Flourishing life: Miroslav Volf

I grew up in the 1940s and 50s in a Baptist church in southern England where the main teaching goal seemed to be to get children of, say, seven or eight years old, to make a ‘decision for Christ’, after which a ‘decision seal’ (a round red sticker) would be inserted in the front of your Bible. This would lead, when you turned fourteen or so, to your baptism with much emotional fanfare in the baptistry that was normally hidden under the floorboards at the front of the church. I resisted this scenario, much, I’m sure, to the chagrin of my poor parents. But my aim here is not autobiographical (I became a Christian later), nor is it to critique a particular Baptist practice of seventy years ago. It is simply to exemplify the fact that in many evangelical circles the preaching focus has fallen on personal salvation to the exclusion of almost all else. You were a sinner and you needed to be redeemed by believing in Jesus.

A book I’ve just read sees things differently:

But sin and redemption cannot stand independently of creation and consummation. For sin and redemption  presuppose some fundamental good from which humanity has fallen and towards which humanity needs to be (re)oriented or into which humanity needs to be set. (p72)

In John’s Gospel, finally, the Word comes to dwell among humans not merely so that Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God can take “away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) but, ultimately, so that the Word can be, in an unimpeded way, the life and light of the world made to be God’s home. (p74)

This is not to belittle personal salvation, but to say that personal salvation only makes sense if I am not just saved from something but saved for something—if salvation is the beginning of something. In the language of the authors of these two quotations that something is ‘flourishing life’.

The language of the quotations in this post, drawn from Miroslav Volf & Matthew Croasmun’s For the life of the world: Theology that makes a difference (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press 2019), may seem strangely stilted in places. There is a reason for this, which I’ll talk about further on.

Volf & Croasman (V&C) focus on life after salvation:

… what exactly can “flourishing life” mean if Christ is its prime exemplar, its archetype? … the flourishing life is identical with what Jesus Christ announced to have come near and toward which his entire mission was aiming: the kingdom of God in its fullness, the realized hope of Israel’s prophets (see, e.g., Isa. 40:9–11). In the terminology of the apostle Paul, it is the new creation in Christ, a world of “justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17) . . . In the imagery of John the Seer, it is the new Jerusalem, the the city rich in cultural and natural goods, but existing as the temple of God; it is the world of God’s home (Rev. 21:3). … flourishing life is what Christ enacted in his own life in the course of his mission to announce the nearness of God’s rule. … As “God-with-us,” Christ served his fellow human beings by proclaiming God’s coming in word and deed: he alleviated the plight of the poor, sick, oppressed, and those ridden by guilt and covered in shame for having failed to love God and neighbor; and he liberated those caught in the snares of power, wealth, and self-righteousness. All this he did in the power of the Spirit … (pp78-78) (italics original)

If I were inclined to do so, I could read into this definition echoes of the prosperity teaching that appeared here in Australia late in the 20th century. But this is not what V&C mean at all. They remind us that

suffering and apparent failure were, in Christ’s life, intimately related to the true flourishing life. They were means to flourishing life, fully in service of the kingdom of God. (p79)

This because ‘struggle and suffering … are the fruit of the same unconditional love of God that flows as the fount of all reality.’ (p79)

The flourishing life has its restrictions in the present age, but we look forward to the age to come, when God’s plan will be consummated and we will know flourishing life in full:

We can know and articulate in positive terms the Christian vision of flourishing life—and the truth of God and the truth of Jesus Christ, as well—only in a broken, unknowing kind of way, stretching ourselves toward something we see “in a mirror, dimly,” and “know only in part” (1 Cor. 13:12). (p95)

“Keep being transformed,” writes Paul, using present passive imperative. As we live in time, and as the time in which we live is filled with tension between the old and the new, transformation must be ongoing, in fact a growth out of the old schema and into the new one. (p124)

Flourishing requires the transformative presence of the true life in the midst of the false, which requires that the true world come to be in the midst of the false world, that the world recall, recover, and for the first time fully embody its goodness as the gift of the God who is love. (p150)

A publishers’ blurb drew me to this book. If I had known more exactly what its goal is, I would probably never have read it, but I’m glad I did. Despite the difficulty of V&C’s language, I found their focus on life after salvation (or perhaps life during salvation, in the light of the quotation from p124 above) decidedly refreshing.

If V&C ever read this post, they will be thinking by now that I have missed the point of their book. That would be because it is intended as a manifesto to theologians about present-day Protestant theology and theologians, who, in their view, are in many cases missing their calling. They write:

As an intellectual endeavor, theology matters because it is about what matters the most for human life. Theology worth its name is about what we ought to desire above all things for ourselves and for the world, about what we should desire in all the things that we desire (whether our desire is effective economic systems and just political orders, livable cities and deep friendships, possessions or lack thereof, healthy bodies and joyous progeny, or even those bell-bottom jeans and Indian gauze shirts). Theology matters because it is about the true life of the world. (p6)

Theology, then, should be about the flourishing life as described above. Instead, theologians are largely divided into conservatives, who defend inherited positions (which often have little to do with flourishing), and liberals, whose method is critiquing conservatism—critiquing without offering a vision in its place. V&C call them afresh to the age-old theological purpose of articulating what it means to live a Christian life in the prevailing culture, of showing how the life of Jesus and the theology of Paul bear upon the present.

But they go one challenging step further:

Our thesis is simple and controversial: execution of the central theological task requires a certain kind of affinity between the life the theologian seeks to articulate and the life the theologian seeks to lead. Put succinctly in the words of Jürgen Moltmann to a group of scholars discussing an earlier version of this chapter: without theological life, there is no proper theological work. (p117-118)

In other words, theologians must seek to live their theology.

The reason the language of the quotations seems ponderous is now clear. V&C use theological language to talk to theologians. I’ve tried to avoid heavier passages like this one:

Here, the question will be, How do the various systematic tensions entailed in any Christian vision of the good life (protological, hamartiological, soteriological, or eschatological) shape how Paul’s vision of fully flourishing life in the eschaton norms the way of life he commends to his churches? (p153)

V&C are not primarily addressing a lay person like me. But in order to communicate what theology should be about, they outline a theology of the flourishing life themselves, and this was what made me write this post.

Finally, note that V&C are not the only theological writers to have regarded salvation as a beginning. Similar ideas are found in the writings of others I’ve blogged about—see posts on Scot McKnight and Tom Wright (and again here)—but neither of them engages so strongly and deliberately with the flourishing life as V&C do.,

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