00:00:10.840 - 00:00:26.760

this year's E. C. Westervelt lecturer is Dr Miroslav Volf, who serves as Henry B White, Professor of systematic theology and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School.

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Dr. is widely regarded as one of the leading Christian theologians of the 21st century. He received his bachelor's degree from the Evangelical Theological Faculty at Ocr Croatia , his M. A. From Fuller Theological Seminary

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in Pasadena and his doctorate from the University of Tubingen , under the direction of juergen moellemann. Prior to teaching at Yale. He held academic positions at Fuller Seminary and the Evangelical Theological faculty in Croatia. Over

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the course of his career, Dr Wolfe has written 16 books on enormously varied topics. He has reflected on the significance of work, reconciliation, the trinity , memory, islam, the church and public affairs

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in the christian life. One of his books, exclusion and embrace, was the recipient of the 2002 Grawemeyer award and a subsequent volume, after our likeness earned the Christianity Today book award. Wolf is a

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theologian who defies easy categories. He is a systematic theologian who is intensely concerned with practical disciplines. He is passionate about the future of theology as an academic and ecclesial discipline while also being critical of some contemporary

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developments in the academy and the church. He is a deeply committed churchman who recognizes the need for dialogue with persons of other religious traditions and in an age when the churches as fractured as our society, Wolf

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is a rare theologian who is read and appreciated by a wide variety of communions, mainline protestant roman catholic and evangelical audiences all hold him in high esteem and rightly so. His writings are worth reading again and

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again and again. In recent years, valves attention has turned to the subject of the flourishing life. This theme is captured at the beginning of his most recent book for the Life of the World, where

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he writes the flourishing of human beings and all God's creatures in the presence of God is God's foremost concern for creation and should therefore be the central purpose of theology. This short readable volume offers an extended plea

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for christian theology to recover its most critical task, a vision of life in which all God's creatures flourish . This is a manifesto that the Austin Seminary faculty discussed at length in conversation earlier this year, it

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provided a challenge for our own work as theological educators and as inspiration as we continue in this critical and yet mysterious vocation, that challenge will no doubt continue . In this year's Westervelt lecturers trampling on pearls theology

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and what matters most dr Wolfe welcome to Austin Seminary . We look forward to your words and the vision of flourishing that you bring to us today. Yeah . Mhm. Good day to all of you,

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those who I see and also I understand some who I don't. So um it's great to be here . I have been to Austin before, but it's my first time on this campus and it's a beautiful

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place to be. I love the architectural integrity of the place. It's a and of course I've known um many of your faculty and collaborated with some Cynthia in particular, so it's great to be here.

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So I will be speaking about theology, I'm a theologian and theologians reflect about many other things, but sometimes we need to reflect upon our own task as well. And as I was working on this task

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of rethinking the task of theology, I was thinking about my own, I don't know, career as a theologian or even the history as a theological student , that may be a better, a better way

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to describe myself, you know, one of the greatest reformed and christian theologians of any time freely. Schlein Maher always talked about himself as a student of theology, signed his name as a student of theology

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. That's a good, good idea. So if I think how many years I've been a student of theology, Well, it's about 46 years. I started when I was just turned 16, and I

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can tell you that there hasn't been a single day has been a single hour, that I have doubted myself choosing that as my colleague, I'm very happy as a theologian, um but I'm not very happy

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about the state of theology, so, so you'll say you'll have a hear lectures of a happy theologian unhappy about theology. Um and I'll try to explain why I think both of these things, why I'm

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happy to be a theologian, as well as why I think the theology needs to be kind of redone and the book, my lectures are based on this book for the Life of the World. It is

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primarily about academic theology. But one of the things that I am deeply convinced is that the split between academic theology and lay theology, he is a pernicious split. I see these two as deeply and intimately

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United. I think of theology as being something like intelligence of faith or the mind of faith or faith with its thinking cap on. That happens in everyday life that christians as christians lead. They act theologically

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, they think and accompany their practices by thinking about them. It happens with folks who are ministers, it happens with folks who have a variety of other callings and who my my friend chris Weidman calls accidental

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theologians who have been trained as theologians, but nonetheless , as writers, as artists or doing other types of professions, they think theologically about their discipline about the world. And then there are few of us

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who are also academic theologians. I think they comprise a unity. And what unites us ought to unite our tribe is that we are after seeking to make our christian practices faith intelligible to us companies as we

