Top 60 Miroslav Volf Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans and myself from the community of sinners.”

— Miroslav Volf

2. “The difference between justice and forgiveness: To be just is to condemn the fault and, because of the fault, to condemn the doer as well. To forgive is to condemn the fault but to spare the doer. That’s what the forgiving God does.”

— Miroslav Volf

3. “To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life.”

— Miroslav Volf

4. “Christ’s indwelling presence has freed us from exclusive orientation toward ourselves and opened us up in two directions: toward God, to receive the good things in faith, and toward our neighbor, to pass them on in love.”

— Miroslav Volf

5. “In the final analysis, the only available options are either to reject the cross and with it the core of the Christian faith or to take up one’s cross, follow the Crucified-and be scandalized ever anew by the challenge.”

— Miroslav Volf

6. “Honoring everyone contains the promise of possibility.”

— Miroslav Volf

7. “Slowly and imperceptibly, the one true God begins acquiring the features of the gods of this world. For instance, our God simply gratifies our desires rather than reshaping them in accordance with the beauty of God’s own character. Our God then kills enemies rather than dying on their behalf as God did in Jesus Christ.”

— Miroslav Volf

8. “The practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance.”

— Miroslav Volf

9. “Christians believe that there will be a Judgment Day at the end. And it is my belief that on that day justice will be done and there will be a reconciliation between those who have profoundly injured one another takes place.”

— Miroslav Volf

10. “If we don’t learn to live with one another we will not live. We will either love each other as neighbors or we won’t be. I believe that it is an insult to me as a Christian to say that I cannot love as neighbor somebody who thinks differently than I do.”

— Miroslav Volf

11. “Christ came to transform us from never enough people – to more than enough people; that through his poverty we may become rich.”

— Miroslav Volf

12. “If you take the ‘love your enemy’ out of Christianity, you’ve ‘unChristianed’ the Christian faith.”

— Miroslav Volf

13. “Theology is not only about understanding the world; it is about mending the world.”

— Miroslav Volf

14. “Every word and every deed, every thought and every gesture, even the simple act of paying attention can be a gift and therefore an echo of God’s life in us.”

— Miroslav Volf

15. “There is no more effective way to radicalize American Muslim youth than for political leaders to make public displays of prejudice against all Muslims. Suspicion will undermine their sense of identification with America and alienate some from both the culture and from politics.”

— Miroslav Volf

16. “If we can exit a relationship, pressure to reconcile lessens; if we must live with those who have wronged us, we are pushed to reconcile.”

— Miroslav Volf

17. “Whatever the reasons, when forgiveness happens it is always a miracle of grace. The obstacles in its way are immense.”

— Miroslav Volf

18. “If evangelism isn’t an expression of love of neighbor, it isn’t Christian evangelizing. And love of neighbor includes not only what I say to the neighbor but how I say that.”

— Miroslav Volf

19. “To live in sync with who we truly are means to recognize that we are dependent on God for our very breath and are graced with many good things; it means to be grateful to the giver and attentive to the purpose for which the gifts are given.”

— Miroslav Volf

20. “The principle cannot be denied: the fiercer the struggle against the injustice you suffer, the blinder you will be to the injustice you inflict. We tend to translate the presumed wrongness of our enemies into an unfaltering conviction of our own rightness.”

— Miroslav Volf

21. “I don’t think we need to agree with anyone in order to love the person. The command for Christians to love the other person, to be benevolent and beneficent toward them, is independent of what the other believes.”

— Miroslav Volf

22. “God’s gifts aim at making us into generous givers, not just fortunate receivers. God gives so that we, in human measure, can be givers too.”

— Miroslav Volf

23. “When people are kept in abject poverty and illiteracy while others grow rich and “develop their personalities” at the former’s expense we speak of oppression; when structures and persons that perpetuate powerlessness are replaced by structures that allow people to stand on their own feet and have their own voice, we speak of liberation.2 Both.”

— Miroslav Volf

24. “Prejudice is a form of untruthfulness, and untruthfulness is an insidious form of injustice.”

— Miroslav Volf

25. “If I say, ‘I forgive you,’ I have implicitly said you have done something wrong to me. But what forgiveness is at its heart is both saying that justice has been violated and not letting that violation count against the offender.”

— Miroslav Volf

26. “In a way, fraud in business is no different from infidelity in marriage or plagiarism in scholarly work. Even people committed to high moral standards succumb.”

