Miroslav Volf critiques ambition, love of status, and superiority, offering a Christ-shaped vision of agapic love and humble glory.

“’And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ If you received everything you have as a gift and if your existence as the recipient is also a gift, all ground for boasting is gone. Correspondingly, striving for superiority over others, seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement, is possible only as an existential lie. It is not just a lie that all strivers and boasters tell themselves. More troublingly, that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world-negating form of the world.”

In Lecture 5, the final of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a theological and moral vision that critiques the dominant culture of ambition, superiority, and status. Tracing the destructive consequences of Epithumic desire and the relentless “race of honors,” Volf contrasts them with agapic love—God’s self-giving, unconditional love. Drawing from Paul’s Christ hymn in Philippians 2 and philosophical insights from Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Max Scheler, Volf reveals the radical claim that striving for superiority is not merely harmful but fundamentally false. Through Christ’s self-emptying, even to the point of death, we glimpse a redefinition of glory that subverts all worldly hierarchies. The love that saves is the love that descends. In a world ravaged by competition, inequality, and devastation, Volf calls for fierce, humble, and world-affirming love—a love that mends what can be mended, and makes the world home again.

Episode Highlights

1. “Striving for superiority over others… is possible only as an existential lie.”
2. “Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.”
3. “To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.”
4. “God cancels the standards of the kind of aspiration whose goal is superiority.”
5. “This is neither self-denial nor denial of the world. This is love for the world at work.”

Show Notes

• Agapic love vs. Epithemic desire and self-centered striving
• “Striving for superiority… is possible only as an existential lie.”
• Paul’s hymn in Philippians 2 and the “race of shame”
• Rousseau: striving for superiority gives us “a multitude of bad things”
• Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and pursuit of power
• Max Scheler: downward love, not upward striving
• “Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.”
• Self-love as agapic: “I am entirely a gift to myself.”
• Raphael’s Transfiguration and the chaos below
• Demon possession as symbolic of systemic and spiritual powerlessness
• “To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.”
• “The world is the home of God and humans together.”
• God’s love affirms the dignity of even the most unlovable creature
• Love as spontaneous overflow, not moral condescension
• “Mending what can be mended… mourning with those who mourn and dancing with those who rejoice.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.

Miroslav Volf explores agapic love, creation’s goodness, and God’s grief—an alternative to despair, power, and world rejection.

“When a wanted child is born, the immense joy of many parents often renders them mute, but their radiant faces speak of surprised delight: ‘Just look at you! It is so very good that you are here!’ This delight precedes any judgment about the beauty, functionality, or moral rectitude of the child. The child’s sheer existence, the mere fact of it, is ‘very good.’ That’s what I propose God, too, exclaimed, looking at the new-born world. And that unconditional love grounds creation’s existence.”

In this fourth Gifford Lecture, Miroslav Volf contrasts the selective and self-centered love of Ivan Karamazov with the radically inclusive, unconditional love of Father Zosima. Drawing deeply from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Genesis’s creation and flood narratives, and Hannah Arendt’s concept of amor mundi, Volf explores a theology of agapic love: unearned, universal, and enduring. This is the love by which God sees creation as “very good”—not because it is perfect, but because it exists. It’s the love that grieves corruption without destroying it, that sees responsibility as mutual, and that offers the only hope for life in a deeply flawed world. With references to Luther, Nietzsche, and modern visions of power and desire, Volf challenges us to ask what kind of love makes a world, sustains it, and might one day save it. “Love the world,” he insists, “or lose your soul.”

Episode Highlights

1. “The world will either be loved with unconditional love, or it'll not be loved at all.”
2. “Unconditional love abides. If the object of love is in a state that can be celebrated, love rejoices. If it is not, love mourns and takes time to help bring it back to itself.”
3. “Each is responsible for all. Each is guilty for all. Each needs forgiveness from all. Each must forgive all.”
4. “Creation is not primarily sacramental or iconic. It is an object of delight both for humans and for God.”
5. “Agapic love demands nothing from the beloved, though it cares and hopes much for them and for the shared world with them.”

Show Notes

• Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s visions of happiness: pleasure and power as substitutes for love
• “Love as hunger”: the devouring nature of epithemic desire
• Ivan Karamazov’s tragic love for life—selective, gut-level, and self-focused
• “There is still… this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me”
• Father Zosima’s universal love for “every leaf and every ray of God’s light”
• “Love man also in his sin… Love all God’s creation”
• Sonya and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: love as restoration
• “She loved him and stayed with him—not although he murdered, but because he murdered”
• God’s declaration in Genesis: “And look—it was very good”
• Hannah Arendt’s amor mundi—“I want you to be” as pure affirmation
• Creation as gift: “Each is itself by being more than itself”
• Martin Luther on marriage, sex, and delight as godly pleasures
• The flood as hypothetical: divine grief replaces divine destruction
• “It grieved God to his heart”—grief as a form of agapic love
• “Each is responsible for all. Each is guilty for all.”
• Agape over erotic love: not reward and punishment, but faithful presence and care
• “Agapic love demands nothing… It is free, sovereign to love, humble.”
• Closing invitation: to live the life of love, under whatever circumstances

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.

Miroslav Volf critiques Nietzsche’s vision of power, love, and suffering—and offers Jesus’s unconditional love as a more excellent way.

The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final Good, does very important work in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche, striving is good. Happiness does not rest in feeling that one's power is growing. In the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘crossed everywhere with infinity.’ …

And therefore condemn to ceaseless striving … The will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time. And that goal can never be reached. You're always equally behind.

Striving for superiority so as to enhance power does not just elevate some, the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increases, the weak become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased. Successful striving for superiority inferiorizes.”