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go, living our faith. Now, I think theology academic theology primarily, but also other forms of theology are in crisis today. When you look at special academic theologians, you can then distinguish between two

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types of crisis in which theology finds itself. one type of crisis you may call external and the other one you can call internal. External is how theology is being perceived. Internal is how theology is being

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practiced. Now let's take a few moments to reflect about these two types of crisis. First, external crisis of theology. Now, when two theologians, young theologians meet, it won't take them 15 minutes

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to talk about job market. Yeah, uh we've spent so many years and so much money getting this degree, but we're not sure whether we can actually get unemployment and in fact, we're not sure that

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if we get the employment will be paid sufficiently in order to pay those bills that we have incurred or even just to put food on our tables. There's a theologians are facing just like humanity. Scholars and

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others as well are facing a shrinking market and it's a problem certainly now, but it's not just that market for employment is shrinking. The audiences of theologians are shrinking as well. If you ask who reads

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theologians today And if you think well academic read academic theology strictly academic theology, very few people actually do . Their books are books in libraries often and if they're really technical, they're going to be published if

00:10:09.530 - 00:10:24.460

they get published in about 400 copies to be distributed in the libraries and used by specialist If you're a little bit luckier and write books that are slightly slightly more popular, first printing of our book is going

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to be something like 1500 copies. And if we're lucky, we're going to have a second printing and it's and if we reach something like 20,000 copies, this is kind of an achievement of course, there

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are stars among us to and these they published books that are sold in wide variety of copies. But it's interesting that there tend to be kind of theology critical types of books. Often we can reflect about

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why that may be the case. So audience is shrinking. Job markets are not there, but that's not the worst part of it. The reputation of theologians suffers a great deal if I go on the

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flight and I sit next to somebody and they asked me, what do you do? All right? I never say I'm a systematic theologian. Mhm. Mhm. I used to say that system, a

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system systematic what and so I have to explain system and I have, oh, my God, I'm not going to do this. So. So for a while I was saying I'm not system, forget

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about systematic part of it, by the way. In any case, I think the systematic city for theology is a kind of problematic term, because you can build system around, on the one hand,

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having God who is beyond comprehension, and on the other hand, having human beings whose chief feature is also their inexplicable as a person. So you can have you can have a set of integrated convictions,

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but systematic systematic city is too much to expect. So I don't say systematic field. I'm not leave the Visa and coherent but not systematic. Okay, so so but I used to say I'm theologian right

00:12:22.130 - 00:12:33.890

? And so theologian. Right? So I say they pay me money to think about great questions of life. Okay, So maybe I'll get some interest there or I'll give an example of the kind of

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question that I that I engage with and then conversation may start going, but that's in the general popular . If I talked to my colleagues in other disciplines , theology is not a particularly respectable, respectable field

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. We don't have any huge discoveries to give, to put to our credit. We have no idea how to never it never would have occurred to us how to explain why in a crater on Mars there

00:13:03.840 - 00:13:18.380

is a mountain that's 3000, m high. We had no tools to do anything of the sort in terms of explaining them. And therefore we are not kind of cool as a, as, as,

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as intellectuals. And of course we have no practical discoveries to uh, to boast off gps. We haven't invented or whatever you may want to want to name everything. That's cool. Right. In trips

00:13:33.450 - 00:13:52.140

of our technological um, developments, theologians haven't played any part in it. So, the reputation of theologians also is a relatively, relatively well. It suffers a great deal. That's the external crisis.

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Folks perceive us talking about external crisis and reputation. Often people, people, my colleagues at Yale giving it to school, is up on the hill. Uh, and sometimes people call call this a God

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Hill. And and my colleagues have no idea what we do up there on the God hill. Mm All right. So we have to do a little bit of explaining and one more maybe anecdote about reputation

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of theology. Um, some years back when Larry Summers was president of Harvard, I was asked to consult in the search for a dean. And I remember one sitting with Larry Summers having, having a

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lunch as I was doing the consulting consulting work and he told me Miroslav, you know if Harvard was to be founded today, it would not have a divinity school. And I said you're looking for Dean

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for it. Um, but that's exactly that's exactly right. What used to be the Queen of Sciences , right at the very heart of all the entire learning is now kind of old lady in the corner

00:15:13.410 - 00:15:35.850

of the university endeavor. And lucky if some attention is paid to her, let's look at the internal crisis that's external, Internal. now that's going to be a contestant thing. But external crisis is fairly