— Miroslav Volf

27. “The goal of pursuit of justice must not simply be that justice happens but that reconciliation also happens.”

— Miroslav Volf

28. “By embracing the “outcast,” Jesus underscored the “sinfulness” of the persons and systems that cast them out.”

— Miroslav Volf

29. “There is no space in which worship should not take place, no time when it should not occur, and no activity through which it should not happen.”

— Miroslav Volf

30. “I do believe that Muslims and Christians and Jews pray to the same God. And yet they understand who God is in significantly different ways.”

— Miroslav Volf

31. “She loved him for his own sake, and therefore she would rather have suffered his absence if he flourished than to have enjoyed his presence if he languished; her sorrow over his avoidable languishing would overshadow her delight in his presence. For a lover, it is more blessed to give than to receive, even when giving pierces the lover’s heart.”

— Miroslav Volf

32. “For many Americans, Osama bin Laden is the paradigmatic Muslim, an absurd conviction for anyone who has lived with Muslims.”

— Miroslav Volf

33. “Love of enemies is a central moral conviction of the Christian faith; theologians who see their work as a mode of Christian life ought to love their intellectual “enemies”: to respect them as human beings, even to seek their friendship, and certainly not to let a personal squabble rob them of a good and productive argument with them.”

— Miroslav Volf

34. “When we forget that, we unwittingly reduce God’s ways to our ways and God’s thoughts to our thoughts. Our hearts become factories of idols in which we fashion and refashion God to fit our needs and desires.”

— Miroslav Volf

35. “All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover him at their side. To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting his way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology.”

— Miroslav Volf

36. “The significance of the crucifixion is not only what God does for us; consistently throughout the New Testament the crucifixion is portrayed as the pattern that we are to follow. It is a model of social behavior toward the other as well as a statement about what God has done for us.”

— Miroslav Volf

37. “There is no greater mystery to me than that of light traveling through darkness.”

— Miroslav Volf

38. “Theology is in crisis, largely because it has lost its nerve and forgotten its purpose to help discern, articulate, and commend compelling visions of flourishing life in light of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.”

— Miroslav Volf

39. “Naked need is the occasion for God’s giving, not a need adorned with the clean, elegant robes of respectability and good works.”

— Miroslav Volf

40. “Faith is the way we as receivers relate appropriately to God as the giver. It is empty hands held open for God to fill.”

— Miroslav Volf

41. “Faith idles when character shrivels.”

— Miroslav Volf

42. “Love properly understood is God – the font of all creation and the ultimate goal of all desires; God properly understood is love.”

— Miroslav Volf

43. “In good relationships, we are happy to grow as the other person becomes part of us and who we are.”

— Miroslav Volf

44. “The cure against Christian violence is not less of the Christian faith, but, in a carefully qualified sense, more of the Christian faith. I don’t mean, of course, that the cure against violence lies in increased religious zeal; blind religious zeal is part of the problem. Instead, it lies in stronger and more intelligent commitment to the Christian faith as faith.”

— Miroslav Volf

45. “If it is true that the dual command of love is the common ground of the two faiths, the consequences are momentous. We no longer have to say, “The deeper your faith, the more you will be at odds with others!” To the contrary, we must say, “The deeper your faith, the more you will live in harmony with others!” A deep faith no longer leads to clashes; it fosters peaceful coexistence.”

— Miroslav Volf

46. “Faith is an expression of the fact that we exist so that the infinite God can dwell in us and work through us for the well-being of the whole creation. If faith denies anything, it denies that we are tiny, self-obsessed specks of matter who are reaching for the stars but remain hopelessly nailed to the earth stuck in our own self-absorption. Faith is the first part of the bridge from self-centeredness to generosity.”

— Miroslav Volf

47. “Sin is here the kind of purity that wants the world cleansed of the other rather than the heart cleansed of the evil that drives people out by calling those who are clean “unclean” and refusing to help make clean those who are unclean. Put.”

— Miroslav Volf

48. “The principle cannot be denied: the fiercer the struggle against the injustice you suffer, the blinder you will be to the injustice you inflict.”

— Miroslav Volf

49. “We also give up on the quest for truth when we marshal all forces – in exegesis and history as well as in philosophical, moral, and practical theology – to “discover” and corroborate predetermined dogmatic stances.”

— Miroslav Volf

50. “To give to God is to take from God’s right hand and put that very thing back into God’s left hand.”

— Miroslav Volf