Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

Trinity Journal, Fall 2007 by Myatt, William

Miroslav Volf. Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005. 247 pp. $12.99.

Miroslav Volf is the Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School. Well known for his book Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), Volf boasts readership from a variety of Christian traditions. In Free of Charge, he flexes his literary muscles by weaving theological savvy with contemporary language through an engaging writing style directed primarily at Christians-at-large; at the same time, the book furtively enters a recently rekindled debate on gifts and forgiveness.

Volf's impetus for writing Free of Charge occurred as part of a multi-year project funded by a Lilly Foundation grant. The assignment was "to write a book sketching Christian faith as a way of life and inviting people to embark upon it" (p. 239). As such, Free of Charge served as Archbishop Rowan William's (Anglican) official Lent book of 2006. Volf goes about his project by presenting two of Christianity's most fundamental actions, giving and forgiving as the organizational matrices by which one can present a basic introduction to the Christian life.

The book follows a well-crafted outline. After an introductory anecdote in which Volf reflects on his most celebrated gifts, his two adopted sons (see "The Gift of Infertility," ChrCent 122/12 [June 14, 2005]: 33), chs. 1-3 establish concentric circles formed around the epicenter of giving. The first chapter, "God the Giver," presents God as the quintessential exemplar of giving, while chs. 2 and 3 meditate on the ethics of giving ("How Should We Give?") and the possibility of giving ("How Can We Give?"). Volf introduces the second epicenter of the book, forgiving with a vulnerably personal story about the premature death of his older brother, Daniel. He then follows the pattern of the book's first section by exploring "God the Forgiver" in ch. 4, the ethics of forgiveness ("How Should We Forgive?") in ch. 5, and the possibility of forgiveness ("How Can We Forgive?") in ch. 6.

The rhetorical simplicity of these tides is misleading, since Volf silently presents his contribution to the modern debate on gifts and forgiveness. This debate, initially associated with French anthropologists Marcel Maus, Jacques Derrida, and George Bataille, has in recent years been brought into theological discussions by Jon Milbank's "Radical Orthodoxy" project. Milbank and Kathryn Tanner (Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001]) serve as two of Volf's primary interlocutors, although neither is expressly mentioned as such in Volf's text. At the risk of oversimplifying, one could observe that Volf's attempts to strike a middle ground in the debate by tempering both the obligatory framework of Milbank, where gifts (from God to humans) are given with an expectation of return, and the anthropologically optimistic framework of Tanner, where gifts are given without obligation. Volf's contribution is to live within the inherent, scriptural tension between obligation and freedom by finding the paradigm for his interpretive framework in the theology of Paul and (consequently) Luther.

As a spiritually engaged reader, I enjoyed Volf's book and preached through its contents during the summer of 2006. In a recent conversation with Volf, I expressed my opinion that the book read like a well-written sermon. Although not fully agreeing with my assessment, Volf did contend that his overarching desire was to present theology in a readable manner while attempting to add to the modern, gift-giving discussion. In light of the aloofness with which theology can often be written, Volf's approach is indeed welcome, and his book serves as a valuable introduction to the fundamental aspects of the Christian life.

William Myatt

Creighton University

Omaha, Nebraska