February 8 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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AGE
42

POSITION
Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and visiting professor at Evangelical Theological Faculty in Osijek, Croatia. At present he is on sabbatical at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton.

NOTABLE BOOKS
Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon, 1996)

After Our Likeness: The Church As the Image of the Trinity (Eerdmans, 1998)

If Richard Hays sees his vocation primarily in terms of pastors and the church, Miroslav Volf has a wider agenda: he wants to write theology that is rooted in the church but speaks to the world. When I met him in his Fuller Seminary office, he was in the final week of considering professorial positions at Duke, Yale, and Heidelberg, Germany—likely the first time that a professor at an evangelical institution has been sought by Duke, Yale, and Heidelberg. He eventually chose Yale, because he thought it represented the best chance to address a wide audience.

Volf is a slender man who speaks with a slightly formal, Old World politesse. Nevertheless, I had a sense in conversation that I was following him on the trail of something elusive and exciting. Volf, Duke's Greg Jones told me, has "a remarkable gift for illuminating vexing issues in theologically fruitful ways."

Volf's reputation has risen like a summer moon, huge and golden, particularly since publication of Exclusion and Embrace, a book that grew out of his experiences teaching seminary in Croatia during the wars that engulfed the former Yugoslavia. In the fall of 1991, Volf's entire seminary had to escape from its home in Osijek to live in exile, "crammed into one Reformed parsonage in a remote corner of Slovenia," Volf remembers. ...