00:15:35.850 - 00:15:48.220

simple to describe and I think most people would agree with the analysis. But once I start talking about internal crisis it's going to be a contested, contested matter. I think one of the aspects of the

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internal crisis of theology, crisis of its purpose is that theology has increasingly become predominantly a descriptive discipline. It's tried to aligned itself with what other disciplines a bubble, I think also what natural discipline natural sciences

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are doing in a kind of social mode. So national sciences you have who have highest reputation method a logically, then you have social sciences, then you have humanities, humanities are trying to align itself as

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much themselves as much as possible to the rationality of natural sciences and then become very much descriptive disciplines. Theology participates in that as well. And that's often a description of theologians as historians. We study Christianity

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in its various aspects and inform about the nature of Christianity as a phenomenon just like other people study other religions. But we don't seek so much to articulate a fresh of faith. For today, that seems

00:17:03.400 - 00:17:25.550

less of a task of theology. Majority of theologians we are more descriptors but we are less of a gods. I personally think that's a fundamental problem with theology because theology, as I suggested earlier is intelligence

00:17:26.140 - 00:17:44.660

of Faith, which is to say that cos faith as it's being lived today doesn't simply describe that faith but critically accompanies it and guides the faith in living itself out. No, if we see ourselves primarily

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as doing the work of description now we often also want to offer guidance but then we do so as amateurs, not as experts. And then we very predictably fall into two camps. You can guess what

00:18:00.940 - 00:18:12.080

these two camps are going to be there going to be conservatives among us and they're going to be progressives among us. And what do some what do the conservatives do? Well, I'm going to be a

00:18:12.080 - 00:18:32.360

little bit unfair both to progressives and conservatives for rhetorical purposes. The conservatives tend to complain why the that the world isn't like the world was of their pious grandparents. That's your fundamentalists for you, right?

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Why isn't America Great. Again, from theological standpoint , that's a kind of basic complaint. And we figured it out how do we somehow return the culture back to the place from which it has falling in

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the progressive camp? Well, we progressives, we do what progressives always do. We we combat three most kind of the the the the negative trinity which progressives retreats. Progressives attack. First, we attacked

00:19:18.260 - 00:19:34.050

any limits on our freedom. Any forms of exclusion and all forms of suffering. Don't put limits on my freedom, don't exclude don't cause any suffering. And theology ends up being involved in the project of

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making sure that these things don't don't happen. Um and we fall into what are actually pre existent camps of conservative critiques jeremy odds and of progressive complaints about limits to freedom of the exclusion and to suffering.

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Now, I want to ask you this, how much theology do you need? Yeah. In order to sing your jeremy, it's well, just about as much as donald trump has how much theology do

00:20:22.370 - 00:20:37.840

you need to be against limits to freedom against exclusion against suffering? Not much more than Bernie Sanders. Now, if that's the answer to the question of how much theology do you need to do the normative

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job that theologians do, then you might say, why are we studying theology at all? What's the good of theology simply to employ religious vocabularies? Two shore up positions that other take and assume on non

00:21:02.650 - 00:21:30.580

theological grounds to say in the broken english, what others are saying in perfectly fine Oxford Oxford Cambridge accent . Who needs theology now? Your present, that is uh scratching his head. And he's asking,

00:21:30.580 - 00:21:52.960

why on earth have I asked this guy to speak ? Mhm. At the reunion about nobody on this planet needing theology. And by inference, I take a theological schools and everything that happens in these beautiful

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halls. But right at the point in our cultural development, when nobody seems to want or need theology , theologies needed the most. That's the basic conviction that I have not the theology as we tend to

00:22:23.650 - 00:22:45.760

do it. But I think theology as has been practiced through many centuries. I think theology most fundamentally and that's true of Les theology as well as an academic theology ought to be true of. Academic theology

00:22:48.020 - 00:23:17.040

seeks to answer the most the important question of our lives. What is the most important question of our lives? It's what is the truly human life? What is the good life? What is the life

00:23:17.040 - 00:23:47.890

that is truly worth living? What is truly flourishing life now? Earlier I spoke how sciences and technology dazzle us and I'm dazzled by science and technology as anybody else is. And I don't think it's only

00:23:47.890 - 00:24:08.610

matter of being dazzled but matter of being served in important place. But science is cannot answer this most important question of our lives. What is the true life? What is the good life? Imagine experiment

