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Miroslav Volf was born on September 25, 1956, in Ossiak, Croatia.

We as a very small group of Pentecostals, my father was a Pentecostal minister, were living under

what we experienced as an oppressive boot

of a communist, relatively mild, but nonetheless communist regime.

The broader community was predominantly Roman Catholic, but even among Protestants,

Pentecostals were, as Volf would later put it, a minority of a minority. Not just small, but kind of a weird group of people.

But interestingly enough, it was a holiness Pentecostalism.

And as it turned out, in my case, holiness, and that's partly because, mainly because of my parents,

who were extraordinary spiritual human beings, not in a sense that they were total exemplars of holiness,

but there was kind of an honesty about the spiritual life in search and striving towards

something, willingness to admit one's mistakes, and hence never regulated strictly by rules,

but always by the sense of both the spirit and divine love.

From what I understand of your biography, your dad spent some time in a labor camp. Is that

correct?

Yeah, that's where he came to faith. He was originally, as a kid, he attended with his

mother Baptist church and walked away from faith in his teens. And then as an innocent man, he truly was,

from whatever perspective you look at it, he ended up in not just concentration camp, but first

on the death march, because he was conscripted as an 18-year-old kid into regular Croatian army where he was a baker.

He tried to defect, was caught, and almost lost his life in the course of interrogations.

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