The impulse to be better than others runs so deep in us that we’re seldom aware of it. Even if we understand that it contradicts our Christian convictions, the societal pressure to be superior – not to mention our innate longing – is powerful. Can we find a better way?

Miroslav Volf guided us in finding and embracing a better way. A theologian and bestselling author, he’ll discuss the ideas in his new book The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others is Making Us Worse. Finding new insights in familiar Biblical passages and the Christian tradition, he’ll equip us to defy our culture of merciless ambition. 

Special thanks to sponsor Brazos Press, and co-host Yale Center for Faith and Culture, for support of this event!

This transcript may contain errors and should not be used as an authoritative source.

Tom Walsh: We are grateful to each of you for joining us today. We have about 1500 people registered and we are grateful for your time and your interest. I understand about 200 of you are with us for the first time, and you all are located in places ranging from Senegal to Malaysia. So the concerns that we’re going to talk about today are indeed universal. If you’re new around here, a quick introduction. What is the Trinity Forum? We are a community of people engaged in a common effort to keep the historic Christian intellectual tradition alive in our time, to foster new growth in that tradition, for  cultural renewal, and to make it available to people everywhere. Many of you are part of this work as members of our Trinity Forum society community; thank you. And a special thanks to our sponsor today, Brazos Press, and our co-host, the Yale Center for Faith and culture. What we try to do in these conversations is invite thinkers with relevant, practical wisdom to help us live. We provide a hospitable place to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers. So turning to today’s theme, the impulse to be better than others runs so deep in us that we are seldom even aware o f it. And even if we are made aware of it and understand that it contradicts our convictions, the societal pressure to be superior, not to mention our innate longing for it, is powerful. To argue that our striving is misdirected, though, sounds like saying we shouldn’t let ourselves be so subject to the Earth’s gravitational pull.

Is there even a choice? Can we find a better way? Our guide in exploration today is Miroslav Volf. He is the founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and culture, and a professor of theology at Yale Divinity School. He’s developed and teaches the most popular humanities course at Yale, entitled Life Worth Living, which is now taught well beyond Yale, including in a federal prison. Miroslav has written or edited more than a dozen books, including Exclusion and Embrace, which was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and was named one of Christianity Today’s 100 Most Important Religious Books of the 20th century. He also coauthored Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, a  New York Times bestseller developed from his course at Yale, which we discussed with him on one of these conversations last year. After this conversation today, you may want to check out our podcast or video with Miroslav on that book. Today we’ll be talking about his latest book, published just a few weeks ago, entitled The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others is Making Us Worse. To our viewers, you’ll enjoy the book. It’s full of old friends: Soren Kierkegaard, John Milton, Saint Paul, the whole gang. And by the way, a bit later, I’ll tell you how you can get a signed copy of it signed by Miroslav while also supporting the Trinity Forum. Finally, I’ll note that Miroslav is a native of Croatia, where he grew up as a pastor’s son during Yugoslavia’s Communist era. Miroslav, welcome.

Miroslav Volf: Thank you for having me. Thank you for taking this time to discuss not so much the book, but the ideas that are behind that inform that  book.

Tom Walsh: Well, we always like to understand the story behind a book or really the ideas that that led you to. So what have you observed in people and in the world we’re now living in that made you decide to take up this topic at this time?

Miroslav Volf: Well, I mean, it’s a great question. What have I observed in people? Now,  I am one of the people, I take it. And so I can answer this question by reflecting on what I have observed in myself. And the story that I often tell is I’m walking  from one terminal to another in Chicago O’Hare airport. And to do so, you have to go through an underpass and there’s this great convenience of escalators on both ends and I choose not to use those because I think I’ll get a little bit of exercise as I’m climbing down and climbing up, going down and climbing up the stairs. And as I’m doing that, I see my fellow travelers on either side of me and I think of myself, oh, I’m a little bit better specimen of humanity. Whereas I am burning my calories and exercising. They’re burning fossil fuels. And then I think to myself, oh, I’m so great. And then next second, I think again, “What? This is a completely idiotic idea. You should be ashamed of yourself, ashamed of yourself, of thinking these thoughts.” So some such experience has been a motivation for me to think personally about this issue, but also to analyze the broader cultural trends and it’s true to say that we live in particularly competitive kind of culture where striving superiority is dominant mode of relating to others in many, many domains of our lives.

