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Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, this is For the Life of the World. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Miroslav Volf: Every person is at least a bit an underground human. The world will either be loved with unconditional love, or it'll not be loved at all, or underground. Humans are unfit denizens of the crystal palaces, sima's stories, and homily circle around the character of proper love for the world, an alternative both to Evan's rejection of the world and to his way of loving it.
Brother Zosima says at one point, do not be afraid of man's sins. Love man also, and his sin for this likeness of God's love is the height of love on earth. Love all God's creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand, every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things.
Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive it more and more every day, and you will come at last. To love the whole world with an entire universal love
Evan Rosa: The world is hard to love. Ivan Karamazov in one of the most poignant chapters of Dostoevsky's Brothers K. It's entitled Rebellion. Ivan appeals to the overwhelming suffering and horror on display in the world, rehearsing a series of real-life headlines that Dostoevsky pulled from the local papers and saying, quote, it's not God that I don't accept Alyosha only, I most respectfully return him the ticket.
Yvonne is rejecting creation, perhaps hating it, and his faithful brother Alyosha, a student of the Russian monk, father Zosima, says scandalized. “That's rebellion.” This, of course, sets up the famous Grand Inquisitor section of the book, but it's another chapter, the Russian Monk that offers a theological alternative to rejecting the world or rebellion.
It's on offer from Zosima who suggests, quote, brothers, do not be afraid of men's sins. Love man also in his sin. For this likeness of God's love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God's creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing.
If you love each thing, you'll perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire universal love. In this episode, we're playing the fourth of Miroslav Volf's
2025 Gifford lectures where he contrasts the selective and self-centered love of Ivan Karamazov with a radically inclusive, unconditional love of father's Sima. He draws deeply on the Brothers K, the book of Genesis Hana errands concept of Amundi, and he explores a theology of a gothic love, unearned, universal, and enduring.
This is the love by which God sees creation as very good. Not because it's perfect, but simply because it exists throughout. Miroslav is challenging us to ask what kind of love makes a world sustains it, and might one day save it. We've been running this entire series of lectures for the past month. If you are just joining us, I'd suggest going to the beginning of these, and they were delivered by Miroslav at the University of Aberdeen for the 2025 Gifford lectures.
The entire series is entitled Amor Mundi, and it considers God's love for the world and what that should mean for our love. Special thanks to Paul Nimmo and Paula Duncan at the University of Aberdeen for allowing us to run these lectures in our podcast and for the support of the Templeton Religion Trust, which helped make the lectures possible.
Hope you enjoyed this fourth installment of Miroslav Volf’s Gifford Lectures. The Earth embraced Dostoyevsky and genesis on unconditional love for the world.
Miroslav Volf: Ladies and gentlemen and friends, the last two lectures I was exploring the travails of love in the World. In Two A Thinkers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They each stand for a prevalent way of thinking about our chief. Good. Happiness as an abiding positive hedonic state, and as enhancement of power. And they stand for two widespread stances toward the world.
Explicit rejection of the world, and its energetic Affirmation from Chau Van Howard will learn that the world will disappoint all those who relate to it, mainly with a competitive love. Think of it as thirst or hunger. The search for full satisfaction ends up in rejection and even hatred of the world from Nietzsche will learn that if we make enhancement of power, our chief good, our possible inspiration to embrace the world notwithstanding, we are likely to end up denigrating and damaging much of it.
In my final two lectures, I turn to the relationship to the world that the faith in Jesus Christ or the God of Jesus Christ implies in the present lecture, I will first sketch contrast between even, is it pronounced even in this parts of the world? Or Ivan from Brothers Karamasov. It is even. Uh, okay, so, so for you, uh, it'll be Ivan for, uh, between Ivan and Father Zima in three F, his brother Karasov Ivan and Epit Themic lover rejecting the world.
Father Sima, an agapic lover, radically embracing the world. I will then seek to motivate Agapic love by exploring the accounts of creation and the creation in the book of Genesis. Yeah. De creation in this particular case is the flood. In the last lecture, I will argue that giving primacy to Agapic love over both the epitome erotic loves is a compelling alternative to striving for superiority that familiarizes people and devalues the world.
