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 mes, love Wolf's Gifford lectures unchanged from its sun. 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 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 it, Carl Bart, Michael Palani, Paul Tillek, Hannah ent, Richard Swinburne, Jaroslav Pelican, Eleanore Stump, Alistair McGrath, Sarah Coley, Mona Siki, David Novak, n Nt Wright, and Mary 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.
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 Ammar 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 Son Ammar Mundi, between Atheism and Theism.
Welcome.
Miroslav Volf: 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 center 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 Nietzche, and Theodor Doki.
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 phenomena, 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, but 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? Would 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'm exploring 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 endeavors, and yet problems of planetary proportions bedevil each of our lives.
In fact, none of us can understand, well even some of our, 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 of each to all. My question is the nature of that relationship. Now, the original inspiration for these lectures.
Came from Hartwood Rosas Magisterial book Resonance, A sociology of our relationship to the world. The book analyzes 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 organizing 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. Think ification 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 as means as a means to their ends and each at best, different and at worst, hostile to the other. In response to this pervasive alienation, Rosa proposed the non utilitarian idea of resonance. It's a 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 suns ray in the green forest, morally arable 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 it 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 labor of making the world a resonant place when resonance off o of working hard on even a few intimate relationships is often doesn't, uh, uh, doesn't wor it's not worth its effort.
And what do we do if it turns out that 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. As 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, thumbs Up the Answer, which I will sketch in lecture four, Amor Mundi. We should love this in radically ambivalent world, unsurprisingly, perhaps scandalously. For many atheists and these 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 the love that is analogous to Gods, I'm more mu.
Underwritten and fed by Amor Day, loving the world by loving the love that God is and that God does in the book, the Home of God. Comfort by with, uh, uh, Ryan Mcally 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 redemptions 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 amundi may be surprising, but it is not new. In the way I'm using the phrase goes back to Hana a I think first time she wrote about it is in the Gifford lectures of 1972.
Uh, but certainly, uh, varied places. 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 Saint John at an Augustine do. Now, Aren 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's referring to romantic, passionate love.
On the margins of the other hand of her work, she writes about another kind of love, which is emphatically worldly. She describe it as Amal, 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 of 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 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. It's narrow, right? God is the creator. And as the prologue to, to John's Gospel says, all things are creatures, each different creature and all equally creatures.
And needless to say, humans too are squarely on the side of creatures and late commerce, uh, commerce 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. 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 has not been without us, we experiencing and acting subjects and the world as a mesh of sentient and in sentient beings are kind of two poles, the self pole and the world poles, so to speak, of the relationship that constitute mutually them.
In relating to the world. 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 live world comes always in what I will call a form of the world. To illustrate what I mean by a form of the word, let me invoke Karl Marx in 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 super structure culture that at least impart, 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'll 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 a position to Marx you, you might think that the sense of possessing in no way distorts genuinely human experience of the world. If you, 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 overthrows. 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 mindset, but over the right form of the world. In the New Testament, one finds a roughly analogous contrast in St. 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 as 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 wor of the world without rejecting the world. As such, indeed we can reject and hate one form the world because we love the world as such and desire to make to for it to have a particular form.
Now, equally importantly, the distinction between the world as 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 Flowerless chocolate cake more than attraction to some intrinsic word work like my life for Zimbabwe and 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. Nisha'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 will start with the first reaction to the deaths of God, and then take up the second. Horizon of possibility, which the Almighty and all seeing kept closed in all direction except one is now open.
Nietzsche rights. He explains with both sense, with sense of boat relief and excitement, our ship can put out to sea again, put out to sea, against any danger. Every risk of the noer is permitted again, the sea, our sea lies here. Open again. Perhaps the heads 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 Carl Marx. For Marx whom Nietzsche never mentions in his writings, EISM is unambiguously positive phenomenon. Human beings who owe their existence to God cannot be free. Religion and the capital system function in similarly alien and alienating ways The worshipers and the workers alike e misrate themselves worshipers by transferring their power and goodness to God the workers by making profit for the capitalists at best religion places.
Imagine 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, prohibition against ever using humans as near means.
