I do, I myself, make myself distinguish, but my work and abilities, all of this I do with God's help. Of course, God helps those who helps themselves. Therefore, I merit status that I have. Paul's second question is formulated to invalidate that implied response.
What do you have that you have not received? The expected or at least appropriate responses? Not very much. He, not just them to affirm that everything they are and they have is received. It is theirs above all as a gift, as I have ordered earlier in lecture four. This is what it means to be a creature. To be abiding, aga, loved by God into existence, and that's what it means to exist and have one's identity in a historically extended and planetary network of relations.
Central to Paul's critique of superiority is the command to imitate agapic love of Christ as savior and as creator. Equally important is a kind of a native sense that one is a small part of interconnected world that God created out of love, such that once in entire self is a gift of grace that received existence and love should regulate one's relation not only to others, but I think importantly also to oneself, agapic.
Self-love is not as it may seem a contradiction in terms, it is a mode of relation of the self that co to the self, that corresponds to the very character of the self. As a gift, my life for myself ought not be erotic based on qualities, any achievements. It can, it cannot be erotic. If I, if, if who I think I myself am is not to be an existential lie because I am myself entirely a gift to myself.
My love for myself should be agapic, such that it both precedes and grounds any of my achievements. I am part of the world. As I'm part of the world in loving myself a ally, I relate to the world and to myself with the same kind of love. Kegar puts this idea precisely, and as in many cases, uh, he does it unforgettably.
You shall love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself.
Paul draws then the consequence for striving for superiority and boasting. In the final rhetorical question, it assumes that Corinthians agree with him that they have received from God everything they have. And if you received it, why do you boast as if it. We're not a gift. If you received everything you have as a gift, if your existences as a recipient is also a gift, what is the ground for boasting?
Correspondingly striving for superiority over others. Seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement is possible only as an existential lie. It is not just a lie. That's all strivers for for all. Strivers and boster. Strivers for superiority and bolsters tell themselves though more troublingly that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world denigrating and world rejecting form of the world.
Over to Mark Shaer. We are skipping about 18 centuries as if nothing happened. Mark Shaer is a philosopher but the account of love. He, uh, he places at the foundation of his critique of striving for Superiorities Theological. To formulate it, he draw draws to pause him to Christ. Here that is just at the beginning, his brief critique of striving for superiority.
And then I'll go to his account of love. In the modern world, everyone is potential competitor. All compare themselves with everyone else and all seek to surpass all others in order to ward off the oppressive feeling of inferiority. Striving for superiority. Shaler notes is intrinsically boundless. Every position is always under threat.
A mere transitional point in the universal race of all against all those who have been here for the lecture on Nietzsche will recognize some of these uh, formulations. When superiority over others becomes a dominant value, everything becomes a means to something. The more important superiority itself, as I have suggested in the lecture three, the consequence is a general ization making things and persons inferior.
The worth of the self is systematically eroded because it is indexed to the position that the self occupies on the inferiority, superiority scale. Since I'm always in both an inferior and superior position in regard to someone I often oscillate between aggressive pride and depressive self-loathing.
Next, the worth of all goods and services is eroded as well. The value that each good has in its own right is secondary, tertiary, but its primary value is to rescue me from the sense of inferiority, but that primarily value lasts only as long as my competitors do not possess superior goods. To the extent that I'm striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the goat, the greatest of all time, and I cannot love any good that is, uh, inferior to the goods of others.
Whether that good is my spouse, my child, or anything else. The key for Schiller's push against striving for superiority is what he takes to be the advantage of Christian over Greek accounts of love. Most important is the direction of love's movement. Now, I'm not interested here really, uh, I'm interested here only in Schiller's position, not whether he's gotten especially Greek love correctly.
So it's not a historical study. It's Shaler study for the ancient Greeks. Love is a desire to ascend. In all human relations, there is a lover, and the beloved and the lover is always subordinate to the beloved. The beloved is the object of lover, striving, and the model for the lover's being willing and acting correspondingly.
God is never. Corresponding. God is always only beloved, never the lover. In contrast to God, the entire universe is a great chain, great chain in which the lower always strives for and is attracted by higher, which never turns back, but strives and it's turned upward toward what is still higher. This process continues up to the deity, which itself does not love, but represents the eternally resting and unifying goal of all these manifold movements of love complete in itself.