00:24:08.610 - 00:24:30.480

of this sort imagine you give up the privacy completely and imagine companies like google facebook and so forth. Get even more intrusive than they already are and they learn everything about you every single conversation that you've had

00:24:30.490 - 00:24:51.860

. Every single core piece of correspondence that you've engaged in. Every single purchase that you've made, every single deliberation that you've undertaken. Alexa is listening and recording and creating a profile of you now that's not

00:24:51.860 - 00:25:14.320

so far from actual reality. Yeah. Even though there are limits to private but imagine that you remove those limits to privacy. So an algorithm would then know you better than you know yourself. If you

00:25:14.320 - 00:25:27.000

ask what this person is going to next by, they'll pretty much be able to predict where you're going to go for a vacation whatever you're going to. In terms of predicting your behavior. Such algorithm will

00:25:27.000 - 00:25:48.270

be much better than you are in terms of predicting also what you will want and desire. They'll do better than you. But the one thing such algorithm could not tell you is what you ought to desire

00:25:48.940 - 00:26:10.540

, what kind of human being you should be. That question is not factual question descriptive question on the basis of stuff that's known about you, that you can make an influence, you can make an inference

00:26:10.540 - 00:26:25.600

of what you might want to project yourself to be , but not who you should project yourself to be what you should like. It's a normative question. And that normative question was a question that has engaged

00:26:25.610 - 00:26:48.160

over the centuries, great philosophers and great religious traditions , including the christian factor. That question what you should do, what the criteria on the basis of which you decide what you should do should be what

00:26:48.170 - 00:27:03.770

kind of human being you should be, I should be. That's the question. That's the question of the good life, that's the question of the true life. That's the question of the truly flourishing life

00:27:06.440 - 00:27:25.410

and all the great as I said, religious traditions , I philosophical traditions they all emerged emerged at what some scholars describe as axel thru axle transformations, which is to say somewhere around the fourth century, fifth

00:27:25.410 - 00:27:41.980

century Bc. Throughout the world. You have a shift away from what some people describe, Charles taylor , for instance, has described as natural nodes of are flourishing to something that was much more complex and

00:27:41.980 - 00:27:57.510

natural modes of our flourishing is. Well, you ask yourself, what do you, what do most people naturally quote unquote desire? Well we desire health , wealth, longevity and fertility. You've got these

00:27:57.510 - 00:28:17.240

and you pretty much as an animal. If you can you can survive and thrive even. But at the time of axial transformation, uh axel transformations are multiple. Put, let me rephrase it. Axel

00:28:17.240 - 00:28:36.010

transformations are motivated by the idea that these natural amounts of flourishing are not adequate to express our true humanity . The all of these great philosophical traditions, they indicate that there's something more to us than simply these

00:28:36.010 - 00:28:49.100

natural modes of flourishing. And in fact that we will properly be able to flourish, only went to use a quotation from the bible, both from jesus and from the martorana. Me only when we do

00:28:49.100 - 00:29:10.560

not live by bread alone, when we are open our transcendence and when this transcendent world frames what happens in our ordinary life. And so all these great traditions are modes of thinking about what truly flourishing life

00:29:10.570 - 00:29:26.100

is to be. Now, recently, I've just finished reading a book uh entitled why why why why should one be a pagan? And it builds quite a bit on Friedrich Nietzsche. And if you take

00:29:26.100 - 00:29:42.440

Nietzsche and some of the recent reflection of paganism, then you'll say well, even paganism is a kind of reflection of what a flourishing life should be. So, that's the great question of our lives.

00:29:42.550 - 00:30:00.170

Now. As it turns out in contemporary societies, there is no agreement on what the good life he is. There is a profound disagreement on that very question. Indeed. It is one of the features

00:30:00.170 - 00:30:17.180

of modernity that we don't agree on the question of the good life. Many philosophers, sociologists have noted that Alasdair Macintyre, he's probably the most famous one in his book after virtue. He bemoans the lack

00:30:17.180 - 00:30:33.410

of agreement on the question of the good life. In wide swaths of society. We have basically plurality of the visions of the good life, but it's not just that we have a plurality of visions of

00:30:33.420 - 00:30:53.500

the good life. Something has also happened two the way in which we construe what the good life is and here's of I'm following sociology german sociologist by the name of Hartmut Rosa in sketching how that shift looks