So today about hunger, desire like hunger, or love as hunger. Well, I call that love for flower chocolate cake. Devouring love. Okay, let's go Do's brother. Car Mazo would could have been entitled a literary religious exploration of our relationship to the world. The backdrop of the novel is Dostoevsky's Sense of Modernities disturbed relationship to the world.
In his view, it shows up not only in the atomizing and indifferent breeding character of modern life, but also in many proposals for improving the world, all of which, in his opinion, treat the world as if it were a machine, and therefore an appropriate object of rational design. From his perspective, such re reforms, compromise human freedom and can be achieved only through aggression.
Zima and his kind of freedom honoring love is Doki response to those among world reformers who are persuaded that the final argument and that the right design to set the world the right can be and must be found. Relationship to the world is the main topic of the stories from Sima's Life and his homily, which make up book six of the novel in the response to book five, which consists of Ivan's account of his own relationship to the to the world.
He's read for his reasons for returning the ticket to God without having known either Schopenhauer or Nies work. The Sevki proposes what in effect is an alternative to both.
Early in there, let's get acquainted conversation. Ivan tells Asha, if I not, if I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced to the contrary that everything is disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish cows, if I were struck even by the horrors of human disillusionment, still I would want to live.
And as long as I have been to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all. Even in fact, IVANS, it is for you. Ivan in fact loses faith in the woman he loves and in the order of things, he does think that the world is chaotic. The hypothetical of his above statement are actuals and still he wants to live.
Why? What conquered his determinate rejection of the world as disgusting but conquered his determinate, rejecting of the world as disgusting and undeserving of life. The answer I think is in the cup. There is still, he says this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me, this thirst for life, despite all.
As long as his thirst lasts. As long as there are things in the world that slake his thirst, as long as there are things pleasing to him, he can both reject the world and still want to live in it. Ivan's thirst for life, despite all is a kind of love, but what kind of love is it? He loves some things. The sticky little leaves of spring blue skies.
Some people, some deeds, and he loves for as long as he loves, not with reason, but with gut. His love is Epit. Themic like Spen. How's thirst And perhaps a bit erotic. Erotic. Erotic. I mean, appreciative love that appreciates the worth of things. By Epit Themic, I mean love simply that hungers to have what it wants to ha.
Um, so he loves some things and loves them with gut. His love is epitope, like chappen tower's, thirst, and perhaps a bit erotic. It is self concerned, selective and temporary inwardly standing at the distance from the world. He assesses it, finds it largely wanting and on the whole undeserving of his love.
But Evensky seeks to make plain that if we are looking for a world that fully deserves our love, we're unlikely ever to find it. If we try to make it deserving of our love, we will have to employ some version of the grand inquisitor to do the job. And if per impo, some universal state of future happiness comes into being.
Now, how long will it last? In the notes from the underground, doki imagines a gentleman with a retrograde and sarcastic physionomy appearing in the U utopia of Crystal Palace. That's the Crystal Palace from 1851 in London. Has nothing to do, uh, little to do with the football team.
So some that, some gentleman of that kind appearing in the utopia of Crystal Palace and for no rhyme or reason kicking a pillar or two to bring the pal place down so that he can live according to his own. Well, every person is at least a bit an underground human. The world will either be loved with unconditional love or it'll not be loved at all.
For underground humans are unfit denizen of the Crystal Palace.
Zima stories in homily Circle around the character of proper love for the world, an alternative both to Evan's rejection of the world and to his way of loving it. Brothers Zima says at one point, do not be afraid of man's sins. Love man also in his sin. For this likeness of God's love is the height of love on earth.
Love all God's creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive it more and more every day, and you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire.
Universal love, the universal scope of Zumas love accentuated. In this text by repeated use of all, every, each whole stands in contrast with the selectivity of Ivan's. Love evident in his repeated sum, some people some things, and signaling out some natural phenomena. Zima called to love every leaf and every ray of God's light is at variance with events loving only the sticky little leaves and the blue sky.
