Miroslav Volf on how to rightly love a radically ambivalent world. “The world, our planetary home, certainly needs to be changed, improved. But what it needs even more is to be rightly loved.” Miroslav Volf begins his 2025 Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen with a provocative theological inquiry: What difference does belief in God make for our relationship to the world? Drawing deeply from Nietzsche’s “death of God,” Schopenhauer’s despair, and Hannah Arendt’s vision of *amor mundi*, Volf explores the ambivalence of modern life—its beauty and horror, its resonance and alienation. Can we truly love the world, even amidst its chaos and collapse? Can a belief in the God of Jesus Christ provide motivation to love—not as appetite or utility, but as radical, unconditional affirmation? Volf suggests that faith offers not a retreat from reality, but an anchor amid its disorder—a trust that enables us to hope, even when the world’s goodness seems impossible. This first lecture challenges us to consider the character of our relationship to the world, between atheism and theism, critique and love. **Episode Highlights** 1. “The world, our planetary home, certainly needs to be changed, improved. But what it needs even more is to be rightly loved.” 2. “Resonance seems both indispensable and insufficient. But what should supplement it? What should underpin it?” 3. “Our love for that lived world is what these lectures are about.” 4. “We can reject and hate one form of the world because we love the world as such.” 5. “Though God is fully alive… we often find the same God asleep when our boats are about to capsize.” **Helpful Links and References** - [Resonance by Hartmut Rosa](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Resonance%3A+A+Sociology+of+Our+Relationship+to+the+World-p-9781509519927) - [The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo29137972.html) - [This Life by Martin Hägglund](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/248368/this-life-by-martin-hagglund/) - [The Home of God by Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz](https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/the-home-of-god/404972) - [The City of God by Augustine](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1201.htm) - [Divine Comedy by Dante](https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/) **Show Notes** - Paul Nimmo introduces the Gifford Lectures and Miroslav Volf’s theme - Volf begins with gratitude and scope: belief in God and our world - Introduces Nietzsche's “death of God” as cultural metaphor - Frames plausibility vs. desirability of God's existence - Introduces Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance - Problem: resonance is not enough; what underpins motivation to care? - Introduces *amor mundi* as thematic direction of the lectures - Contrasts Marx’s atheism and human liberation with Nietzsche’s nihilism - Analyzes Dante and Beatrice in Hägglund’s *This Life* - Distinguishes between “world” and “form of the world” - Uses cruise ship metaphor to critique modern life’s ambivalence - Discusses Augustine, Hannah Arendt, and *The Home of God* - Reflections on divine providence and theodicy - Biblical images: flood, exile, and the sleeping God - Ends with preview of next lectures on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche - Let me know if you'd like episode-specific artwork prompts, promotional copy for social media, or a transcript excerpt formatted for publication. **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 on how to rightly love a radically ambivalent world.
“The world, our planetary home, certainly needs to be changed, improved. But what it needs even more is to be rightly loved.”
Miroslav Volf begins his 2025 Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen with a provocative theological inquiry: What difference does belief in God make for our relationship to the world? Drawing deeply from Nietzsche’s “death of God,” Schopenhauer’s despair, and Hannah Arendt’s vision of amor mundi, Volf explores the ambivalence of modern life—its beauty and horror, its resonance and alienation. Can we truly love the world, even amidst its chaos and collapse? Can a belief in the God of Jesus Christ provide motivation to love—not as appetite or utility, but as radical, unconditional affirmation? Volf suggests that faith offers not a retreat from reality, but an anchor amid its disorder—a trust that enables us to hope, even when the world’s goodness seems impossible. This first lecture challenges us to consider the character of our relationship to the world, between atheism and theism, critique and love.
Episode Highlights
Helpful Links and References
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: As God loves the world, even a wayward world with unspeakable horrors, so should we, and with a love that is analogous to Gods amor, Mundi, underwritten and fed by Amor Dei. Loving the world by loving the love that God is and that God does. What difference, if any, would that make for the character of our relationship to the world?
It is a powerful motivation to love and keep unbreakable faith with just such an ambivalent world, chaotic and ordered life-giving and life destroying a thing of exquisite beauty and a bone chilling precarity trust in God enables us also to acknowledge without flinching the seeming nonsensically of the world, and to have a rolled up sleeves kind of hope even.
When what we hope for is shrouded in the darkness of seeming impossibility.
Evan Rosa: Our world, the planet itself, all sentient life, but especially humanity needs our care. But can we love it well enough to care for it? And perhaps a surprising question is God a hindrance to care for the world or perhaps its foundation. This past May Miroslav Volf took on these questions. In the first of five lectures he delivered at the University of Aberdeen for the 2025 Gifford lectures, his lecture series entitled Amor Mundi, considered Sincerely, God's Love for the world and what that should mean for our love of the world, inclusive of God.