Tom Walsh: Well, let’s define our terms. So you call striving for superiority a social vice dependent on a shared system of values. What distinguishes striving for superiority, which you criticize as a vice, perhaps even a sin, from striving for excellence, which you praise—is a good thing?

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, I think that’s a very important distinction for the for the book. Striving for superiority for me is defined by striving to be better than somebody else. Striving for excellence is defined by striving to achieve certain ideal, irrespective of how I stack in comparison with others. And I think that distinction is really crucial. We have, in a sense, allowed in my own our own lives and societal lives to kind of transmute this striving for excellence into striving for superiority and to take striving for superiority, how we are better than others, to be the measure of our excellence.

Tom Walsh: So is that what you mean when you say it depends on a shared system of values, or it’s a social vice that it’s it’s it’s a comparative, fundamentally comparative exercise.

Miroslav Volf: It is fundamentally comparative exercise. So that’s one element of it. But the other element of it that striving for superiority also always assumes the third party that is observing what’s happening. So we have a kind of set of values of what counts as good that is socially negotiated, maintained by different standards depending on what we’re talking about. Say, ideal of beauty it used not to be a strike against you if you are not slim looking and buff. To the contrary, if you’re too slim looking, it used to be a sign that you are maybe a little bit malnourished or something of that sort. Whereas if you are kind of corpulent, that means that you’re somebody and somebody important, but you see that even just kind of bodily shape and size is a socially constructed kind of a value. And we live then in a world in which many of our values are not independently motivated in a system of values that we share, but rather are socially negotiated, and they constantly move and move in and change what counts as success. Yesterday doesn’t count as success tomorrow. That too, then, is a kind of socially mediated category and hence makes striving for superiority a kind of a social vice, primarily with detrimental impact upon the self.

Tom Walsh: Now, even if we take that to be true at an individual level, at a societal level, doesn’t it benefit us all? I think we’ve all been kind of taught over the centuries, really, that this striving for superiority is benefiting us as a whole. That’s it’s a basis for the prosperity of the West that many of us enjoy. So how would you respond to that?

Miroslav Volf: Let me just correct something. I misspoke in my last comments by describing the striving superiority primarily is detrimental to us as individuals. I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it has also very detrimental social and also ecological consequences. And I’m not ready necessarily to weigh the character of these detrimental consequences against one another. Just a footnote to correct that. But back to your question and indeed it has been in different periods of history thought that something like striving for superiority. In fact, you read it in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes, you have the idea that, you know, we observe what other people do and that makes us want to do better and improve ourselves. You say you have similar observations in ancient Greece. And of course, in the modern time, that has become a kind of standard mantra. And an example that is often given is is an example of sports. If there weren’t for competition we would not have as high level of athletic achievement in various sports. What we have forgotten, though, in the meantime for various reasons that I think need to be carefully explored, we have forgotten, though, that there are these detrimental consequences of striving for superiority. People like Adam Smith, for instance, which people might necessarily associate with a critique of striving for superiority because he is the granddaddy of the capitalist system, which has as its foundation, a certain sense of competition. At least that’s what we think. But he actually has a fairly robust critique of striving for distinction in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even more so, Rousseau and other figures in 19th century, with one of them I engage in the book. So this has been a widespread kind of tradition of critique, of striving for superiority, of which we are these days not aware. And we emphasize only this positive side. So how do we weigh positive sides versus negative sides? This would be the important question to keep in mind.

Tom Walsh: Well, one of the things to point out to the audience is this is a rather theologically oriented book. You draw heavily from the letters of Paul as well as the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible. So for those of Christian faith in the audience, are there any particular blind spots we may have around striving for superiority?

Miroslav Volf: Well, I mean, it’s interesting that striving for superiority is alive and well in the Western tradition, which claims to be under the influence of the Christian faith. And more generally, Christian theological tradition. Now, my sense would be that striving for superiority is a kind of social vice, which we have learned from the environment and then baptized: made it somehow a Christian virtue in the guise of something like meritocracy, of which we can speak as well. But I think we have to keep in mind also that the apostle Paul, a good chunk of his theology was shaped by pushing back against the idea that striving for superiority—in his case, striving for superiority, in being morally better, more aligned with with God’s law than somebody else next to me—he’s pushing against that and develops his whole theology of grace because he’s pushing against it, pushing against it in his own life, but pushing against that also in lives of his congregations.