And the claim that history construed material realistically is unfolding in a dialectical movement toward the goal. These two convictions both borrowed and amended, one from Kant, the other from Hagel, 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 marks and nature, many modern atheist 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 Helu 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 Beatriz 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 ate. Dante makes her his guide through Paradise when they reach Imperia Imperion. 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 internal fountain that was the last glance, last smile of hers. The Dante would see when he himself sees them divine radiance. He realizes whoever sees that light is soon made, such that it would be impossible for him to set that light aside for another site.
With the eyes locked in on God. Even what was most precious to Dante in this world is forever lost to him. Haglund writes, there is no Dante in Beatrice's beatitude, and there's no Beatrice in Dante. The attitude within the world of divine, the divine comedy, Beatrice does not ultimately matter to Dante as herself, only as means to God with faith in God, everything the world is relativized desirable, only as a proverbial ladder that one kicks after having climbed the wall.
For Haglund, 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 fulfillment. Let's say that after Dante's death, he and Beatriz are united in the heavenly glory and they look into each other's eyes with love. What we might think would follow is living happily after ever after unthreatened by fragility and death, und 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 who fulfillment or the source of the everlasting communion of creatures faith in God amounts to betrayal of this life.
This is helo love for God, either extinguishes, dentist, love for bears, or everlasting this 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 rest 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 niche's phrase is an enemy of life.
Even in Augustine, a preferred and easy, uh, target of critics who can be legitimately faulted for excessive other worlds, and as we find resources to push against indifference toward the world, commenting on what looks like. World hating command in John one, uh, uh, in one John two 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 August in the city of God. He notes that the denizen of the world to come enjoy not only God, but also one another in God. Augustine as Augustine would see things, Dante and Beatriz would have at least the sum part in each other's bude.
Whether that's enough, I'm not sure. In lecture five, I will return to First 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 ran McKenna ly and I write once intellectual sensibilities would have to be trained in Platos school to miss the sounds, sight, smells, tastes, and textures of lively and vivid materiality of the new Jerusalem. Though the city is in God, but its denizens.
See, when they look around, it is not God. The world in God. They see the world made radiant by God's presence in it for indwelling creatures. The invisible God, invisible God, who can be seen only as invisible. That's a paradox, but true makes creatures radiant with the globe, 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. Earth links is we human are. It is only fitting that our ude 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 in it, to care for it. We don't need to be freed from the God of the biblical traditions. Atheists like haglund 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 century in the 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, on another side to Nietzsche's take on the effect in on the effects of God's death on our relation to the world. He believed that progressive visions like Marx, conservative wants too, must rely on cultural effects of a God who is assumed to be dead.
Nietzsche calls such effects, God's shadow, and he himself feared, feared, not hope that the shadow of God may bedevil humanity for thousands of years, his madman figure in, uh, joyful science articulates the effects of the death of God powerfully in the dis consulate image of an unchained 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? Do up and down still exist? Aren't we just straying us through an endless nothing? Don't we feel the breath of empty space? Has it grown? Colder? Is a night an evermore night closing in on us?
Don't we have to light lanterns in the mour, the death of God? Indeed, the killing of God and the unchained Earth are powerful images. More Prozaically 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. Nitches claim that without belief in God, European morality becomes un 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 God's death. Identifies the ones that seems to me incon Uncontestable.
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 sea. The bridge is behind us. What's more we've broken off? The land is behind us. Now little ships 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. The hours will come when you will realize that it's infinite and there is nothing more terrifying than infinity.
A poor bird that felt itself free and now slams against the wall of this cage. Woe to you should homesickness for land before 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 a raging sea.
The unpredictable sea is its mortal danger and its only hope. Danger, and hope coincide. The culture shaped by bi bi Haber Bible. The most potent and influential image of the strange phenomenon of an unbounded sea is the great flood in Genesis six to nine. I will return to it in lecture four. In Genesis one.
On the second day of creation, God's separated waters below from waters above. Then on the third day, God gathered the waters below and let the dry and, uh, land appear. The great flood almost completely undid that work. It was an act of de creation, God's judgment for the, the creative force of malicious human hearts and societies rampant with self-destructive violence After the death of God, Nietzsche imagines the world in just such the created 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 determinant goal and with no hope of protection. This is a key aspect of niche'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 honor 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 aside, thought out, and ordained for the sake of the soul's salvation. That's nature Nisia 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.