Creation and even each other. In this episode, we're airing the first of these five lectures, and over the next month thereafter, we'll be sharing the audio of each of these lectures with you. Special thanks to Paul Nimmo and Paula Duncan at the University of Aberdeen for allowing us to run these and for the support of the Templeton Religion Trust, which helped make the lectures possible.
We hope you enjoy listening, and here's the first of Miroslav Volf's Gifford lectures unchanged from its son. I'm Amor mundi between theism and atheism
Paul Nimmo: Members of the university, friends and esteemed guests.
A warm welcome to this, the first of our 2025 series of Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen. My name is Paul Nimmo, and I hold the King's Chair of Systematic Theology here in the Department of Divinity. I also chair the Gifford Lectures Committee.
The Gifford Lectures are named after the prominent Scottish advocate and judge Lord Adam Gifford, who died in 1887.
In his will, he generously provided for a series of lectures to be held at the four ancient universities of Scotland Aberdeen,
Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews.
These lectures were aimed at promoting, advancing, teaching and diffusing the study of natural theology in the widest sense of that term.
Since 1888, the Gifford Lectures have become one of the most renowned public intellectual events in the world in the fields of theology,
philosophy, history and religion. Indeed.
To hear a list of those who have given Gifford Lectures here in Aberdeen alone is to
hear a roll call of some of the finest minds in those disciplines over recent times.
Names include Etienne Gilson, Karl Barth, Michael Polanyi, Paul Tillich, Hannah Arendt, Richard Swinburne,
Jaroslav Pelikan, Eleonore Stump, Alister McGrath, Sarah Coakley, Mona Siddiqui, David Novak, and N.T. Wright and Miri Rubin.
For the Gifford Lectures of this spring of 2025, for which we are deeply grateful to have the support of the Templeton Religion Trust.
We are honoured to add a further distinguished name to our roster of Aberdeen Gifford Lecturers.
Miroslav Volf is the Henry B Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School,
and the founder and director of the Yale Centre for Faith and Culture.
Educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany,
he regularly gives lectures around the world and has been a leader in international interfaith
dialogues and a participant in the Global Agenda Council on Values of the World Economic Forum.
He has written or edited more than two dozen books, and his work has been featured in The Washington Post.
Christian Century, Christianity Today, and Sojourners, among many other outlets.
His book Exclusion and Embrace was awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Religion and
named one of Christianity Today's 100 Most Important Religious Books of the 20th century.
Insights from his popular Yale College course
Life Worth Living can be found in his co-authored work, Life Worth Living A Guide to What Matters Most.
And his latest publication, released earlier this year, is The Cost of Ambition:
How striving to be better than others makes us worse.
Professor Volf, we are thrilled that in your busy schedule,
you have been able to make time this spring to come to Aberdeen to deliver a series of
Gifford Lectures entitled Amor Mundi: God and the Character of Our Relation to the world.
It is with great pleasure that I now invite you to the podium to deliver your first Gifford Lecture, entitled: "Unchained from Our Sun":
Amor mundi between atheism and theism.
Welcome. [APPLAUSE]
Miroslav Volf: Professor Nimmo.
Members of the Gifford Lectures Committee. Ladies and gentlemen.
Friends. I stand here before you with a deep sense of gratitude.
Gratitude to the members of the Gifford Lectures Committee for bestowing on me
the honour of being a 2025 Gifford Lecture in the wonderful city of Aberdeen,
and at its great an ancient university.
I'm grateful to Professor Nimmo for these very kind words of introduction, as well as for all the work that he,
together with his assistant Paula Duncan, have done in order to make this event possible.
I'm grateful to the staff of the Yale Centre for Faith and culture for the support they provided me as I was preparing the lectures,
especially to Ryan McAnnally-Linz, my close collaborator, to Karin Fransen, who is here,
my assistant and unofficial editor. To Evan Rosa, who has prepared the slides that you will see,
and above all, to Taylor Craig, who in the course of the past three years has spent countless hours working as my research assistant.
He, too, will be here a little bit later. I'm grateful to the members of the advisory board of the Yale Centre for Faith Culture,
not just for their financial support, but for their lively interest in the mission of the centre.
Some of them, led by the chair William Cross, who is here, were even able to come here to hear these lectures in person.
Finally, I'm grateful to my wife, Jessica, who had to bear with the distraction of writing - my distraction of writing
these lectures with my forgetfulness and sloppiness in my domestic duties,
and also to my seven year old daughter Mira, who already forgave me for missing her half birthday.
Yes, we celebrate those. And it was on Saturday.
Uh, but she will exact, uh, certain payment for this. [LAUGHS]
So it's not quite forgiveness. I'm very much aware that there are,
there is unfairness in my expressions of gratitude here.
Many, many to whom I owe much, very much, have not been mentioned at all. According to my theory of merit,
and if you come to the lecture five, you will get a little bit sense of it with this theory of merit,
even if I took the whole hour to name all those who contributed for the fact that I'm standing here today, I would still fail to mention many.