The universality of love in an imperfect world implies its unconditionality first. The fact that humans might be disgusting and undeserving is not an obstacle for such love, but in fact an invitation to it. One loves them no matter what in what state they are, and in an important sense precisely because they're so unfortunate as to be disgusting and undeserving for only unconditional love can let them be and possibly even save them.
Second SLA is directed toward entities that are beautiful and not, and that are beautiful and not, is not meia, which seeks to quench a thirst. It is primarily erotic, honoring the intrinsic value of their qualities. He enacts love that is both a gothic and erotic in the way he dies. He kneels. He bows down with a face to the ground.
He stretches his arms as if embracing the earth, kisses it with joy, and gives up his soul to God, gripped by such love. Early in his life, Zima sought to practice it until his dying breath. The enduring character of this love like its universality, is another consequence of its unconditionality. For one ought to love all things, not for a chance moment, but for all time.
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. Mostly it involves both. It is pragmatically exemplified in Sonya's relationship to Rasko Nikko in's Crime and Punishment. Sonya's empathy and seemingly naive generosity led Rasko Nikko, a murderer to turn himself into police, but he did not repent even as a convict in Siberia for many months.
He remained not sorry for the murder he committed, but the shame for having showed himself incapable of being one of the great humans for whom everything is permitted. A little Napoleon Bonaparte. What brought him to own his awful deed was again, Sonya's, Allah. Love that made her go with him to Siberia to endure the torment to which he subjected her because full of pride, he would not accept his guilt.
He began to walk from the captivity to evil into freedom. When he knelt and wept at her feet, she lumped him and stayed with him. Not so much, although he murdered, but because he murdered. What have you done to yourself? Konik of ask her early on and tells her, you're so strange, Sonya. You are forgetting yourself.
But in loving with self, decentering love, she in fact was at one with herself. By the end of the book, she will be at one with himself as well, by having received her agapic kind of love and made it her own. For Sima human, agapic love for the world is rooted in God's relation to the world. In the quote above, he notes that such love imitates God's love.
Perhaps that it is it that is its earthly Aho. All human love should be like God's love. Little bit, at least like God's love. And the form of God's love that is highest on earth is love for those who are undeserving. It is the love of Christ who can forgive everything, forgive all, and for all. As Aha says to Ivan quoting the Orthodox him of the resurrection, it may seem that to love the world with an entire universal love amounts to Nietzsche and kind of whole scale acceptance of the world.
In contrast to Ivan's reject. But everything is loved is not equivalent to everything is good just as it is. The first claim is Sima. The second was LOV from Dostoevsky's. Novel Demons for Sima. That which is good, is loved with delight in the good that it manifests love. Here is erotic and appreciation and attachment to good as good.
That which has become undeserving is love with self-centering, empathy, and active care, which is apathic love by loving with agapic love. Humans are most like God's acclaim, the possible pain and the assured promise of such love is expressed in Jesus saying very truly, I tell you. Unless a grain, a wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain.
But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Dostoevsky used this saying as the epigraph for the entire book, the brothers Ker of. For humans to love, rightly in either erotic and AIC way is to recognize the imperfection of their love and therefore their own guilt and need for forgiveness. First, not to recognize and appreciate something as good is to dishonor it.
It's a very interesting, um, position tics, birds of God, joyful birds. You too must forgive me for I have sinned against you. Praise Joma. Sima's, brother Marco. How did he sin against the birds? He did not notice their beauty and glory. He did not even know how he would love them. Second not to empathize with and actively care for those who are in the grip of evil is to fail to be like Christ in his greatest liberating love for humanity.
In short, not to love is to fail to honor everyone properly as intrinsically valuable and failure to become and fail to be become a servant of all. The account of sin is failure to love everything abiding is tied to one of the most controversial of Ana's teaching. Namely that each of us is guilty between before everyone and for everyone.
This idea is at the heart of his response to Evan's Rebel Ivan's rebellion. If we were to make Sima speak to Ivan, he would note that Ivan should not be rejecting the world, while at the same time exempting himself from Responsib responsibility for behaviors and patterns of relating which make the world unacceptable to him.
