Quotes from Miroslav Volf

Absolute hospitality would in no way amount to the absence of violence. To the contrary, it would enthrone violence precisely under the guise of nonviolence because it would leave the violators unchanged and the consequences of violence unremedied.

Christians should see Muslims, who give ultimate allegiance to God as the supreme good, as allies in resisting the tendency in contemporary culture to see mere pleasure, rather than justice and love, as the hallmark of the good life.

Many ministers are more the church's institutional managers than its theological guides; correspondingly, many read more management ("leadership") books than they do works of academic theology.

Our theology is insufficiently Christian—and less revealing of the truth than it should be, if Christian claims are indeed true (as we believe them to be)—when we repeat in religious idiom normative stances that nontheologians advocate, often with better arguments and greater rhetorical power.

All men are in search of happiness. . . . This is the motive for men's every action, even those who are going to hang themselves.

The problem with Luther's account of the Christian faith and of theology is that he distinguishes too sharply between the "inner person" and the "outer person

What is needed is a biblically rooted,30 patristically guided,31 ecclesially located, and publicly engaged theology, done in critical conversation with the sciences and the various disciplines of the humanities, at the center of which is the question of the flourishing life.

This is why we believe in Jesus Christ—to help us see that we are not what we ought to be and to help us become what we ought to be.

Creeping meaninglessness is a private cost of making the nature of the flourishing life a mere matter of taste.

requires going beyond the controversies that occasioned the letters to identify claims undergirding Paul's theology that are so fundamental either for Paul or for both Paul and his audience that they are assumed and therefore referenced merely obliquely and relatively rarely.

To change the world, we need an "I have a dream" speech, not an "I have a complaint" speech.

Evil has insinuated itself into our very souls and rules over us from the very citadel erected to guard us against it.

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners

If forgiveness does take place it will be but an echo of the forgiveness granted by the just and loving God-- the only forgiveness that ultimately matters, because, though we must forgive, in a very real sense no one can either forgive or retain sins 'but God alone.

To exaggerate a bit: academic theology today is composed of specialists in an unrespected discipline who write for fellow specialists about topics that interest hardly anyone else.

Christian faith is therefore a "prophetic" faith that seeks to mend the world. An idle or redundant faith—a faith that does not seek to mend the world—is a seriously malfunctioning faith

Living toward a world in which these identities no longer divide, but living in a world fundamentally structured by them, Paul takes up and lays down various identities for the sake of the gospel. Though free, he has made himself a slave. For the sake of the gospel, he lives sometimes as one under the Jewish law, other times as one free from it—all while recognizing the truth of his situation as one no longer under "the law" but nevertheless under "Christ's law.

It's a thread in a tapestry.

Instead, it's a change in our response to the Question, and being true to the insight means being open to how it revises the whole.

Contrary to the assumptions of Western moral traditions, human beings are (1) not free in their actions but governed by necessity; (2) not transparent to themselves and others in their motivations, but opaque; (3) not similar to each other and therefore subject to the same moral code, but each different.

Everything else follows from this responsibility to those who have come before us. It is the root of flourishing humanity.

To remember a wrongdoing is to struggle against it.

Virtuous theologians work as God's stewards building God's home (1 Cor. 3:9), not masters building their own little empires.

the central question was how to remember rightly. And given my Christian sensibilities, my question from the start was, How should I remember abuse as a person committed to loving the wrongdoer and overcoming evil with good?