00:30:53.500 - 00:31:15.660

like. Since we cannot agree on the goal of human life, the end of human life, the purpose of human life on what the good life is . We start concentrating on the means to achieve whatever

00:31:15.670 - 00:31:29.100

vision of the good life or true I life we have and as it turns out, we have a very tenuous relationship to our vision of the good life . For the most part, we think of it

00:31:29.110 - 00:31:41.800

in terms of our dreams. So if you talk to your to your kid and you have somebody listening to you on the side or even you listen to your heart what you're going to be telling the kid

00:31:41.810 - 00:31:52.730

, you can sit them down, you can look at their qualifications, you can look at their natural propensities and then, almost as a rule, you will always add the most important thing, but just

00:31:52.730 - 00:32:09.670

make sure to follow your dream. If you don't follow your dream, no matter what else you do , you cannot dr the car of your life into wrong direction. You're going to find yourself at the

00:32:09.670 - 00:32:25.730

place where you don't want to be. You've got to follow your dreams. That's a dubious advice by the way, because those dreams are quite ephemeral, Especially at the age of 16, especially at the

00:32:25.730 - 00:32:44.640

age of 21, even at the age of 62 , mind you my dreams and I'm quite aligned with purpose is that I feel that I ought to have . But The problem also is not that you have

00:32:44.640 - 00:32:54.320

a dream that that it ends up being stable. So you actually drive your car for 15 years, life scar for 15 years and you find yourself in the direction that you don't want to be. You're

00:32:54.320 - 00:33:08.310

smarter than that, right? So your dreams change our period of time. So what do you do if you don't have a vision of a good life ? But you have a shifting and changing dreams for

00:33:08.310 - 00:33:28.270

your life? Well you need resources, okay? You need means that you can deploy independently of how your vision of life. Your dreams for life change of. Very pragmatic about this. And so we

00:33:28.270 - 00:33:37.940

concentrate on means. So what do you have? What kind of resources do you need? So you you need monetary resources, economic resources. If you don't have those, you won't be able to put

00:33:37.950 - 00:33:52.810

bread on your on your table. It won't work . You need reputational resources. You need people to think well of you. Otherwise you won't be able to get a job, you need educational resources because

00:33:52.810 - 00:34:06.620

you won't be able to get the job that you really would want, which will provide the kind of life that you desire to have. Let you realize your dreams. You need aesthetic resources. You need

00:34:06.620 - 00:34:20.060

to dress in a certain way. You need to when you look in a certain, in a certain way and so forth. You need wide variety of resources in order to achieve your changing dreams well.

00:34:20.740 - 00:34:42.930

And so the business of life. What indeed the purpose of education, the purpose of major modern institution ends up being to provide us with resources to fund and be able to pursue the changing dreams that we

00:34:42.960 - 00:35:00.570

have. That's why the universities, we don't talk too much about the purpose of life universe. American colleges and universities, as colleague of mine has put it in his famous book. Have given up on

00:35:00.570 - 00:35:19.350

the purpose of life on the meaning of life, but we haven't given up on providing resources. Two students, that's what we do. Um now there's 2, 2 problems at least with concentrating on resources

00:35:20.440 - 00:35:38.970

. It turns out that means to life very quickly morph into purpose. A purpose of life. You can see that most easily and has been noticed for centuries about money. Money is a quintessential resource means

00:35:39.840 - 00:35:57.690

you can't eat it, you can't you can pile it. But I mean but there's nothing. Money is nothing and yet it is everything right. And so your entire life can resolve revolve around creating more

00:35:57.700 - 00:36:14.510

of the recent monetary resources for life that you hope to live. I think the same is true about education, but we don't want to admit that often . The same is true about reputation. How many

00:36:14.510 - 00:36:28.420

likes do you need on facebook? Right. When when is enough? There is no enough right enough . Depends on competitively how much your friend has, right or somebody else has, then you know exactly

00:36:28.420 - 00:36:50.860

where it is, which is to say it's constantly a moving target. And so it is that our resources become our ends. Um, sociologists on whose work I base these comments have said, we are

00:36:50.860 - 00:37:19.640

like a painter who is obsessing about how her studio looks, the quality of her materials where the light falls. Um, every external setting so much so that she never gets actually to paint. So that

00:37:19.640 - 00:37:52.990

working on your studio ends up being your life project . And so you miss the purpose of life by making creating means to achieve purpose of life, purpose of your life. Now in this situation, if