Lemme repeat that one more time. He would note to even that even should not be rejecting the world while. Exempting himself for, from responsibility for behaviors and patterns of relating which make the world unacceptable for him. The sharp point of that objection is not that Ivan two is a wrongdoer, that he contributes the reasons for his own rejection to the world.
It is that he fails to recognize that wellbeing of others is partly his responsibility. Even more that he's guilty not just for his own misdeeds, but for the misdeeds of others as well. The idea of guilt for everything and everyone presupposes that persons are not individuals sovereignly relating to the world.
Indiscreet acts instead, as Sima puts it in creation, everything flows and connects. Touch it in one place and in echoes in the other end of the world. Each is responsible for all. Each is guilty for all. Each needs forgiveness from all. Each must forgive all Ivan's form of hostility toward the world. Boat feeds on and is nourished by most intimate and rep rapacious of humans of one more time.
Even's form island's form of hostility toward the world, feeds on and is nourished by the most intimate and rapacious of human aggressions against the world. The overwhelmingly epit themic nature of our love. If such love defines our relation to the world, Sima's alternative self, decentering love appears to us as a sentimental nonsense.
Sima knows this well. He would have been treated as a mad man if he had not decided to become a monk in the still pious Russia of 19th century. He could be honored though even there only as a holy fool. Still, his kind of love is to be lived in the world, which is where Zima sends aha. His disciple. The key to Amor Vita or to key to love for life.
Inky is life of love. Under whatever circumstances one happens to live. This is what that improbable but extraordinary Jewish saying from the Nazi occupied Amsterdam rights. If you haven't read her diaries, please do. She's absolutely amazing. Zalla is scandalously, unconditional agapic. He's committed to loving every human being, no matter how abhor in their deeds and to loving the world no matter how disordered the stance makes little sense.
If we assume that what human beings do, what they undergo, how they process, what they have done and undergo, undergone is inseparable from who they are. That in a decisive sense, they are what they have done and undergone, and in the process made themselves to be. Agapic love is plausible only if we look deeper and distinguish between person and work.
Dostoevsky never articulates this distinction, but he in fact makes both Sima enacted and Aha too. For Sima and Aloha distinction is rooted in God's creative and restorative relation to the world. So now from Dostoevsky to the Book of Genesis, at the end of the very first account of creation and Genesis, looking at all things God made God exclaims with what seems like delighted joy and fond attachment and look, it was very good.
God creates everything, surveys it, and celebrates it as very good. What God celebrates as good is what God created as good. And then this meta narrative interjection and look invites the reader to share God's own valuation and praise of the created reality and to experience themselves in their world as praise worthy.
What could God mean by calling creation? Very good. Very good. In what sense? Aesthetic. Functional and moral. Moral. Even with a great leviathan, a symbol of rebellion and enmity to God present in creation, even if only as one member of the whole species of marine animals. Now I think that all three of these senses may be contained in the very good, but none of them is primary.
Another sense. Of good is dominant. Call it existential. It's a kind of goodness which cannot be lost, and of which there cannot be more or less when a wanted child is born. The immense joy of many parents often renders them mute, but their radiant faces speak of un uh, unsurprised. Speak of surprise delight.
Just look at you. So very good that you are here. The delight precedes any judgment about the beauty functionality and moral rectitude of the child, child, the child's sheer existence. The mere fact of it is very good, and that's what I propose God to exclaim looking at the newborn world. Such unconditional love is ground of creation's existence.
Surprisingly, perhaps the first praise recorded in the Bible is not human praise of God, as we find in Babylonian myth of creation on which Genesis partly depends. Instead, it is God's praise of creation. Granted praise, wordiness of creation, read downs to the praise of creation, creator, but all human praise, all human praise of God follows and rests upon God's original praise of creation as a result in its.
Relation to God. Creation is not primarily sacramental. Creation is a foretaste of the world to come, nor is it primarily iconic creation is a kind of translucent pain through which we see God's goodness and God's glory in Genesis. Nothing that God's praise of creation is primarily self-referential. If it, uh, if it as if it were God is praising a creation so that we can praise himself, right?
