Glimmerings | Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf & Christian Wiman
I love this picture from Christianity Today of Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf. It envisions what I see when I think “Titanic minds,” which is what came to me over and over as I read this book.
#2 - Glimmerings | Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian - 5*
Miroslav Volf & Christian Wiman
2026
I've read a lot of Christian Wiman and heard him at the Festival, but I haven't read anything by Miroslav Volf, though I have heard of him. They're both Yale professors. It was a very good book. Deep. What Titanic minds those two are. They usually take walks around Yale together, but this book is a collection of letters they wrote to each other while Wiman was undergoing cancer treatment. He's had cancer multiple times and has been close to death several times.
There were lots of gems:
MV: I am saved by God’s faithfulness, not primarily by my faith. (page 4)
I always feel befuddled when Jesus says, after performing a miracle, “Your faith has made you whole.”
CW: I find it very consoling to think of my faith not mattering so much, of it being mostly a form of patience.”
He writes about having a hunger, “a restless and appetitive drive” for faith of two types, a good hunger and a bad one:
CW: The former [the good hunger] lives with no expectation of permanent fulfillment. “Glimmerings are what the soul’s composed of,” as Seamus Heaney puts it in “Old Pewter.” One gathers one’s soul, one’s god, fitfully, fugitively, and is content with that.” (page 7)
Hence the book title. :) It reminds me of Parker Palmer’s description of seeing glimpses of God, or hope, or something like that when he was clinically depressed, immobile with depression. He describes seeing a kind of wild creature hidden in the forest, glimpsing it only briefly now and then.
MV: I am less reaching for God than recognizing, at times, that God is holding me. (page 10)
I love this way of expressing the feeling I have that there is a bedrock, a foundation, within me of God’s love and my trust in it, even when I may not recognize or feel it.
MV: My love can be love only to the extent that it participates in God’s love, or, rather, to the extent that God is doing the loving through me. (page 13)
Oh. May God love through me.
MV: Our lives are not in our control, and whoever controls them rarely seems to have our best interests in mind…
I trust God even when God isn’t doing what seems reasonable to think that God should do…Hope is trust on tiptoes, said Charlie Moule, a Cambridge New Testament scholar…
[H]ope isn’t a reasonable expectation that some determinate positive goal, the hope’s object, will become reality. Instead,…hope is a way of living into the future with objects or expectation themselves only vaguely and tentatiely known. And lightly held, too, with a readiness to recognize as the hope’s fulfillment even things that weren’t explicit in expectation…
Hope, [Luther] writes, transfers a person ”into the unknown, the hidden, and the dark shadow, so that he does not even know what he hopes for.” And then, miracle of miracles, in the arrival of that which was beforehand not known or not fully known, I recognize with joy the object of my hope!
Christ…both fulfilled and transformed hopes. (pages 103-104)
“Hope is trust on tiptoes.” OMG.
And, “miracle of miracles,…I recognize with joy the object of my hope!”
Hope, glorious hope!!!
These are only a few gems in the first third of the book. I think I need to read and re-read it many times.