But you have not come here to find out who are all the people to whom I owe gratitude, but to hear lectures to which unnamed they have contributed.
Speaking of the death of God, Nietzsche said "there has never been a greater deed."
At the centre of these lectures, and of Nietzsche's own philosophy,
are the effects on our relationship to the world of both the death of God and God's aliveness.
The topic is crucially important, but impossibly broad.
I will narrow it by focusing on three 19th century thinkers to whom the issue was central Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I come to this exploration with a sense of preciousness, precarity and brokenness of the world, and in search of strong motivation to care for it.
Even to love our planetary home.
For Nietzsche, the death of God is a metaphor for a cultural phenomenon,
a key feature of modernity, namely the fact that for many people in today, belief in God has ceased to be believable.
Now, I'm a theologian so concerned with the plausibility of the belief in God is part of my job description.
I will leave that concern here aside and explore only some implications of a hypothetical:
If God does exist, specifically, if the God of Jesus Christ, who is the God of Abraham and God of Moses, does exist,
what difference, if any, would that make for the character of our relationship to the world? Put slightly differently,
my concern here is the desirability of belief in God.
For if we were convinced that belief in God is undesirable, the badness of God -
if God's undesirable, then must be bad, right? - will then eat away at the plausibility of God's existence.
Hence my interest here in the effects of the belief and unbelief in God.
Now, as the subtitle of these lectures indicate, I am exploring the effects of the belief in God on our relationship to the world.
This too seems an immodestly broad domain of inquiry,
especially in our time when micro problems of micro domains dominate many intellectual endeavours.
And yet problems of planetary proportions bedevil each of our lives.
In fact, none of us can understand well even some of our most intimate desires without considering processes of global proportions.
The whole and the part have never been more intertwined than they are today.
A Christian theologian has another reason to attend to the whole, to the entire world.
For the one God is by definition both the God of every quark and lepton, and the God of the whole cosmos.
It is not possible to understand well God's relation to any entity without considering God's relation to the whole world and the other way around.
To be a monotheist is to be committed to a certain kind of relationship to each and
to all. My question is the nature of that relationship.
Now, the original inspiration for these lectures came from Hartmut Rosa's magisterial book 'Resonance: Sociology of Our Relationship to the World.'
The book analyses compellingly a pervasive problem most of us sense in many domains of our lives.
The world has become mute for us because our ways of organising life and our ways of living
have reduced everything that surrounds us to mere things we manipulate to serve our ends.
A technical way of describing such a characteristically modern relation to the world is "alienation from the world,
on account of world's systemic reification."
Thingification is sometimes the term that is used.
Our experience of the world is akin to that of an estranged couple who, for whatever reason, must continue to live together,
each uncomfortably dependent on the other, using the other's means as a means to their ends,
and each at the best indifferent and at worst hostile to the other.
In response to this pervasive alienation, Rosa proposed the non utilitarian idea of resonance.
It's the kind of relation to others, both animate and inanimate, in which we can hear the other - a landscape, a city square, an animal,
a person - speak to us in which the other moves us to respond, and we are changed, enriched in the process, even if ever so slightly.
Though, we can create conditions of resonance, resonance itself is never fully under our control.
When it happens, we, ourselves and the world of drab or glitzy things becomes radiant.
We can resonate with many aspects of the world.
The sun's ray in the green forest. Morally admirable deed.
The sublimity of volcano's eruption.
Provided we let those aspects of the world take us on the journey of genuine encounter.
But how do we relate to what is hideous?
What is ghastly, detestable in the world?
Can we resonate with the world while fully alert to the accelerated destruction of many species, for instance?
Resonance would not only be inappropriate, it might be impossible.
Now, Rosa invites us to the transformative work of expanding the domains and spaces of resonance.
But what will motivate the labour of making the world a resonant place when resonance pay off,
of working hard on even a few intimate relationships is often doesn't work, doesn't work.
It's not worth its effort.
And what do we do if it turns out the seemingly unalterable features of our lives economic and political systems, pervasive cultural habits,
stubborn individual propensities thwart all of our individual and collective attempts as improving conditions of resonance.
Is a basic mode of relating to the world,
resonance seems both indispensable and insufficient, but what should supplement it?
What should underpin it? The title of these lectures sums up the answer which I will sketch in lecture four.
Amor mundi. We should love this ineradicably ambivalent world.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps scandalously, for many atheists and theists alike,
the basic form of which my argument will take is this: as God loves the world, even the wayward world with unspeakable horrors
so should we, and with a love that is analogous to God's?
Amor Mundi, underwritten and fed, by amor dei.
Loving the world by loving the love that God is and that God does.
In the book The Home of God, written by with, uh, Ryan McAnally-Linz,
I argued that God's purpose in creating the world is to make it the joint home of God and all God's creatures.
That book was about the story of redemption, culminating in the vision of this worldly New Jerusalem.
The present lectures are about the kind of relationship to the world required to live as a community of creation, in the world, as our common home.
