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.