Tom Walsh: Well, we’ll come back to Paul, because you do deal with him at length in the book. One of your arguments I found powerful or perhaps even convicting, is that striving for superiority tends to devalue our particularity as persons and our sense of joy in simply being human and in the service of that. You refer to a parable of a little lily. So can you share the story? Who created it and what it illustrates. 

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, that’s a wonderful story, or parable, I think we should say that Kierkegaard tells, and he tells it as he’s commenting on Jesus teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, that we should not worry. And then Jesus says, look at the lilies, they don’t toil, they don’t strive. And yet their heavenly Father creator, he clothes them in garments more beautiful than Solomon’s were, the most glorious of the kings in Israelite history. And then Kierkegaard makes out of this because Jesus uses it as a kind of worry about whether we for our daily necessities. Kierkegaard assumes the situation where kind of basic necessities are satisfied and then is attending to kind of worry about who we are and our standing with regard to others too often go hand in hand to worries. And so he’s picking out one dimension of that worry. And then he says, there was this little lily—field lily is what was in mind when Jesus was talking—and was growing close to a brook, a wonderful little lily. Satisfied. And then there were also birds there and Kierkegaard has in mind that Jesus mentioned look at the birds, not just the lily. But one of those birds was a naughty bird, Kierkegaard imagined, and then has befriended this little lily and started talking to lily about all the kind of stuff that he’s seen flying around. And one thing that he has seen that that bird has seen is, is a kind of more beautiful lilies than the little lily is. And he even names the crown Imperial lilies that he’s seen. And the more he talked about this, the more the little Lily become dejected about how she looked and so after a few visits, they decide what they should do is the bird should peck around the little lily and carefully uproot her and then carry her to be in the company of those Crown imperial lilies so that she, too would be admired and maybe in some ways become as they are. And the moral of the story is obvious. Kierkegaard doesn’t draw it really necessarily. We know that what happened when the bird carried the little lily to a different place. And the idea is that this striving, this bird has put that in our minds, and bird carries us to places where we would be actually much better than than others and better than we are right now, which would we have a kind of equality and maybe even be a best specimens. This kind of worry is what undoes us, creates a sense of inferiority in us, and we can’t experience ourselves as beautiful as a unique specimens of the creature that God has made.

Tom Walsh: Yes. So one of your one of the themes you really draw on is that the desire to be superior and the pain of being inferior can’t be separated, that they always go together. So yeah. Why is that? Why does the striving for superiority never lead to rest?

Miroslav Volf: So especially if you make this, if you think of it as a social bias, that is to say, there are observers and there are also competitors. And it happens to be then that there are always, as a rule, especially is the case in modern societies in which we can compare ourselves with anybody, anywhere in the world. There are always people who are below us a little bit, and that gives us a certain pride that we are better. And then there are always people who are above us and that give us a sense of unease with who we are ourselves. And that kind of sense of, and we live in dynamic societies, which is to say the there’s a constant movement up and down. We always hope up. And no position is then secure. So if you come to a particular position, this position is not secure. So you have a worry about your possible inferiority and worry that you won’t be able to achieve superiority. And it’s this place of worry that kind of creates a sense in the self. But I might not be worthy. Others are looking at me. They’re seeing me as inferior to somebody else. I have to kind of go up. I’m not adequate as I am. I have to make up for that inadequacy. And once I make up for that inadequacy, the game begins afresh. The joy lasts a very short while because competitors are at our heels.

Tom Walsh: As an example of that, you reference teenagers and children and social media as an example of how we tend to think striving for superiority will enhance our lives and then find out not so much.

Miroslav Volf: Yeah. And in some ways, it’s also those images are curated. We had experiences earlier and I think Toni Morrison in her book, The Bluest Eye, picks up on some of that, some of those earlier experiences, namely that we had cultural icons that were portrayed in a certain way, a certain sense of beauty. But even those icons, we don’t catch them early in the morning where they’re rubbing their eyes and they have puffy eyes and haven’t properly beautified themselves. We catch them at the greatest moment of glory. They have been made up by artists of makeup. And then that is projected to us, against which we are measuring ourselves. And that, I think, is happening in social media today as well. And then in a sense, you get this. Both the comparisons are universal, anybody can show up wherever they live can show up and kind of style themselves or be presumed to be better or have a certain kind of “yeses” or cliques that say that they are superior. And the kind of the struggle then becomes competition, becomes very difficult to sustain. And so the more one observes that the more one internalizes one’s own inadequacy. So it’s kind of almost like a perverse school of inadequacy that is being enacted there in front of our eyes, and we’re glued to it because we have this value of being somebody and superior in somebody else’s eyes.