Now, this idea of amor mundi may be surprising, but it is not new, and the way I'm using
the phrase goes back to Hannah Arendt.
I think first time she wrote about it is in the Gifford Lectures of 1972.
Uh, but certainly, there it plays, a significant, uh, uh, spatially minimal but nonetheless significant role.
She, of course, took it from Augustine and he from the first Epistle of John, though
she affirmed love for the world rather than rejecting it, as Saint John and Augustine do.
Now Arendt is famous for insisting in her book the Human Condition, that love has nothing to do with the world, that it is unworldly.
But there',s there she is referring to romantic, passionate love on the margins, on the other hand of her work,
She writes about another kind of love which is emphatically worldly.
She describes it as amo: volo ut sis.
I love you. I want you to be.
This kind of love is an unconditional affirmation of the sheer existence of humans, through which they become members of a mutually shared world.
For her, such love is basic to other ways we relate to humans, for instance, for treating them as bearers of inalienable rights.
I will return to the way she motivates this kind of love for the world in the lecture
four. She restricted amor mundi to the to the world of humans.
However, we should expand it, I think, to include all creatures.
Now, I imagine that many will experience my thesis that we should love the world unconditionally,
the way we experience fireworks going a moment or two after the bang of initial statement,
a break into many questions. What does love mean here?
How can it have world as its object and the horrors? Should we
love them too? I will get to these questions in lectures four and five.
For now, it is important to note that my theme is our emotional stance toward the world and our commitment to keep faith with it, no matter what.
It is not the many ways we need to change the world. The world,
our planetary home certainly needs to be changed, improved, but what it needs even more is to be rightly loved.
Before I continue, three brief comments on one key word in the title: world.
First world here refers to everything that is not God, the entire universe, and any parallel universe,
if such exist, though, I will focus more narrowly on our planet.
God is the creator. [LAUGHS] It's narrowed,
right? God is the creator.
And as the prologue to John's Gospel says, all things are creatures.
Each different creature and all equally creatures.
Needless to say, humans too, are squarely on the side of creatures and late comers,
comers among them at that. We have never existed and cannot exist without the world.
World can exist and has existed for billions of years without us.
Second, we humans are part of the world, of that part of the world which in a unique way relates to the world, including ourselves.
When we humans appear, we begin to leave traces and increasingly deep and deadly lacerations on the world.
And the world becomes for us and for other sentient beings, what it has not been without us.
We, experiencing
and acting subjects, and the world, as a mesh of sentient and insentient beings
Our kind of two poles, —
the ‘self-pole’ and ‘world pole,’ so to speak — of the relationship that
constitute mutually them.
In the course of history, we are creating and recreating what one can call a lived world.
Our love for that lived world is what these lectures are about.
Third comment about the world. The lived world comes always in what I will call a form of the world.
To illustrate what I mean by a form of the world, let me invoke Karl Marx and the way he thought about the world.
I simplify. First there is base: economy,
the entire way we go about reproducing material life, the instruments of production, and the relations of people in production.
Then there is a superstructure: culture that, at least in part, serves to articulate and legitimate a given way of reproducing material life.
Following Charles Taylor today, we tend to call this social imaginary.
Finally, there's the way in which an individual experiences the world.
It is uniquely their own, while in part shaped by both the base and the superstructure.
So three dimensions material, cultural and very personal influence each other and in the way we understand them, make up a given form of the world.
Now, if you are a Milton Friedman kind of capitalist, you will reject key elements of Marxian form of the world.
You will repudiate social ownership of means of production and insist on sovereignty of private property.
You will want to base distribution of benefits on merit, rather than on the principle,
from each according to their ability and to each according to their need.
And in opposition to Marx, you might think that the sense of possessing in no way distorts genuinely human experience of the world.
If, on the other hand, you are Marxian kind of socialist, you will think that Friedman's form of the world is so bad that it must be overthrown.
The two perspectives are radically opposed to one another.
This is the clash between the capitalist and socialist over the right form of the world,
not over the love for the world in my sense, but over the right form of the world.
In the New Testament, one finds a roughly analogous contrast.
In Saint Paul's writings, there is an imperial form of the world with its god,
its own set of material and social relations, its own kinds of rulers, its own wisdom and glory.
The form of the world which he insists is passing away.
There's also the coming form of the world, with its own wisdom and glory, visible now in the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ.
What counts as wisdom and glory in one form of the world counts is foolishness and shame in the other.
Love, for one implies rejection of the other.
Now, this distinction between the world as such and the form of the world can keep confusion at bay.
We can reject, possibly even hate, one form the world of the world without rejecting the world as such.
Indeed, we can reject and hate one form of the world because we love the world as such and desire to make, for it to have a particular form.
Now, equally importantly, the distinction between the world such and the given form of the world is the cosmological
presupposition of the kind of love toward the world that is more than mere appetite,
mere appetite being my love for flourless chocolate cake, more than attraction to some intrinsic work like my love for Zimbabwean Shona art.