Hagel, this world is divine. All the horrors of nature and history, not withstanding in the imagery of Jesus', story of the prodigal, the world is God's son away in a foreign lead, nudged by hunger and debasement to return to the father's home. Such linear accounts of history are highly abstracted, and in some cases, secularized 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 a, 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.
Slavo 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 events existing at the same time, and pushing in diversion 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 niches, aquatic chaos, and morally ordered world history. Now, gospels tell a story. Tell, tell a story about disciples caught in the fierce storm that was threatening to capsize there both while Jesus was sleeping in the bow, immortal 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 be is between life and death. For sleeping, God can wake up, which is what happens in the gospel story. The stories, 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 uh, ridge, for 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 resourced, resourced, and shielded can in any moment succumb to a 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 Israelite slavery for 430 years so long, in fact that they seemed to have forgotten God in affliction.
They did not call on God but groaned until at long, long glass. 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, worthlessly, but from the depth of the being grown for liberty.
As Paul writes, likening suffering of non-human sentient beings to the suffering of the ancient people of God in Egypt. Fourth, but Paul implies but does not explicitly state our individual and collective cultures full of beauty and grand achievement are the same time lack 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 crest over Sun Hut, molten core barreling 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 and 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. When things looked green, you might have thought that I'm painting, uh, to gr of a 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 modern luxury cruise ship to stand for our life on this planet. If you were a guest on one such ship, you'd sleep in a 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 me and boisterous guests. You might even come to think of yourself as living in the rose. To borrow a phrase from Chala Milosh, who may be echoing white rose of Dantes 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 dressing, designer gowns, tuxedos, and tipsy bravado, face laughter. After all, you are here to have good time. For the same reason and more, you might not give a second thought to the entire army of underpaid and overworked trolls who toil in the bowels of the ship to, for which 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 a 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 course coast of Sumatra.
That's largely our world. Toil and sweat in the bowels, be, uh, below enjoyment and partly flas fly false glamor above and great deal of pollution and garbage left in the trail. There's beauty too, and much of what is good, good, both on the ship and around it. The world and our lives are deeply and in radically 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 insignificant 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 soul love. In these lectures, I will sidestep this difficult and burning question, leaving it to those with a calling to work on the problem of the Odyssey. 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 a bone chilling per carrot. Trust in God enables us also to acknowledge without flinching the seeming nonsensical 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 world without God to be stupid, blind, insane, questionable. As for many today, abiding pleasure. Untroubled by pain was his highest value, but he found suffering to be the deepest truths about the world.
Inspired by eastern religions, his sought salvation in the will to nothingness. His hatred of the world was his disappointed love and his love, the craving of an unfulfillable void. I will end by suggesting that Chappen Horror's account of craving has strong affinities with the late modern desire that seems 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 Nietzche. 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, universal, yes, to the entirety of the world.
Its cows and its 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 the their chief value one is power, and second is pleasure, are crucial for many today. In my final two lectures, I turned from Schopenhauer Niche'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 Dostoevsky's brother Sev Central to the book is the contrast between even Kara Mazo, who rejects the world but loves things in it. With selective Petitive love and Father Sima who embraces the entire world unconditionally. I then anchor Sima's kind of stance toward the world in a discussion of Genesis account of creation.
I end the lecture but dis by discussing what seems like, but 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 placed the accounts both of creation and flood into the con into conversation with Hannah ent. 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 co defines our form of the world and equally seriously undermines love for the world.
Explore Haus and Paul, and following him, mark Shaer used the hymn to Christ in Philippians to show up unconditional love for all humans and to expose striving for superiority for what it is not a benign driver of FR progress, but the world. Denigrating Vice, both thinkers helped 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.
If you're a new listener, remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode. And if you're a loyal supporter, we would love. For you to share this episode, send an email, post it on social media, or even better or even better, tell a group of your buddies, have 'em all listen, and then have a lively discussion.
As always, thanks for listening, friends, and we'll be back with more soon.