Volf Miroslav: Mostovi vjere - biblijske meditacije i teološke studije

Miroslav Volf: Bridges of faith - biblical meditations and theological studies

"In order to help the reader better understand these texts, it is necessary to present a short autobiographical outline of my work in Christian communities and my forays into theology. All this went hand in hand with the creation of these texts and preceded them.

I intellectually revived and discovered theology at the age of 16 in 1972. It happened shortly after I left my silent rebellion against my parents' calling. The key person in my intellectual development at that time was Dr. Peter Kuzmič, a guide whom I did not think I needed and wanted. One of the first books he put in my hands - which was a risky move - was by Bertrand Russell (1970). It was my introduction to theology, but the first book I read in the English version was C.S. Lewis's book, "Elementary Christianity". an apologist of the Christian faith - they set me on the path of informal study of philosophy and theology during the last two years of my high school education. It took place mostly during the late hours, and often into the early morning. From the very beginning I moved away from Russell's atheism and Lewis's Christian Platonism. I devoured the works of popular evangelical writers and influential non-evangelical theologians in theology, the first books I tackled were Wolfhart Pannenberg's early books, God and Man and Basic Theological Matters. At the age of 17, I was not ready for that aspect of theology. Another thinker became important to me before graduating from high school: Joseph Ratzinger and his Introduction to Christianity gave lectures in Tübingen in the spring of 1967. (The manuscript of those lectures is still in the theological library in Tübingen. The book was published in 1968, and today it is considered a classic of the Catholic theology of that period. I read it in 1973 in Croatian translation - as evidenced by the thick underlined sentences in that book. Finally, after my family moved from Osijek to Novi Sad when my father became a pastor in that city, I was exposed to Orthodox theology. At that time, Fyodor Dostoevsky's version of Orthodoxy became important to me; I remember reading The Brothers Karamazov at 36 hours, almost without any sleep. In the early 1970s, I also read the entire oeuvre of Herman Hesse - works like The Glass Bead Game - which took me into the world of thought and spirituality beyond the borders of Christianity. From the very beginning, my Christian orientation was broad. At its core, it was ecumenically open and exposed to wisdom from many sources."