A roundabout way, getting back to him. So
intrinsically valuable creation is an object of delight, both for humans and for God only as an objective of God. Delight is creation. Also a medium of human relation to God, a sacrament and an icon. Hannah AR with whom I was in dialogue, the entire series. I'm in dialogue in this entire series of lectures, and who coined the phrase Amundi and use it in the sense in which I do Hannah ar made what I call existential goodness of the world, the foundation of her political philosophy, a shared world with common norms, and the right to have rights she believed depends on mutual affirmation of our mere existence of all.
That is not our artifact or our achievement, but it is mysteriously given us by birth.
And how it is that we might affirm each other in such a way above all by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says, I want you to be without being able to give any particular reason for such a supreme and unsu unpassable affirmation. Now, this love for her was different from passion, but he calls passionate love above all because passionate love is selective and reciprocal, but the two have in common that they zero in on mere existence.
Passionate love embraces the who of the person and is so earned unconcerned, to the point of unworldliness with what the beloved, beloved person might be with his qualities and shortcomings. No less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love for the world is similarly unconditional, but now directed towards humans in general to the world as a whole.
I love you. I want you to be is not, I want to have you, I want to rule you. It is I want you to be irrespective of your qualities that may deem you either, uh, that, that may deem, that I may deem even either positive or negative. One more time. This is a nice sentence that I botched for you. I want you to be irrespective of your qualities that I may deem to be either positive or negative, to illustrate this kind of love.
She points to the story of creation. Those who properly say, I want you to be our arent rights in what were her? Gifford lectures in Aberdeen show themselves capable of the same love with which God supposedly loves humans, whom he created only because he willed them to exist and whom he loves without desiring to possess them.
As God loves humans in their sheer existence and does know not for the sake of, not for God's sake, but for their sake. So also, humans should love their fellow humans in their sheer existence and do so for the sake of those they love. Love here is not mere recognition of the other say after struggle.
For those who are familiar with, with hagel or mere appreciation of them after identifying certain admirable qualities. Love here is a sheer gift. It aims to make possible the ongoing life of the beloved, their growth into themselves. I love to, to love. I love, um, you to be. She writes in one point in the capitals, in the margin of her lectures six times before the final declaration of goodness of all God's works.
God also declared individual families of creatures to be good. Promote their light, water and land vegetation, sun and moon, aquatic and Ian animals, and finally terrestrial animals, all creatures, each individually and all together, not just humans created in the image of God. All of them have intrinsic value.
Like humans, they exist as the great Jewish philosopher, my maimon des put it for their own sake and not for the sake of something else. They're good before they have become means to anything for anyone. Many scholars have noted literary similarities between creation of the world in Genesis one and the building of the tabernacle in Exodus.
Like the tabernacle of later temple, the creation is a dwelling place of God. But unlike tabernacle in temple, God's home and humans', homes are originally not separated into sacred and secular realms. God shares home with all creatures, and God is invested in the state of that joint home. In his lectures on Genesis, Martin Luther asks, why did God declare to be good?
The gathering of waters in one place and letting the insignificant bit of earth emerge, but did not declare heaven to be good. Perhaps he conjectures because God wanted to indicate to us that he was more concerned about outwelling than about his owns. Luther did not, um, see the creation as God's home, as I have just suggested that we, we should, and I think as Genesis does, few pages later, Luther notes that God constructed the home for humans before they were even created.
Thus he explains when man is created, he finds a ready and equipped home into which he's brought by God and commanded to enjoy all the riches of so splendid home. Luther's comment about God commanding humans to enjoy all the riches of their global home is a dig against Augustine, who famously reserved enjoyment for God.
For Luther, the world is not to be loved above all for its usefulness, not even usefulness as a means to God. A trigger warning after the fall, the world may be. Shit house as he puts repeatedly. And yet, there are genuine, worthy goods that can and ought to be enjoyed. Sex is one of them. As a newlywed Rooter.