00:37:52.990 - 00:38:12.180

this is roughly and remotely the picture in which we find ourselves, we the most important thing that can happen to us is for somebody to shake us and wake us up and tell us what you have made

00:38:12.180 - 00:38:35.520

. The purpose of your life is debasing you as a human being. You're squandering your very humanity in multiplicity endeavors in which you are undertaking for. Human beings do not live, buy bread alone. Do

00:38:35.520 - 00:39:02.750

not live primarily by bread. What do human beings live by? What are the pearls for? Which ? What is the pearl for each of which it is worth selling absolutely everything you've got. Even when

00:39:02.750 - 00:39:30.010

I put this question in this way, people become uncomfortable, I become uncomfortable. Yes. If you ask Socrates, if you ask jesus, if you ask buddha um the buddha, they'll tell you there

00:39:30.010 - 00:40:01.660

is something more important than resources for life for which all resources, if they're going to make any sense , ought to be resources and not and ends now , I think the purpose of theology is to articulate

00:40:01.660 - 00:40:34.010

deserve, articulate, to persuade 1st of four, the theologian about what truly matters in our lives, but we have unlearned even to think in these categories . And this is why I say this is not

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a matter about what the nature of academic theologies, but what the nature is of this ordinary theology which we all employ living our ordinary lives. Are we ready to think and be challenged by the message of

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jesus who says the Kingdom of God is like merchant who saw this incredible person and I went and sold absolutely everything he got in order to purchase it. It's like a person who stumbled on the treasure hidden

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in the ground and he said, wow, I've got to get that field because everything else is a lesser value than that feel now that treasure. Now , that's the true life. The task of christian

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theology, I believe, is to discern. You have to discern it. Not everything that looks like a pearl. He's a pearl of great value to articulate, to give yourself a reason why on earth

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should you leave everything behind, sell everything you've got in order to buy that? I always find as a theologian, did I need reasons to live the way I know I ought to live. In fact

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, most of a lot of books that I write , I don't I don't write for anybody else writing for myself, exclusion, embrace, which was mentioned probably my most well known book hasn't been written for

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anybody. I had no audience in mind. Zero audience. I was the audience of the book that I was writing because I needed reasons to do what deeply intuitively I knew as a christian that I ought

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to do. So we need to discern, we need to articulate, I think we also need to commend commend to others, command to ourselves, but also commend to others. Let me recently, I

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was reading a book I mentioned to you it's a book by person who ends up being a thinker for um quite a bit of ultra right and who advocates of paganism form of paganism along the Ben Ben Ben

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Ben notice, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name is a french Frenchman. He ends his book on how to be a pagan with the challenge, which I think is very interesting, um which it's

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basically a quotation from Carl Gustav jung, and I want to read that quotation to you toward the end of the end of my talk now in his autobiography , Carl Gustav jung tells of a moment of unusual

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clarity during which he had a strange dialogue with something inside him Now, those moments of unusual clarity, I don't know whether they happened to you, but they often happened when foundations shake. The foundations of

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our lives shake, when foundations of our entire cultures shake, when foundations of our entire global order shake , which they're shaking, I think right now then the moment of clarity can arise. And so he

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had a this strange dialogue with himself and here's how he hume describes this in what myth, in what myth does man live nowadays, in what mythology translated just a little bit. Do humans being lived today

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or put it slightly differently in what overarching story have humans today situated their lives, which is to say what is their conception of who they are, what the social relationships should be and what the good toward

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which they should strive is in, what myth, that's humans language, in the christian myth, the answer might be, Do I live in it? I asked myself this is you right to be honest

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. The answer was no for me, this is not what I live by. Then he questions himself . Do I no longer have any myth response? No, evidently we no longer have any myth,

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but then what is response again? What is your myth? The myth in which you do live? And then he adds at this point, the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable and I stopped thinking I have

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reached a dead end in what story do we live in? What story? What we live? I think that is the profoundly theological question and to answer that question is the most important task of your life

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. To answer that question is the most important task of my life To live That answer out is the most important task of my life. That's why I'm a theologian. That's why, for 46 years,

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for second, I haven't regretted being a theological, because this question will not not let loose of me , and because this question fundamental to the survival of our entire planet, let alone of each of our

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lives, is the most important question that we are to pursue. Thank you very much, Yeah.