A perfect being cannot love. If it did, it would only love itself. In Christianity, the movement of love is reversed. The perfect one loves what is imperfect. The highest one loves those who are the lowest. The Messiah comes to the sinners and Republicans. Shaer is drawing here mainly, uh, his contrast mainly from the life of Christ.
But he's reading them through the story, uh, through Paul's hymn to Christ. Commenting on that hymn, he writes an event that is monstrous for the man of antiquity that is absolutely paradoxical. According to his axioms, he's supposed to have taken place in g God spontaneously descended to man, became a servant, and died the bad servants death on the cross.
The event changed radically the nature of God's relation to the world, and therefore also human relation both to God and to the world. God is no longer the internal unmoving goal, like a star for the love of all things moving the world as beloved moves the lover. Now, the very essence of God is to love, is to serve, creating, willing and acting are derived from these original essential qualities.
Consequently, the greatest good is no longer something or some state of affairs, but an act. It is the value of love itself as love, not for its results and achievement. But what kind of love is this? First, it is a love that does not spring from the need alone. It is not epitome. Love. All acts motivated by need, consume themselves in realization of the desired goal.
A point, which as we have heard, sharpen, hower, and niche are made as well. For Shaer love's action does not originate for me need, but rather, love itself is the origin of action and the goal of action. Far from spending itself and disappearing in its goal. Love grows in its action. Second to rational principle, no rational principle regulates who and what ought to be loved, or how much love ought to be bestowed on those who ought to be loved.
Love is not tailored to the worthiness of the beloved. It is not erotic in my sense, but unconditional agapic all are worthy of love. Shayla writes, friends and enemies, the good and the evil, the noble and the common, the cornerstone of sheller's argument is that is the claim that to love to serve, to bend down is God's own essence.
One can serve in many different ways and for many different reasons. One can be also forced to serve as many are even today as well. When one serves freely out of love, Shaller notes two ways in which one can do so. Love that serves can be motivated by self-loathing, surprisingly, by hatred upon song weakness and misery.
Goaded by the sense of inferiority, lovers then help the downtrodden, for instance, in order to acquire a reputation for generosity and strength to show themselves as superior, both to those standing by idly and the downtrodden themselves. In my terminology, such service is Epit Themic. In contrast to the false lovers search for superiority, genuine lovers are not after their own glory.
Instead, they seek to affirm the positive value of those they love, however weak and lowly they might be. That's because genuine love is not predicated on lack, but on abundance. It is a spontaneous overflow. It is not motivated by the need of lovers, not even by the need to free themselves of the burden of their goods.
As we saw was the case with z Tora, love of presupposes. That one is rich enough that one feels, that one is rich enough to freely share one's being and possessions. The genuine lovers aim to do good. Usefulness is not their main concern. They worry in fact of the insulting condescension toward recipients that often accompanies are giving more important than usefulness.
Sheer argues controversially is the act of loving itself. His example is the poor widow who gave to the Temple Treasury two small copper coins, while the rich gave vast sums. Jesus praises her for having put in more than all because she out of her power to his put all she had to live on. Almost nothing can be worth more than vastest of sums.
A strange Mac works because the main value of the gift lies in the loving act itself. It illuminates and no in nobles the loving person. That is also the main, not the soul, but the main benefit, the loving act parts to the beloved instead of underscoring their inadequacies, some give giving does it illuminates their soul by celebrating their inestimable worth.
Sheller's main example is Francis of Assisi kissing the festering wounds of lepers. The kiss enacts the conviction that even nausea nauseating leprosy has not diminished preciousness of the leper. The act of love unsolid either by the plague of inferiority or by the craving for superiority, affirms the dignity of even the most fragile, downtrodden, seemingly unlovable creature, whether human or nonhuman.
Agapic love for the world. It illuminates and celebrates the world. I've come to my conclusion for the lectures as a whole. These lectures have been about the effect of the faith in the God of Jesus Christ, on the lack of um, or the lack thereof on our relationship to the world. Over the course of these lectures hovered the enormous figure of Augustine, his history shaping account of our relation to God and to the world.
Though we should appreciate the world as we would a beautiful engagement drink, we should love truly only the heavenly writer. Augustine's critics mostly agree that turning the world largely into a means for union with God is bad for the world. Some even insist that it ramified 15th centuries later into a deep ecological crisis of today.
I'm kind of skeptical of of this, but let's let it stand for a moment. In the course of these lectures, I have pushed against Augustine's account of the relations between human God and the world. I have argued that the world is not a space from which to flee into eternity, but the domicile to perceive as a gift and to enjoy and love precisely because we love the giver.