It's a kind of love that is unconditional attachment and care, which even the horrors of the world cannot undermine,
a kind of love with which a good parent can continue to love a very troubled prodigal child.
Let me return to the death of God and its bearing on the character of our relationship to the world.
Nietzsche's own reaction to the death of God is complex.
Like many atheists before and after him, he feels as though he were illuminated by a new dawn at the news that the old God is dead.
But unlike many atheists, he also knows that without God, the threat of chaos and meaninglessness looms large.
It cannot be countered by affirmations of human dignity and hope in progress.
Now I will start first with, I would start with the first reaction to the death of God and then take up the second.
"Horizon of possibility, which the Almighty and all seeing kept close in all direction except one, is now open"
Nietzsche writes. He explains, with both sense of a sense of both relief and excitement,
Our ship can put out to sea again, put out to sea against any danger.
Every risk of the knower is permitted again.
The sea. Our sea lies here open again.
Perhaps there has never been before such an open sea.
A mood of triumph and celebration permeates the passage, except for the yellow flashing light of danger and risk.
Both, by the way, good terms for Nietzsche. The passage could have been written, say, by a very optimistic young Karl Marx.
For Marx, whom Nietzsche never mentions in his writings,
atheism is an unambiguously positive phenomenon. Human beings who owe their existence to God cannot be free.
Religion and the capitalist system function in similarly alien and alienating ways.
The worshippers and the workers alike immiserate themselves, worshippers by transferring their power and goodness to God.
The workers by making profit for the capitalist. At the best religion places,
imaginary the flowers on the chain that holds humans in captivity so that they can bear their enslavement with false comfort.
Atheism, Marx believed, underwrites the two key convictions of his philosophy: the sanctity of human dignity
implied in the prohibition against ever using humans as mere means.
And the claim that history construed materialistically is unfolding in the dialectical movement toward the goal.
These two convictions both borrowed and amended, one from Kant, the other from Hegel,
assure us that the kingdom of freedom will come, that all exploitation and suffering will be gone.
That each human will be freed into creativity.
For him, God is interference.
The sense that one must be freed from God because God is inimical to life,
that atheism liberates and opens horizons of possibilities,
is still today among us, two century after Marx and Nietzsche.
Many modern atheists contend that belief in God distorts humans relation to the world.
Consider one recent example in the book, This Life,
our colleague at Yale, Martin Hägglund, argues that the commitment to worldly goods is at odds to commitment to God.
To illustrate his point, he reflects on the relation between Dante and Beatrice in Divine Comedy.
Arguably, Divine Comedy is the most compelling artistic articulation of the medieval Christian synthesis.
Beatrice, who died early, was the love of Dante's life.
He fell in love with her when he was nine years old and she eight.
Dante makes her his guide through Paradise when they reach Empyrean,
just before he comes to see the divine Radiance,
She leaves him to take the seat in the white rose of the heavenly host.
After giving him a glance with a smile, she turns back to the eternal fountain.
That was the last glance, the last smile of hers, that Dante would see.
When he himself sees the divine radiance,
he realises whoever sees that light is soon made
such that it would be impossible for him to set that light aside for another sight, with the eyes locked in on God,
even what was most precious to Dante in this world is forever lost to him.
Hägglund writes there is no Dante in Beatrice's beatitude.
And there's no Beatrice in Dante's beatitude.
Within the world of the Divine Comedy, Beatrice does not ultimately matter to Dante as herself.
Only as means to God. With faith in God,
everything in the world is relative. Desirable only as a proverbial ladder that one kicks after having climbed the wall.
For Hägglund, the hope for everlasting life in the world to come would be life denying,
even if we did not take God to be the sole content of human fulfilment.
Let's say that after Dante's death, he and Beatrice are united in the heavenly glory, and they look into each other's eyes with love.
What you might think would follow is living happily ever after unthreatened by fragility and death?
Hägglund disagrees. In his view,
we can care only for things that we can and eventually will lose. Only finite life, a life that can be damaged and that can be lost, can be loved.
Fragility and death, he argues, are conditions of care.
So whether we claim that God is the content of human fulfilment or the source of the everlasting communion of creatures,
faith in God amounts to betrayal of this life.
This is Hägglund. Love for God either extinguishes Dante's love for Beatrice, or everlastingness of their common life cools it into indifference.
Love for God and hope for the world
to come and hope for the world to come, make love for this world
impossible. In the course of these lectures, I will contest the claim that love for something or someone presupposes fragility and death,
that it rests either on possible or actual lack.
That will be one element of the negative critical side of my main and positive argument,
that faith in God of Jesus Christ motivates and makes possible our love for this fragile and troubled world.
Now, it's fairly easy for theologians to respond to the general charge that the old God, to use Nietzsche's phrase, is an enemy of life.
Even in Augustine, a preferred and easy target of critics who can be legitimately faulted for excessive otherworldliness,
we find resources to push against indifference toward the world.