Tom Walsh: Why is it that we tend to assume that being better at one thing, or better in one respect, makes us a better person in general?

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, that is a really great question. There’s a kind of falsehood involved in that, right? It doesn’t follow at all. That one thing—why is it that I don’t count all the things that I’m good and all the things that other people are good, right? That would be a fair comparison, in some sense. But even that, I think, would turn out to be problematic. So, the kind of sense that we get out of comparison is, we get it because we have come to believe that what we do, how others perceive us is who we truly are. So in some ways there’s a fundamentally problematic anthropology that underlies this, namely that our achievements, whatever those achievements, might be—aesthetic, moral, athletic, intellectual, you name those achievements—those achievements make us up to be who we actually are. And I think that’s a great lie, in fact, and I think the entirety of Apostle Paul’s theology pushes just against this kind of lie. And that’s pervasive today. We have what one might describe a narrative construction of identity. Whatever happened to me, however I reacted to whatever happened to me, whatever I have done, however I or others reacted to what I have done, that’s kind of what makes us up who we are. And then identity is identified with this person who this is the core of me in some ways, right? So there’s kind of one important strand in which we think about ourselves in this way. And that’s devastating for us because—-and just from the Christian standpoint, just as simply a lie. And to be engaged in this kind of comparison and then striving for superiority is a kind of existential lie enacted.

Tom Walsh: Right. In the book, you describe superiority and inferiority of worth or status as social fictions. But the reality is we all live as though they’re real much of the time, if not all the time. So how to replace them? What can replace them?

Miroslav Volf: Well, I mean, that’s what we try to. That’s how we try to raise our children, hopefully to see those through those as lies, as fictions that don’t have reality. That’s why I hope we understand Christian faith that it tells us that you don’t have to get up in the morning and make yourself presentable and beautiful to count in God’s eyes. And when you make yourself presentable and go into the world of achievement, you actually haven’t gained anything in terms of your standing before God. So that’s all at a kind of individual level, but I think we need something more than that. We need communities that will seek to act in those kinds of ways where these values that are fundamental to our humanity, that are fundamental to our faith, where they can be exemplified. And if you look at the writing of Apostle Paul, I write about this, you will see that he tries to apply this to the way in which his communities, in particular Christian community in Rome, but in Philippi as well, and above all, I think, in Corinth, behave and organize their lives. Once we start doing that, then it has kind of that ideal has taken root, communal root. Then we have a community which looks at us not through the eyes of a kind of lie about us, but through the eyes of the truth about us or the eyes of truth about us.

Tom Walsh: In your passages describing Paul’s letters to Corinth, he was addressing very concrete issues and conflicts among them, which resemble, in some cases, those we face today. Some don’t, but a lot do. And so his urging of the believers there was not just to be nice to those who were below them in status, but to treat all others as superior to themselves. Why do you think he put it that way?

Miroslav Volf: Yeah. And the way in which I interpret superior, is “more important.” I think that’s the right way to interpret that text that’s in Philippians 4—I’m sorry, Philippians 2:4. So if you think of it simply as superior, you might say, well, somebody’s superior, so when I play soccer, if I play soccer with somebody who’s played it, who’s 30 years younger than I am, they’re superior to me as players, right? So there are these judgments of superiority which I’m not against those judgments. It’s just thinking of your own worth that somehow depends on you being superior than others. So there are these judgments of superiority. And if I say simply that I treat others as superior to me, I would be sometimes lying. It would be simply the case that they aren’t superior. So where I interpreted it is to mean, oh, treat others as if, no matter what their qualities, as if they were more important than you. And when one reads that passage in the context of Jesus coming to save those of us and taking the form of humanity, we see that he was an example of treating us as if we were superior to him, which we, in fact, are not. And I think that way of reading it means, oh, anybody in this community I need to treat as if it would be good for me, or that it is good for me to actually serve them, to treat them as if they were superior. And I am there in order to make them, in a way, flourish: help them if they cannot do so, that they would be actually equality in the body of Christ.