I have also argued that Epit Themic lab is not the great world affirming good that we models in particular, have made it to be. Augustine himself points to a personal agent involved. Agent involving aspects of Epit, Toia ass badness. The ineradicable restlessness of our hearts can find no rest in the world.
Nothing like blessedness is possible within the frame of the world alone. He's right about that. I hope that I have shown that also that unleashing our unendingly escalating desires upon the world is bad for the world as well. Much worse in fact than reducing is to a springboard to God. As Hana den has suggested, it triggers a repudiation of the earth more intense than did the faith in the Father in heaven.
As a springboard to God, the world is still God's creation. A beautiful engagement drink to be appreciated, just not loved in its own right, as if it were not a sacrament of the relationship with the love. Even the kind of relationship to the world Augustine does recommend can push against ramification of the world, against letting the void of our once swallow it and the flame of our desire scorch it.
Shortly before writing this lecture, I came across Sunil, uh, Sunil Amri, colleague at Yale book The Burning Earth, a global ecological History of the Past 500 Years. He writes at the beginning, the transformation of the world began with desire, even as most human lives scrambled for subsistence the desire of powerful rulers for symbol of rank and distinction for pearls and pepper, for gold and, uh, silver and sugar, as well as desire for maximum profit in the shortest time.
The body of the book connects astonishing human achievement with ravaged earth and millions of maimed and destroyed human lives in the course of five centuries in the epilogue. Title, road to Repair Amid calls for a stern lum of the kind that m uh, my dyslexia had totally kicked on the, what, what's the first name of Gandhi?
There we go. I can recognize it. I just can't pronounce it right now. The that one exemplified. And Martin Luther King practiced in seeking to build the beloved community derd by many political realists too. Soft King nevertheless insisted that love is exactly what the civil rights struggle demands. In my own ways, I have argued that the, that the damage earth to and all that is in it groans under our rapaciousness, and it demands that we love it.
It ought to be loved into its own dynamic and always incomplete wholeness. Not mainly because its revenge is fierce, which is true too, but because its value is inestimable. A more apt image for the world. And Augustine's beautiful ring is the image of home, the world as the home of God and humans together in, as I noted in lecture core, that vision was originally articulated between the lines.
In the first book of the Hebrew Bible, the world God created bears the subtle, subtle, but unmistakable marks of a temple. We generally think of a temple as demarcated holy space within the secular environment. In Genesis, the whole creation is the temple. The two last chapters of of the last book of the Christian Bible sketch, an intensified version of this image.
The entirety of the world has become holy. In fact, it has become holy of holies in virtue of God's presence in it. But what about the world between the Premortal beginning and post historical ending between Genesis and Revelation 21 and 22? Two gospel stories one told after another, but partly with partly concurrent action.
Illustrate. Well, the way to think about our relation to the world for which I was arguing in these lectures, I'm referring to the story of Christ's transfiguration and the story of a boy possessed by an evil spirit. In what was for centuries considered to be the most famous painting in the West, Raphael portrayed these two stories on a single vertical canvas split in the middle, the mounted top scene of transfiguration above the scene of demon possession below.
In the birth of tragedy, Nietzche saw the top panel apollonian in the top panel Apollon world of illusion. And in the bottom one, the chaotic unis world that gave rise to the dark wisdom of the ancient Greek Suter Solens, that it is best not to have been born, and if one has been born to die young. In Rafael's painting.
There indeed is something dreamy about the top of the mountain world. Transfigured Jesus robed in extraterrestrial white with eyes turned upward is flanked on each side by Moses in Aya, and the wind from below is making all three levitate against the bar. Bright cloud of divine presence. Innies reading.
The scene was designed to divert our minds from the cows below so that we can sit quietly in our rock rocking rowboat in the mid sea, absorbed in contemplation. Now, apostle Peter, the Apostle Peter, witnessing Christ transfiguration experiences the situation in a kind of simplified nietzche lines. He wants the dream to last and not quite knowing what he was saying.
Proposes to make dwellings on the mountaintop. The way Rafael paints the seed, however, pushes against the instinct like Peters in niches. You can't see it on the, in the painting, but if you look at the painting, I'm told because I actually haven't looked at him in this fashion at all. So trust my colleagues, John Hare, who I'm not sure from whom he got, uh, this idea, but, uh, I trust him.