In this third installment of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a trenchant critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral philosophy—especially his exaltation of the will to power, his affirmation of eternal suffering, and his agonistic conception of love. Nietzsche, Volf argues, fails to cultivate a love that can endure possession, withstand unworthiness, or affirm the sheer existence of the other. Instead, Nietzsche’s love quickly dissolves into contempt. Drawing from Christian theology, and particularly Jesus’s teaching that God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good alike, Volf explores a different kind of love—agapic, unconditional, and presuppositionless. He offers a vision of divine love that is not driven by need or achievement but that affirms existence itself, regardless of success, strength, or status. In the face of suffering, Nietzsche's amor fati falters—but Jesus’s embrace endures.

Episode Highlights

1. "The sun, in fact, has no need to bestow its gift of light and warmth. It gains nothing from imparting its gifts."
2. "Love that is neither motivated by need nor based on worthiness—that is the kind of love Nietzsche thought prevented Jesus from loving humanity and earth."
3. "Nietzsche aspires to transfiguration of all things through value-bestowing life, but he cannot overcome nausea over humans."
4. "God’s love for creatures is unconditional. It is agapic love for the states in which they find themselves."
5. "Love can only flicker. It moves from place to place because it can live only between places. If it took an abode, it would die."

Show Notes

• Miroslav Volf’s engagement with Nietzsche’s work
• Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as life-denying and his vision of the will to power
• Schopenhauer’s hedonism vs. Nietzsche’s anti-hedonism: “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power.”
• The will to power as Nietzsche’s supreme value and “hyper-good”
• “The will to power is not a philosophy of life—it’s a philosophy of vitality.”
• Nietzsche’s agonism: the noble contest for superiority among equally powerful opponents
• “Every GOAT is a GOAT only for a time.”
• Amor fati: Nietzsche’s love of fate and affirmation of all existence
• Nietzsche’s ideal of desire without satisfaction: “desiring to desire”
• Dangers of epithumic (need-based, consuming) love
• “Love cannot abide. Its shelf life is shorter than a two-year-old’s toy... If it took an abode, it would die.”
• Nietzsche’s nausea at the weakness and smallness of humanity: “Nausea, nausea... alas, man recurs eternally.”
• Zarathustra’s conditional love: based on worthiness, wisdom, and power
• “Joy in tearing down has fully supplanted love’s delight in what is.”
• Nietzsche’s failure to love the unworthy: “His love fails to encompass the great majority of actually living human beings.”
• Volf’s theological critique of striving, superiority, and contempt
• “Nietzsche affirms vitality at the expense of concrete human beings.”
• The biblical God’s love: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and the good.”
• “Even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars.”
• Jesus’s unconditional love versus Nietzsche’s agonistic, conditional love
• Kierkegaard and Luther on the distinction between person and work
• Hannah Arendt’s political anthropology and enduring love in the face of unworthiness
• Volf’s proposal for a theology of loving the present world in its broken form
• “We can actually long also for what we have.”
• “Love that cannot take an abode will die.”
• A vision of divine, presuppositionless love that neither requires need nor merit

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
• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
• This Life by Martin Hägglund
• The Home of God by Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• The City of God by Augustine
• Divine Comedy by Dante

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.

Pope Francis died on Monday April 21, 2025. And to remember and celebrate his life, we’re bringing out an episode from our archives featuring social ethicist and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Nichole M. Flores. Ryan McAnnally-Linz interviewed her in early 2021 about Fratelli Tutti, an encyclical teaching he published 6 months into the COVID-19 pandemic. From that encyclical he writes:

“Here we have a splendid secret that shows us how to dream and to turn our life into a wonderful adventure. No one can face life in isolation… We need a community that supports and helps us, in which we can help one another to keep looking ahead. How important it is to dream together… By ourselves, we risk seeing mirages, things that are not there. Dreams, on the other hand, are built together. Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all." (Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti)

Last year, in the midst of a global nightmare, Pope Francis invited the world to dream together of something different. He released Fratelli Tutti in October 2020—a message of friendship, dignity, and solidarity not just to Catholics, but "to all people of good will"—for the whole human community. In this episode, social ethicist Nichole Flores (University of Virginia) explains papal encyclicals and works through the moral vision of Fratelli Tutti, highlighting especially Pope Francis’s views on faith as seeing with the eyes of Christ, the implications of human dignity for discourse, justice and solidarity, and finally the language of dreaming together of a different world.

Support For the Life of the World: Give to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Show Notes

• Read the entire text of Fratelli Tutti online here
• What is a papal encyclical? For “All people of good will”—not just Catholics
• Examining the signs of the times, e.g., Fratelli Tutti will always be connected to its global context during a pandemic.
• What is Fratelli Tutti? What does its title mean?
• Brothers and Sisters All: Using Italian, a particular language, as a pathway to the universal, rather than traditional Latin title
• Pope Francis’ roots in Latin America: How his particularity as Latin American gives him a universal message; local and communal belonging; neighborhoods contributing to the common good
• Seeing/Gazing: Faith as seeing with the eyes of Christ (Lumen Fidei)
• Undermining human dignity in social media discourse; the failure of grandstanding rather than encounter
• Solidarity as a dirty word: conflicts within Catholicism about how to understand and apply justice and solidarity in real life
• Solidarity requires encounter with the other
• Social friendship and fraternity
• Human dignity in the tradition of Catholic social ethics
• Dreaming together: fighting against the temptation to dream alone, inviting us to imagine; cultivating a conversation that forms collective imagination and aesthetic reality.

About Nichole Flores

Nichole Flores is a social ethicist who is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She studies the constructive contributions of Catholic and Latinx theologies to notions of justice and aesthetics to the life of democracy. Her research in practical ethics addresses issues of democracy, migration, family, gender, economics (labor and consumption), race and ethnicity, and ecology. Visit NicholeMFlores.com for more information.