He was a monk, right? As a newlywed, Luther wrote to his friend, I am chained and captured with Caan Catherine, and I lie on the barrow allusion to her last name, F Bora, mortified to the world. Now, this last phrase, those few who know that your New Testament, this last phrase is startling. According to St.
Paul, all Christians united with Christ should be mortified to the world and the world mortified to them. To the great delight of this former monk, sex with Caton had similar effect. It was not cupidity enacted, but for a moment at least a distorted form of the self and the world, not mortified, which I think would work only if Cain felt the same way.
For Luther, the riches of soul splendid. The home that God made for humanity is a gift of divine solicitude and benevolence toward us. Some achieved worthiness of human beings. Some earned merit could not have been part of the reason for making it. It was a made for the future human being. The only worthiness in view could have been existential goodness given by the sheer fact of human existence.
In his smaller catechism, Luther gives a first person or, or a person centered account of creation. Re-articulating the first article of the Apostolic Creed. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven, the earth. He writes, I believe that God has created me together with all creatures that God has given me, my body and soul, eyes, ears, and my members, my reason and my senses.
Now behind this, insistent first person formulations lies a very important conviction. Gifts are personal. They're meant for the recipients as an act of care for them. That's how receiving gift differs, for instance, for from finding yourself lucky possessor of some desired object or from receiving an entitlement.
Gifts are expressions of the givers active care. Their benefits to recipients surpass the concrete usefulness they have as objects for a gift is not a mere thing or service. In fact, most things in the lived world are not mere things. As Marlo ti has argued. All cultural objects, which is most of what surround us, are sediments of human activity and have around them and atmosphere of humanity or inhumanity as the case may be in an even greater degree.
This is true of gifts, trinkets in a gift shop. Each envelope in an atmosphere of humanity are not gifts. It's a gift shop, but it doesn't have gifts. They need to become gifts. They become gifts when somebody has purchased them with the intention of giving them to someone else in hope. It'll be received as a gift.
The act of giving turns ordinary things into gifts. Gift is an interpersonal relation when the relationship recedes from consciousness, gifts morph back into just ordinary things, whether useful, delightful, or superfluous, and annoying white elephants. Is that the phrase? If creation as a whole and each creature in it are gifts, the consequences will be something like what Hamo Rosa has described with the idea of resonance, a relationship of being moved by entities, responding to them freely and in the process oneself being transformed.
For if cre, all creatures are gifts of the God whom we love. Each thing in the world is a site of relationship marked by love. Every good and beautiful thing then shimmers with an aura that exceeds its thinness. Each is itself by being more than itself. Each is itself by being more than itself. Each is a carrier of the traces of the giver and a site of recipients.
Meeting with the giver and just for that reason, each is a source of deep and many layered pleasures. If we love the world only for its utility, such love would easily morph to desire to cont into desire to control the world, to make it as Rosa not at knowable, physically accessible, manageable, and finally transformed into the material and the object of our own projections and desires.
The world would become then a point of aggression. If the world has only instrumental value, our very love for such world would be the source of our alienation from the world. Almost paradoxically, if we ourselves, our senses and activities becomes, would be, uh, I'm sorry, and we ourselves, our senses and activities would become solid by an ugly blend of greed and hostility.
As creation the world in all its variegated richness is an intrinsically valuable gift. The most basic human relation to God, therefore is gratitude. The most basic human relation to the world is delight in its existence and care for its wellbeing. We ought to relate to things not primarily for our sake, but for their own sake.
Now, this is not to contest the world's utility for humans. Our planetary home is an interdependent and dynamic hole in which each entity is a gift to all others, and in which each plays a role in survival and thriving, thriving of others. Genesis one, however, implies the subordination of utility to delight and care, not exclusion, but subordination of utility and delight.