So, um,
EZ we are looking the painting, it is as though we are level with each panel. We are at the same time in transcendent glory and in earthly cows and despair. Rafael painted two persons from the troubled crowd below, pointing toward the mountaintop. The source as gurta put it, of effective power and sucker in the gospel story.
However, it is not just that these two scenes and interacting with one another, the problem below, and the solution above which is true, but not just that suffering and bewilderment are in one way also inside the scene of glory. Moses, a nation builder and law giver is also the great, the reluctant liberator.
His image evokes the long years of Israel's suppression and slavery as well. Elijah is both despairing and triumphant prophet who stood against royal overreach and castigated the false, false cult of fertility. Most importantly, there is the heavenly voice addressing Peter James and John declaring This is my son, the beloved.
Listen to him. Strong and contradictory. Motions are associated with beloved sons in the Hebrew Bible, tenderness, terror, suffering, hope. Isaac was the beloved son who almost got crucified. Sorry, sacrificed. I'm going to the son who is going to be crucified. Sacrificed. Joseph too was beloved and considered himself lucky to him, been sold into slavery rather than robbed of life.
Each of them in his own way, face death, and with them resurrected. So the voice is not just announcing Jesus oneness with God, that this is the son. Equally, significantly. It implies that the path to salvation is not power and glory, but suffering. Agapic love. In the scene just preceding transfiguration, Jesus was teaching about just such path of suffering, love, and above all about salvation through his own suffering and also suffering of his disciples, mending the world.
The divine voice underscores that teaching. Listen to him. The horrors are not just below. They're also in Nietzsche calls illusions. They are what the mountaintop experience is fundamentally about the God of unconditional love, who grieved over possible destruction of the world. In Genesis six is the God who gets crucified to save the world from its captivity to sin.
It was the cows below, not the illusion above that interested nietzche the most. It was, it symbolized for him.
The nature of the world, essentially chaotic, impervious to any fundamental reform along moral lines. In his view, life that's worth living will involve the embrace of cows and the will to power within it for sharpen power. The scene below would not so much symbolize cows as the utter incapacity to avoid suffering a world we do best to hate and will.
Its nothingness, chop, andhow and nie are mistaken in the res, res, respective accounts of the world and our relation to it. At least they're mistaken from the perspective of the faith in the God of Jesus Christ. Still, there is something very dark about the world in which God gets crucified, in which God is killed for loving the world.
At the bottom half of Rafael's painting we see underscored that it would be a mistake to minimize cows and to think that we can manage it with mere moral persuasion and social reform echoes of doky. The boy possessed by demon is only one of many instances of demon possession in Mark Demon. Possession is of, of course, not a medical diagnosis, but a description of an experienced phenomenon.
The boy was utterly in the power of murderously destructive alien force. His father was in despair, unable to help him. Jesus disciples too were impotent facing an illness that had afflicted the boy. Since early childhood, within the good creation, a chaotic power has broken loose and made life nearly impossible.
The father who brings the boy to the disciples and the disciples who try but fail to heal him, love him in their way, aga impotently their actions, say, I want you to be and I want you to be well. I will not break faith with. Even if it is Jesus who heals the boy, the father and the disciples are part of the community of care.
Talk of demon manic, demonic possessions is ancient, but the feeling of being in the grip of power we cannot control is very much still with us, all our sophisticated technologies designed to help, not withstanding indeed, partly because of these same technologies. It is so in private lives, we are often in the grip of an uncontrollable power, but we experience powerlessness also in systemic inertia of technological development, economy, and politics.
We often feel that we live in a runaway world with no escape ramp in sight. Another insistence, another instance of possession in Mark is a man from Garza. He lived among the tombs naked in his fierce and his fierce power was such that he could not be restrained for harming himself, as he told that Jesus he was possessed by Allegion.
Some interpreters, new Testament scholar suggest that he symbolically represents that his Damon possession symbolically represents occupying power of Rome against which the native population was helpless. Jesus healed the man as he healed the boy. Rome's oppression remained so did illnesses and incapacities of many individuals he encountered.
Still in healing some Jesus planted seeds of a new form of the world. In the old one,
Amor mue love for the world By practicing fierce, unconditional love, we should join God in keeping unbreakable faith with a world that so stubbornly, resists being healed, mending what can be mended, improving what can be improved, mourning with those who mourn and dancing with those who rejoice. Thank you very much
Evan Rosa: for the life of the world as a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Miroslav Volf production assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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