Commenting on what looks like world hating command in John 1
Uh, in 1 John 2:15, do not love the world or things in the world.
Augustine describes creation how? As a beautiful ring God designed to make for humanity and made for humanity, a bride destined for union with God.
It would be as strange for a bride not to love the ring, as it would be strange for her to love the ring more than the one who gave it to her,
to prefer ring to the union between them.
Even in a state of eternal blessedness, love for created goods is not entirely extinguished.
That's Augustine. In The City of God,
he notes that the denizens of the world to come enjoy not only God, but also one another in God.
Augustine, as Augustine would see things, Dante and Beatrice would have at least some part in each other's beatitude.
Whether that's enough, I'm not sure. In lecture five, I will return to 1 John and his command not to love the world.
In general, biblical traditions are much more world affirming than Augustine would grant.
Even the world to come is not heavenly, but worldly.
I think. The portrayal of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation illustrates
well the worldliness of the early Christian eschatological imagination,
inherited from Jewish hopes as we find them in the Hebrew Bible.
Commenting on the New Jerusalem in the Home of God book,
Home of God, Ryan McAnnally-Linz
and I write: “One’s intellectual sensibilities would have to be trained in Plato's school, to miss the
sights, smells, tastes and textures of lively and vivid materiality of the New Jerusalem."
Though the city is in God, what its denizens see when they look around, it is not God.
And the world in God. They see the world made radiant by God's presence in it.
But indwelling creatures, the invisible God, invisible God, who can be seen only as invisible.
That's a paradox. A true one. Makes creatures radiant with the glow that God's presence in them bestows on them.
The New Jerusalem has God's glory and radiance.
It is not a window onto them. The creatures are translucent, not transparent.
Earthlings, as we humans are, it is only fitting that our beatitude consists in enjoying God and creatures,
just as our earthly lives should be oriented toward loving God and loving God's creatures.
To love the world, to delight and to care for it,
we don't need to be freed from the God of the biblical traditions.
Atheists like Hägglund think they're storming a citadel, as I will show in lecture
four, its doors were flung wide open at the beginning of biblical story.
Closed, perhaps tentatively for a while, and have now been open for at least a century and a half.
God is inimical to some forms of the world, but certainly not to the world itself.
So, so much about the death of God as an act of liberation.
Earlier, I mentioned the other, another side to Nietzsche's take on the effect.
On the effects of God's death, on our relation to the world.
He believed that progressive visions, like Marx, conservative ones too, must rely on cultural effects of a God who is assumed to be dead.
Nietzsche called such effects God's shadow, and he himself feared, feared not hoped,
that the shadow f God may bedevil humanity for thousands of years.
His "madman" figure in Joyful Science articulates the effects of the death of God powerfully in the disconsolate image of an unchanged earth.
Where is it moving now?
Where are we moving? Away from all suns?
Are we not constantly plummeting? And backwards, sideways, forwards in all directions.
The up and down still exist? Aren't we just straying through an endless nothing?
Don't we feel the breath of empty space?
Has it been grown colder? Isn't night and evermore night closing in on us?
Don't we have to light lanterns in the morning?
The death of God, indeed, the killing of God and the unchained are powerful images.
More prosaically, Nietzsche noted that our entire European morality, all of it built on the belief in God, will have to cave in.
All talk of equality, of human rights, of democracy, of civilizational progress,
and certainly all utopian visions of the realm of freedom, rest on the airy foundation of a mere shadow.
Nietzsche's claim that without belief in God, European morality becomes implausible,
is radical. And as you can imagine, it is contested.
I will not discuss the issue in these lectures. Instead, I will focus on another effect of gods death
Nietzsche identifies. The one that seems to me in incontestable. Now,
in addition to the cosmic metaphor of straying through endless nothing,
Nietzsche also uses uses the aquatic metaphor of open sea now, not a space of freedom and possibilities, but in an important sense, the very opposite.
In a crucial passage that comes immediately before the madman's speech,
the sea is not just open. The sea is infinite.
We've left land and gone to see the bridge is behind us.
What's more, we broken off the land.
It's behind us. Now, little sheep, see to it.
Beside you lies ocean. And truth be told, it does not always roar.
And sometimes it lies there like silk and gold and dreamy kindness.
But the hours will come when you will realise that it is infinite.
And there is nothing more terrifying than infinity. Oh, poor bird that felt itself free, and now slams against the wall of this cage.
Woe to you! Should homesickness for land befall you as if more freedom existed there.
And there is no land anymore.
The freedom of the open horizon is the freedom of a bird to slam against the wall of an infinite cage.
It is a freedom of a ship in the raging sea. The unpredictable sea is its mortal danger and its only hope.
Danger and hope coincide.
In the culture shaped by Hebrew Bible,
The most potent and influential image of the strange phenomenon of an unbounded sea is the Great Flood in Genesis 6-9.