Tom Walsh: You reference Milton’s description of Satan in Paradise Lost as being “un-delighted” in all the delight of God’s creation, because it’s not instrumental to his own project of superiority, Satan’s project. So in our lives, how do you see being “un-delighted” play out and how do we escape that?

Miroslav Volf: You know, it’s there everywhere in many ways, right? If we are into striving for superiority, we are uncomfortable if somebody is superior to us. And in order to lessen our discomfort with them being superior, we kind of tend to kind of lessen their achievement, or at least we cannot enjoy and rejoice in their achievement. So we need to craft them in a way that they wouldn’t usurp our space. So to say in that our place in that ranking that we have constructed or that society has constructed for us that has implications from the very pinnacle of political power, of economic power, of athletic achievement, of academic achievement—the domain where I am active—to just about all domains of life. We hate to read things about other people and therefore misunderstand what they’re saying, undermine what they’re saying. We hate to look at them and therefore see the negative and don’t see the positive. In a sense, the striving for superiority, it twists the way in which we see the world, twists the way in which we see ourselves. And therefore it kind of creates a form of the world, which is just a fiction. And I think it’s good to call it a lie, not simply a fiction. Lots of fictions are nice and innocent fictions that we have. They’re great in some ways, but this is a kind of lie, and it’s in interest of our own fragile egos to read the world in the way in which we read it, rather than rejoice in things that surround us.

Tom Walsh: Well, we’re getting a lot of great questions. So I’m going to turn to one of them in a moment. But before that, one that connects this argument to the moment, the cultural moment we’re living in. In this time, we’re particularly valuing things like change and movement and growth. All these dynamic sorts of concepts are really exalted in doing that. What are we missing? What are we failing to love and celebrate instead?

Miroslav Volf: In some ways, what we’re failing to appreciate is the good that is that surrounds us. It’s almost like we have—to put it in philosophical terminology—ontology of that which is not yet. Indeed, there is a philosopher who advocates this and block in some ways. Though I don’t want to rope him into everything that I’m going to say now as a consequence. But so that the being that what really matters is what is to come and not what already is. And it makes us blind and kind of trashes that which is. You know, we see that in our relationships with others, with friends, with our spouses. We see that in many, many other domains where what is we cannot stay with it, we cannot delight in it. We have to get something new, because otherwise we’d get bored with what is. And I think that’s a sign that what surrounds us, we are unable to recognize in what surrounds us intrinsic value. And so we flee into something new, something we think would be better. Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t improve. I’m saying that these two are closely—should be—united: celebration of what is and working for what could be better.

Tom Walsh: Well, let me turn to audience questions, and I’m going to try to bundle a few of them together that are on a similar theme. And then I’ll let you riff on it for a while if you’d like. So an anonymous attendee asks, for those who work in the marketplace, how can we strive for excellence and not superiority in mindset when we are judged precisely by our edge versus competitors? And then, on a similar note, what advice do you share for those seeking employment in the US workforce where not answering the question: what makes you the best person for this job? As if there could be no other competent candidates, is viewed as noncompetitive and even angers some potential employers.

Miroslav Volf: Yeah, I think the second one might be a little bit easier. I think we can honestly respond to that question: what makes you qualified for this job? Right? In some ways. And you can talk about your qualification without in any way having somebody that you are dissing let the employer make the comparative judgments. And even some of those things might be very difficult to execute. I mean, I’m in academic world and if we are promoting, when we are participating in the search committee or if we’re promotion committee, we stack candidates against each other and in fact asked the recommenders to compare them to one another. It’s a feature of our world that we have to, that we have to recognize, and some of it we can’t change. But we can change in some ways how we behave in that. The first question, which is to say that a whole economic endeavor is a kind of competitive nature. What I would really like to do is have a meeting of Christians in different domains and reflect on how do we take what is the profound Christian ideal, I think, and make it livable in the world as we inhabit more and more footnote.