Uh, subordination of utility to delight and care. Humans are finite and fragile creatures of need, but we live at our best when not withstanding our vulnerability. We don't cater to our needs and our enjoyments to the detriment of our neighbors and our shared world in our own way. We then participate in God's ongoing active love for the world, our joint home with God
in one of her entries in Dan Iron Rights Amor Mundi. Why is it so difficult to love the world? The world is deeply flawed and seemingly incorrigible, which is why if the world is loved at all, that love will have to be ex. She writes in Calculable grace, incalculable grace, for which it is not possible to give any particular reason, except that such love is the only possible means of constituting and maintaining a shared world.
Her term for such acts of love is reconciliation, and then in one of the entries he has, but reconciliation has a merciless boundary. Some pursuits and acts cannot be accepted under any circumstances as our fate. For her ado Mann is an example. In the epilogue to Eiman in Jerusalem, aand applies, I'm sorry.
Aand explains her reasons why in his case, capital punishment is appropriate. Addressing Eiman himself, she writes, and just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of, of a number of other nations, we find that no one that is no member of human race can be expected to want to share the earth with you.
This is the reason, the only reason why you must hang. There can be no reconciliation with Daman and those who, like him participating pro programs, genocides, ethnic cleansing. It is not possible to live in a shared world with those who systematically eliminate others from the shared world. Says, I want you to be, does not apply to them.
R is here in line with the genesis and Exodus, both of which affirm capital punishment, the gospels and epistles. Arguably do not it being the case that nobody, it's outside the scope of God's unconditional love. The sketch of our relationship to the world that I've given earlier. Rest on God's.
Exclamation in Genesis and look it. The creation was very good. As I noted in lecture two, Schopenhauer thought that these few words are the biggest and more conse, most consequential lie in the entire Bible. And if we were to stop reading Genesis after that, exclamation auer would not be entirely wrong.
More importantly, we would end up with a one-sided account of how can Genesis itself cease the world and human and the human condition. To complete the picture, we need to turn to the story of the great flood it sits. If you read Genesis first 12, uh, 11 chapters of Genesis, it sits right there in the middle, which is important Literarily.
The account of that great calamity begins with a statement about God's seeing that parallels and echoes. God's exclamation in Genesis 31 and God's soul, the earth. And look, it was corrupt. Every inclination of the thoughts of human hearts was evil, continually with their will and reason fully in grip of evil, humans have have filled the earth with violence.
Every human was such that no shared world was possible. Each v violently excluding others from it. This is the world utterly un homed. And the Lord, the Lord's was sorry that he made the earth. And it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out from the earth, the human beings that I have created people together with animals and creeping things and burns in the air.
What do we make of the radical change in the character of creation and in God's relation to it? God's delighted joy and fond attachment gives way to the convictions that it would have been better not to have created the world and a brutal decision to destroy it.
I read the disturbing account of the great Flood as a hypothetical story. I get it from, uh, uh, Marilyn Robinson. The basic idea, if you haven't read her book Genesis, uh, please do. It's an interpretation of entire story, entire book of Genesis as an account of what God, I read it the following way as an account of what God could do but does not if evil were to fully colonize the world, and then what God actually would do, though I cannot justify my hypothetical reading here, I consider it a plausible one to take, uh, on what is a very complicated text.
The main body of the story is what about what could happen if the evil became pervasive? It is stalled under assumption of the primacy of erotic love. Human beings get what they deserve. Moral performance determines their faith. God regrets having created the world and decides to destroy it. A world from which all goodness is absent.
A world in which, except for the righteous, Noah, everyone's heart is always an only evil and which is full of violence. Such a world would deserve to cease to exist. In fact, it would come close to returning on its own accord to the cows before the first day of creation. This is how Genesis six and seven portrays the flood except that the world turns into cows as a result of God's punishment.
The waters cover the earth because God lifts the dome that on the second day of creation, God has made to separate waters above from waters, uh, waters below. If the primacy is given to erotic love. The story about God, who full of joy, originally pronounced creation very good, then turned into, then turned into a radical pessimist, not on hedonic grounds as Schopenhauer, but on moral grounds, utterly unsustainable corruption.
Looking at the beginning of the story from the end, we see faint sign, a faint sign that the erotic love with its rewards and punishments might not be primary. That even in the story of the flood, it may not be basic to God's relation to humanity. Neither anger nor indifference accompany God's decision to destroy, but most strikingly deep sadness and it grieved God to his heart.