I will return to it in lecture four. In Genesis 1, on the second day of creation, God separated waters below from waters above.
Then on the third day, God gathered the waters below and let the dry land appear.
The Great Flood almost completely undid that work.
It was an act of decreation,
God's judgement for the decreative force of malicious human hearts and societies rampant with self-destructive violence.
After the death of God. Nietzsche imagines the world in just such, decreated state.
Except that, like, unlike righteous Noah, all humans themselves,
a bundle of more or less chaotic drives sail on their little ship in chaotic waters without a determined goal and with no hope of protection.
This is a key aspect of Nietzsche's form of the world.
A limitless space of unrestrained freedom turns out to be a cage.
Exaggerations? Yes, but with more than just a granule of truth.
Now if God were alive. Nietzsche implied in Britain actually the world would not be as chaotic as it in fact is.
Those, for those who believe in God, he writes, regard nature as a proof of the goodness and stewardship of a God.
They interpret history in honour of divine reason as
constant demonstration of the moral world order and moral ultimate purposes.
They interpret their own experiences as if everything were providence, a sign, thought out, and ordained for the sake of the soul's salvation.
That's Nietzsche. Nietzsche has in mind here, not just Christian learned and pious accounts of providence,
but also Hegel's philosophy of history and perhaps socialist hopes that rest on the progressive accounts of history as well.
For Hegel, this world is divine. All the horrors of nature and history notwithstanding.
In the imagery of Jesus story of the prodigal,
the world is God's Son, away in the foreign land, nudged by hunger and debasement, to return to the father's home.
Such linear accounts of history are highly abstracted and in some cases secularised
rendering of the way in which many Christians mistakenly, I think, understand God's providence.
God directs the great rivers of history, as well as most minute happenings in individual lives, so that they all conform to reason and moral order.
The bumper sticker version of this idea is everything happens for a reason.
For Nietzsche, all these are consoling illusions for which we grasp to shield ourselves from the stark and unbearable reality.
Our little ships. The world's big waves and a dead god.
After the collapse of the bipolar world at the end of last century, linear accounts of world history have increasingly lost plausibility.
Slavoj Žižek with his quantum theory of history,
many like him, many have come to believe that history is indeterminate, that it is in flux with multiple configuration of,
with events existing at the same time and pushing in divergent directions.
Perhaps surprisingly, in the biblical traditions,
the way Providence works is closer to the view that history is indeterminant than to typically modern linear accounts.
Providence looks like a cross between Nietzsche's aquatic chaos and morally ordered world history.
Now Gospels tell a story,
tell a story about disciples caught in the fierce storm that was threatening to capsize their boat while Jesus was sleeping in the bow.
In mortal danger, the difference between the dead God and the sleeping God is in one sense, negligible.
As long as God is sleeping, God might as well be dead.
In another sense, of course, the difference is between life and death.
For sleeping God can wake up, which is what happens in the gospel story.
The story is, however, about what can happen, not about what happens
as a matter of course. It would be an understatement to say that God does not calm every raging storm, every rage for a boat that is in danger.
Consider for a moment the state of the world through the lens of biblical traditions.
First, each one of us, no matter how well researched, resource and shielded,
can at any moment succumb to an unspeakable affliction, as did the powerful and righteous Job.
Even when Job's fortunes were restored, the voice from the whirlwind gave him no insurance that the disaster would not strike again.
Second, we live among people.
Many of us are the people who, like the children of Israel, groan under cruel oppression and destructive violence of today's pharaohs.
In the biblical story of Exodus, God was sleeping in the storm that was the Israelites slavery for 430 years.
So long, in fact, that they seem to have forgotten God. In affliction,
they did not call on God, but groaned until at long, long last,
God remembered the covenant with Abraham and delivered them.
Third, we humans share our planetary home with other living beings who, though each in its own right,
a marvel of creativity and beauty, wordlessly, but from the depth of their being,
groan for liberty, as Paul writes, likening the suffering of non-human sentient beings to the suffering of the ancient people of God in Egypt.
Fourth, what Paul implies but does not explicitly state, our individual and collective cultures full of beauty and grand achievement are at the same time,
like the thin, ruddy skin of an apple with a partly rotting core.
And finally, there's something we know that biblical traditions could not have known.
Our planetary home is like, um, it's a ball-like rocky crust over a sun hot molten core barrelling through space,
a glorious and fragile oasis of life in the vast cosmic desert with five extinction events in its long history.
The living God is both abiding source of the whole creation and at the same time,
often asleep, failing to do what we think
that we have right to expect a God to do.
We cannot fit all the little large horrors of history into some cosmic harmony and moral order.
We cannot do that. But there's no knowing what the God can do.
Those of us who believe are left with trust that though God does not seem to be controlling,
God is nonetheless in control and that God's love will ultimately issue in the world's good.
Before my last paragraph,
when things looked a grim, you might have thought that I am painting, uh, too grim of an image of the world.
