Meeting Miroslav Volf

I'm embarrassed at times by what I don't know that I think I should. I'm not a theologian. By that I mean, not that I don't think about my faith and life in light of God and Scripture, but that I'm not trained in theology. My training has been in biblical studies. Mostly I learned one-liners about classical and contemporary theologians, associating them with their main contributions or ideas.

I have read a volume of Karl Barth's Dogmatics, and I've read a couple of volumes of Jurgen Moltmann, whom I like very much. But for the most part, contemporary philosophers and theologians have not been my main diet.

So regularly I discover a thinker that everyone else seems to know already. This week it was Miroslav Volf. I was visiting on the Emergent website, and noticed they have a podcast now. I've gotten into podcasts and audio books as a way of using some of my driving time. My iPod has become more than a nifty way of carrying music around with me. I'm a regular subscriber to a podcast of the Daily Office from the Book of Common Prayer. The reader reads Scripture and some beautifully crafted prayers to me for about 20 minutes. But I digress.

The Emergent podcast started a few weeks ago and the first six episodes were taken from a conference held at Yale University in February. The conference was a conversation with Miroslav Volf, who teaches there in the divinity school. He is an evangelical theologian, and quite conservative, really. He was born in Croatia in 1956 and his life story is tangled up in the struggles of the former Yugoslavia.

Although he has written several books, he is best known for Exclusion and Embrace, which deals with the theology of reconciliation. He recently published Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, which the Archbishop of Canterbury named the 2006 Lenten study book. He writes a regular column for Christian Century. He used to teach at Fuller Seminary. And I have never paid attention to him.

This week I spent several hours listening, not to him lecturing, but to him engaging in conversation with pastors and practicioners of ministry at Yale, all of whom would consider themselves part of the emerging church. They were discussing ideas in his books and in his life. What impressed me most about him was his transparency about his life and thinking. I was impressed about his practice of forgiveness and reconciliation. I was impressed with his generosity in giving himself to these pastors for three days.

So, I've ordered the books and I will get on with exploring his thinking further. I wish I'd paid attention to him earlier. When amazon.com gets my books here, I'll post some of my thoughts about his thoughts.