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