Miroslav Volf: There are also, in the domain of certainly investment, folks who think that, in general, it’s a bad idea to compare yourself with others. And that’s Warren Buffett. He’s no mean kind of investor, right? One of one of the greatest, right? But his advice is always work in the area of your strength, rather than competing with others and trying to succeed where you might not have a kind of competitive edge, so to speak. But behind it lies, if I’m not mistaken, I’m no expert on Warren Buffett at all, but I’ve read a bit about him. Behind this, uh, is this idea that he always advises and for his 3 or 4 rules by which he lives. And one of those rules is always try to be everyday better than you were yesterday. So there’s a kind of competition that’s going on, which is no different than actually striving for excellence. I’m measuring myself with myself. I’m not measuring myself with somebody else. I may be disappointed that I haven’t achieved certain things and improved, but it’s improvement relative to where I am, not some imagined goal for which I’m striving, or some goal that is set by somebody else.

Tom Walsh: Thank you. Well, here’s a question from Amanda Heiner that I think flows well from that one. It seems like striving for an audience of one, God, and striving to be competent, fair, ethical and self-sacrificial cause one to be exploited and overlooked in many institutions, while those who are self-promoting and willing to betray others get ahead. How do we process this or reconcile this with Scripture?

Miroslav Volf: Well. It seems to me that it’s never been easy to be a responsible Christian in the world. And the question is whether we are willing to pay the price. There will be circumstances where maybe not this domain, but in many other domains, we will not be able to progress as much as otherwise we might if we embraced, if we if we don’t embrace the kind of the patterns of behavior that shape social relations. You know, one of the first public lectures that I delivered on this topic was, I was invited onto the Second World Congress of Christians in Sport. And I thought, “why did they invite me to speak at that Congress?” I gave keynote address, and I basically asked the question at that time, at the beginning of my research, I asked the question, I made a difference. What’s the moral value of being superior? What’s the value of being superior in sports? And then I distinguish between monetary value and reputational value. And I said, well, monetary value is really great. Messi was the highest paid player athlete in the world at that time. And every kid anywhere in the world knew who he was and was wearing his jersey. So reputation and money was there. But my question was what is the moral value of that? And at that time, I said, well, moral value of striving for superiority is exactly zero. Now, I think I overvalued it. In the meantime, I’ve come to believe that the moral value is a negative one and that’s what we need to figure out. I think in my own academic world, it would seem to me that that’s also possible in some ways. It may not succeed always. But again, this is the price that we sometimes pay. And it’s not even the price that Jesus said that we might be paying, namely, well, you know what he said. It can cost you a life and not a promotion.

Tom Walsh: Well, here’s a question that applies some of this in the church or faith sphere from Mark Buchanan. Is selfish ambition and vain conceit more toxic in a spiritual sphere? And he cites Luke 18, the story of two men going up to the temple to pray. Any thoughts on that context?

Miroslav Volf: I think it is very toxic. And no question about it. I think some of the religious ills that are enacted in the name of striving for superiority are some of the worst. Though, national superiority and striving for it to seem to me if not worse or at least second, very close second, and you can go down the lines. But I clearly I agree very much. And I think about what happened in the first, actually, first act of violence described in the Bible is Cain killing his brother Abel. And there is a compelling way to read that story that Cain was trying to shore up his superiority, that he felt he had with the help of God’s judgment and failing God’s judgment, that he was superior, but that God judged Abel to be superior. First fratricide is committed. So, that’s very much a problem.

Tom Walsh: There’s an interesting question on another topic of the moment from Phil Thompson. As AI continues to improve and take over creative human activities like drawing and coding, how is it going to impact this sort of inferiority complex, which up until now has been based on comparison with other humans? I’m already seeing discussion of people sort of giving up and wondering what the point is. If I can do their jobs better than they can.

Miroslav Volf: Yeah. So I think that may be actually—let me back up a little bit. AI may create and is likely to create a great deal of social disruption. How we deal with that is one of the great challenges of our time. I think that it will have tremendous impact on our lives, individual lives, and social lives. That’s a big question. But I don’t think that ought to impact us thinking that somehow AI diminishes us as if our worth came from being the smartest species, or as if the smartest among us are somehow superior to all the rest of us. I think this is a bit of overvaluing of kind of smarts. Angels are presumably smarter than we are. I’ve never been threatened by one in a sense, except, you know, the consequences of jobs that we do. But social consequences might be, but not really value consequences for us as human beings.