The grief, God's grief here corresponds to God's joy at the end of the sixth day of creation. Two contrary motions are each a modality of agapic love. God loves with the joy and commitment, the very good creation. God loves With sadness, the creation become utterly corrupt. Agape love for the world in Genesis, uh, six to eight stand out most Lumin when we consider how the two acts of God's de deliberation frame the account of the flood and how they relate to one another, the reason for destroying the world and the reason never to destroy it again.
The Lord said that every inclination of thoughts of their hearts. I'm sorry. The Lord saw that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. So the Lord said, I will block them out from the earth. That I have created. The great evil of humans here appears to be the reason for their destruction.
Now, puzzlingly, the reason for never destroying humans again is almost the same the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of humans. For the, for the inclinations of human heart is evil from youth, nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done now it seems Luther notes that God can be accused of an inconsistency here.
Now the inconsistency, I believe controversially grant you, and I'm sure some of you will ask the questions about it. Uh, and I received some resistance to it. I still think I'm, uh, roughly right. The inconsistency disappears. However, when we recognize that the primacy, ERO of erotic love, which governs the first stance, has given way to the primacy of agapic love that governs the second we can read the reason for God's decision never to destroy the world in two ways.
We can translate four for the inclination of human hearts or evil. We can translate four in the praise for the inclination of human hearts as evil from youth, either with although or because in the first case. In the case of, although at the end of the story, erotic love has primacy as it had at the beginning, despite the appearance to the contrary, I will not destroy them.
Although they're evil remains in, remains in one regard, close to I will destroy them because they're evil. Though the result is opposite, sparing rather than destruction. Human wickedness still pushes in the direction of destruction. It still remains as Keith the rose puts it, a good reason for destroying them, but just not, but has just ceased to be a sufficient reason to for doing so in the second case.
I will never again destroy because the inclination of human heart is evil from you. Now, agapic love has primacy. There is a dramatic shift in the direction in which the misfortune of human evil pushes, especially human incapacity, not to be evil. The aga relation to those who existential goodness is affirmed, but who have been colonized by evil from youth is neither their destruction nor mere forbearance.
They will be loved in their incapacity to do good, and they'll be loved. We hope out of that incapacity. God's love is unconditional. Do not strip of behavioral expectations. Still, God, not only spares humans, but changes the demand in the light of human incapacity kind of lessens the burden. Now the killing of animals for food and capital punishment are allowed worse.
Previously, they were not. God is indulgent, but God's grace is not mere indulgence. It is agapic love because to live is to be unjust as nie put it, echoing in his way more radical, echoing his own more radical way. Luther's anthropology, the world can continue it to exist only if God makes a commitment to it.
Faith keeps faith with it no matter what. What we'll not do is to destroy all the EBIT evil doers and save one particularly righteous per uh, person and frankly, un whetted his sons and daughters in hope that humans will do better the next time they will not. The story of the flood and its aftermath underscores that a shared lived world exists only through God's grace of creating.
Not only through that, but through God's grace of keeping faith with and caring for humanity and that not merely despite the evil which is widespread, but because of it, capacity captivity to evil is the reason for liberating grace when God whose very being is love, creates the world. God gives it existence and does so for no other reason than to delight in it.
As Genesis suggests, by loving free and wayward creatures unconditionally, God gives them grace of time and of God's own redemptive presence to be and to grow into their own fullness. This is the stance for the world on which Father Zima insists in sharp contrast to even and his competitive epitome, pseudo love for the world.
Let me conclude. Agape love demands nothing from the beloved, though it cares and hopes much for them and for the shared world with them, it is free. Sovereign to love free to honor those it loves, to keep faith with them no matter what. Free from needing to defend its own honor at all costs. Agape love is therefore also a humble.
It provides an alternative, not just to epit themic desire, but also to striving for superiority that is so widespread in the world today and then degrades much of that world. That will be the topic of my final lecture. Thank you so much
Evan Rosa: for The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Miroslav Volf. Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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