Now let's take another look at it. Altering main metaphor for the world that I have borrowed from
Nietzsche, instead of a little boat,
let's follow David Foster Wallace and take a modern luxury cruise ship to stand for our life on this planet.
If you were a guest on one such ship, you would sleep in the wonderful room with open horizons, many amenities and a staff at your service.
On the top deck you'd see spectacular ballrooms, enjoy great food, energetic music, and mingle with many other merry and boisterous guests.
You might even come to think of yourself as living in the rose,
to borrow a phrase from Czeslaw Milosz, who may be echoing white rose of Dante's Paradise, the company of the redeemed in heavenly bliss.
You might be tempted to avert your gaze from the emptiness and sadness, even despair
behind dress, designer gowns, tuxedos and tipsy bravado-faced laughter.
After all, you're here to have a good time for the same reason and more,
you might not give a second thought to the entire army of underpaid and overworked thralls who toil in the bowels of the ship,
- two for each one of you up on the on the top part of the ship.
If you look beyond the edge of the ship, you might see "sucrose beaches" and the clear, brilliant water of blues untold.
But you'd like,
you'd likely block out the thought of an occasional tsunami, which destroys everything on those beaches, along with any cruise ship nearby.
I was writing this on the 20th anniversary of 2002 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that devastated the coast of Sumatra.
That's largely our world. Toil and sweat in the bowels below. Enjoyment and partly false glamour above.
And a great deal of pollution and garbage left in the trail.
There's beauty too, and much of what is good both on the ship and around it.
The world and our lives are deeply and ineradicably ambivalent.
What's true of lives of all good Christians, according to Martin Luther,
namely, that they're righteous and sinful at the same time is in significantly different sense,
true of the world as a whole, though God is fully alive, keeping all things in existence,
we often find the same God asleep when our boats are about to capsize.
You may wonder whether we can believe in such a God, let alone give God our whole souled love.
In these lectures, I will sidestep this difficult and burning question, leaving it to those with the calling to work on the problem of theodicy.
Instead, I will concentrate on what trust in the God of Jesus Christ makes possible.
It is a powerful motivation to love and keep unbreakable faith with just such an ambivalent world.
Chaotic, and ordered, life giving and life destroying.
A thing of exquisite beauty and the bone chilling precarity.
Trust in God enables us also to acknowledge, without flinching, the seeming nonsensicality of the world, and to have a rolled up,
kind of, rolled up sleeves kind of hope, even when what we hope for is shrouded in the darkness of seeming impossibility.
My next two lectures are about two atheists for whom our relationship to the world was central concerned.
first, Schopenhauer,
came to consider a world without God to be “stupid, blind, insane and
questionable.”
As for many today, abiding pleasure, untroubled by pain, was his highest value.
But he found suffering to be the deepest truth about the world.
Inspired by eastern religions, he sought salvation in the will to nothingness.
His hatred of the world was his disappointed love and his love,
the craving of an unfulfilled void.
I will end by suggesting that Schopenhauer’s
account of “craving” has strong affinities with the late modern desire.
The theme so much like love for the world, but is in fact largely a certain kind of hatred for it.
The next lecture, then, third one is about Nietzsche.
Schopenhauer was both his teacher and his antipode.
And Nietzsche. Nietzsche's central concern was to counter all forms of hatred of the world.
His highest value was enhancement of power,
and his central idea amor fati — a universal yes to the
entirety of the world, its chaos and all the horrors included.
And yet his kind of love, especially love for vitality, was shot through with contempt, even nausea at most humans.
I engage here Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, above all, because their chief value one is power, and second is pleasure are crucial for many today.
In my final two lectures,
I turned from Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's inability to motivate genuine love for the world to the resources of the Christian faith to do just that.
I start the fourth lecture with Dostoyevsky's Brother Karamazov.
Central to the book is the contrast between Ivan Karamazov, who rejects the world but loves things in it with selective,
appetitive love, and Father Zosima who embraces the entire world unconditionally.
I then anchor Zosima's kind of stance toward the world in a discussion of Genesis account of creation.
I end the lecture, but this by discussing what seems like what isn't the clearest case of the hatred of the world in the Bible,
God's hatred for it, in fact, the story of the Great flood.
I place the accounts, both of creation and flood into conversation with Hannah Arendt.
In the last lecture, I continued the argument for unconditional love for the world by taking head on the striving for superiority,
which, like modern desire codefines our form of the world and equally seriously undermines love for the world
explore how Saint Paul and following him,
Max Scheler use the hymn to Christ in Philippians to shore up unconditional love for all humans and to expose striving for superiority for what
it is - not a benign driver of progress, but the world denigrating vice.
Both thinkers help me connect the challenge of loving the world unconditionally to the challenge of loving oneself unconditionally.
Thank you very much.
Evan Rosa: For The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured MES Law Volf Production Assistance by Taylor Craig, and Macy Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith dot Yale dot edu where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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