Tom Walsh: Well, just to follow up on that, in the book, you talk about a conception of glory, using that word as the foundation for the entire edifice of Paul and Milton and Kierkegaard’s thoughts around superiority. So could you just unpack that a bit?

Miroslav Volf: Yeah. So I think the best way to articulate this is—this actually doesn’t come, I don’t discuss it in the book, I discuss the glory is a very important concept in the book, and I think for the whole issue central. But in John’s gospel, famously, Jesus was glorious and glorified on the cross and in one of the really beautiful pieces of music, Bach’s Saint John’s Passion. There’s a kind of line that he, Jesus, was even in his greatest. Jesus is addressed. Even in your greatest humiliation, you were glorified. Now, I’m not sure whether who’s addressed, but basically talking about Jesus that he, even in his greatest, greatest humiliation, was glorified. Which is to say that Jesus was equally glorious before at the foundation, before the foundation of the world, and after he ascended, was seated at the right hand of the father as he was on the cross, that is to say, on the cross he was equally glorious as in at the beginning and ending point of that journey that came to, that was the deepest point was the crucifixion, which is to say that the glory of God isn’t glory of power, glory of capacities that God has. The glory of God is the glory of God’s love, and that glory is as great on the cross as it is in eternity.

Tom Walsh: A couple of conversations have come in around academia because that’s the world you’re in. So, for example, Diane Smith asks, keeping in mind the conversations about how the academy has been lowering its standards, can you speak to the necessity of striving for excellence, which challenges our human value against performative value? Are we by moving towards an emphasis on equity, are we missing some of the advantages of innovation that flow from striving?

Miroslav Volf: Well, I’m again, I wouldn’t want to be read as being against striving, right? So a certain kind of maybe lowering of the standards might be observed. It would be interesting to have a discussion of what explains that lowering of standards. But, yeah, my point would be that the academic world, we should do what we more generally ought to do. We should strive against a certain kind of excellent knowledge should be what we are after and, with full dedication do that. And discipline. I think we’re, many of us are distracted. We don’t—it’s hard to imagine that you would spend five hours a day kind of in deep study, how many emails will come during that period of time? And it’s not always true that we don’t have that time, it’s we don’t take that time because we let ourselves be distracted. But I would take it out of comparison and I would take it out if possible, also, from the climbing within the academic context. My very good friend, colleague, John Hare, some of you folks on the Zoom now will know him as one of the great living Christian philosophers. He always said that he did his best work after he was given tenure. When he was working toward tenure, he kind of had to work within the system in which academy works. Sometimes that works really well, sometimes that can be difficult for folks. But once he was free, he was able to do the best work. And that best work is the work that I think can be motivated without striving for any kind of superiority.

Tom Walsh: We have an interesting question from Jeff Ayers, who asks if striving for excellence is marked by striving for toward an ideal, how are we to understand the ideal we’re striving toward, except through moral exemplars to whom we must compare ourselves in order to judge our progress? Do you have a problem with that?

Miroslav Volf: No, I don’t have a problem with comparing ourselves with moral exemplars. The best example is Jesus is a fantastic moral exemplar. I compare myself all the time, but I—what I have a problem with is comparing myself to others and thinking of myself as really great because I’m closer to my exemplar than they are. So I’m not against assessing things in moral terms, and in terms of excellences. I have a problem of which defining myself with regard to others in comparative means, also comparative means in terms of being better than others at something that is actually valuable. Patting myself on the back. Now, we haven’t discussed this question. I have quite a bit of a discussion in my book on this, and it’s one of the great discussions right now, in various domains of life, namely question of meritocracy. I have a problem with meritocracy. Paul had a problem with meritocracy. I think Christian account of who we are will have a problem with meritocracy. So this has nothing to do with how close we are to the exemplar. This is ascribing to ourself the capacity and glory of being close to the exemplar.

Tom Walsh: Well, I think a lot of people would be interested in hearing a few more thoughts on this meritocracy question, since you raise it and it is discussed so much now. Could you go a bit deeper on that?

Miroslav Volf: Well, so I’m not very keen on it and I’m not keen on it where it’s being used. I’ll put it this way. This is not how I put it in the book, but it’s a different way of expressing the idea. Ask me, for instance, how much of the success that I’ve had, a little bit of some success, okay? So how much of that success is to be ascribed to me? Okay? If I’m honest, when I calculate some kind of calculus of ascription of achievement, right? —which would then determine how much merit should be ascribed to me, right? If I say maybe 3%, 97%, probably, is to be ascribed to many different sources, ultimately to God, but, even if not God, you know—where I was raised, what kind of genes I got, all sorts of things influences in life. And if I trace all of that, I can imagine scenarios that would be completely going the other way, because there is this one little thing that happened and shifted the balance, right? So, what kind of merit should I be given? What should I be given for this 3% difference? I don’t know. And then I ask myself, did I do that rightly? Calculate this. And I think, well, likely not. I haven’t even said a word about how God figures in all of this. It’s just a completely kind of secular mode of analyzing merit. God crosses it even more than simple our calculus of merit. And for that reason, I find meritocracy and emphasis on meritocracy not particularly helpful, actually.

Tom Walsh: In the book, you and we’re going to close in a moment. But you mentioned drawing from Paul’s letters, but also from the narratives in the Hebrew Bible and the life of Jesus. You say that treating others as superior to ourselves fundamentally reflects the character of God. Why would you say that?

Miroslav Volf: Well, it seems to me that’s what God does on the cross for us. Luther has this marvelous, marvelous image of God. And he does that in this—his commentary on Magnificat. And he says, well, God is called in that Magnificat, God is called Almighty, or the highest. God is the highest. If God is the highest, that means there’s nobody above him. God never looks above. There’s nothing there. Nobody’s equal to him. God doesn’t look to the left. God doesn’t look to the right. Front, back. Nothing is there. The only place where God looks is down. To those who are far below and furthest down, Luther, put it this way, further somebody is away from God, the more God—better God sees him. It’s a strange optics that he employs and Luther is playing, obviously, with images, not a metaphysical statement. This is a statement about God’s moral character. And I think one sees that, actually, that God chose us, chooses those who are not of a particular repute or qualities. This is true in the choice of Israel. It’s true in the choice of disciples and early Christians. I think it’s true in the choice of all of us. God attends to those who are weak, who are troubled and so forth. And in that sense, I think, God is the one who does not attend to self-described superiors. He had God attends to those who are, “nothing.” And, strictly speaking, again, this is maybe a whole other session of discussion, strictly speaking, we all, before God, are nothing. Not because we don’t matter, but because the entirety of who we are has been given as a gift to us.

Tom Walsh: Thank you. Well, in a moment, we’ll give Miroslav the last word. But first for our viewers, immediately after we finish, on your screen, you’ll see an online feedback form. Would appreciate you filling it out. For doing that survey, we’ll give you a free digital copy of the Trinity Forum reading of your choice. We’ve published over 100 that you can choose from, and then tomorrow we’ll send all of you who registered an email with the link to today’s video, some discussion questions, and links to register for our upcoming events. Please share it onward! We also hope you’ll join us in our community, the Trinity Forum society, and the link to do that is in the chat. As a special incentive, if you become a member today with a gift of $150, you will not only receive four of our readings in the mail during the year, but we’ll also send you a signed copy of Miroslav’s book so you can go deeper with the ideas we’ve just started to discuss here today. Your membership and support helps keep these conversations free. Together, let’s keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive. Renew it for generations to come, and make it available to everyone. Some of our upcoming events you can register for: on June 20th we’ll have the entrepreneur Uli Chi talking about humility and leadership. And then in July and August, we’ll have Beth Moore talking about how to stay faithful to our callings, Karen Swallow Prior on her new book on vocation, and Graham Tomlin discussing Blaise Pascal. It’s also a good time to subscribe to our podcast. Some of our recent ones feature Tom Holland, Curt Thompson, and Warren Kinghorn and many others who are very edifying. With that, over to you, Miroslav, for the last word.

Miroslav Volf: You know, it’s hard for me to do last words, but the last word that always comes to my mind when I think about these things. Let’s dare trust in the God who comes down to serve those who are a refuse of society. And let’s trust in that unconditional love of God that takes those of us who are nothing and places us to become sharers of the community of those who are God’s beloved children.

Tom Walsh: Thank you so much, Miroslav, for these powerful thoughts, for sharing this time with us. And thanks to all of you for joining us today. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Miroslav Volf: Goodbye. Thank you.