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The 20th Century produced several great commentaries on Romans. Barth, Cranfield, Wilckens, Jewett. Then there were some very good ones, Sanday and Headlam, J D G Dunn, Douglas Moo, Jospeh Fitzmyer, N T Wright. The one that's missing is the one I found hardest to read, which says as much about me as it does for the book.

Ernst Kasemann's commentary on Romans was published in English by SCM in 1980, and bought with a gift from my first church who knew well my love of books. Because it was a gift, (and I chose it for goodness sake), I felt obliged to read it, not to waste a generous gift. For weeks, in my wee sloping roofed study, I slowly made my way up the steep brae that is Kasemann's dense style, theological wrestling and absolutely uncompromising approach to theological exegesis – something Kasemann was doing long before it has become a fashionable innovation to the hermeneutical industry. But I got to the top of the brae – I finished it, and it is one of those few books you begin as a chore, continue as a discipline, persevere as a matter of sheer determination not to be beaten, and then like climbing in low cloud, you move above the cloud base and see the view that makes it all worth it.

And the view Kasemann opened up changed our way of looking at things Pauline. Justification isn't to be limited to the specific individualistic benefit of the justified Christian; justification is cosmic in scale, is gift and power to accomplish, and is the dynamic reality that displays the reality and promise of the Lordship of Christ, now and in God's future for the creation. Not so much a breath of fresh air as a gale that blows you off your feet. For that reason Kasemann goes in the list of great commentaries.

And the man who wrote this dense masterpiece of exegetical toil? It takes a special kind of faith in God and faithfulness in discipleship to Christ, to take Isaiah 26.13 as the text to preach in 1937 Gestapo ridden Germany. Read the text and you'll see why he was arrested. In 1941-2 Kasemann argued passionately for the validity of womens' ministries. No surprise either, that he was a vociferous anti-nuclear campaigner. His daughter was killed in and Argentinian jail in 1977, an event that deeply affected him, pushing his theology in directions of radical critique of power, injustice and economic greed, and fuelling active inviolvement in the theology of world mission. He latterly became a Methodist – John Wesley and Ernst Kasemann!

There is a point to all this. In the Spring Eerdmans will publish collected sermons and lectures of Kasemann, who died in 1996 aged 90. The book cover is pictured above.  In my view this is a publishing event. An absolute necessity in early summer will be allocating blocks of reading time to gather the fruit of what Kasemann was saying and writing to the so complex world in the last quarter of the 20th Century.

Rebecca Elson's Diaries contain fragments and notes for future poems. Here and there a few lines are enough to indicate the trajectory of a thought:

When sleep won't come

And your whole life howls

And words dive around your head like bats

Feeding off the darkness.

What prompted those lines? The howl of rage, or fear? Those familiar with overanxiety will recognise that hyped up inner chatter in which we either rehearse our own reassuring speeches, or hear the imaginary criticisms of others niggling away at our self-confidence. Feeding off the darkness indeed – despair feeding despair, anxiety replenishing itself, and that prolonged state of inner red alert that induces exhaustion. Here and there, especially late into her last illness, Elson shows in these diaries an honest facing of the things we are afraid of. At one point, refusing denial as a coping strategy, she chooses instead defiance – "The thing is not to let the doctors take the poetry out of your body, your life".

And then this beautiful image of life still to be lived, and the sense of one not yet ready to relinquish life's flow, the middle line a hinge of refusal, "I'm not like that…"

"You think the river knows when it's getting near the sea?

Wide and slow & begins to taste the salt

Well I'm not like that

I still feel narrow, quick and fresh

Still somewhere in the mountains."

There are few more poignant poems than those in which the poet confronts their own mortality with dignity, reluctant resignation, and a deep knowing of those insights that define and exalt our humanity. Denise Levertov's late poems have that same quality of writing – there's a case to be made for the poetic fragment as a valid literary form, expressing life's transience and acknowledging the instransigence of that process of relinquishment we call dying.

If that seems too low key for Advent, then maybe that's because somehow we have lost that sense of the precariousness and preciousness of life, the utter giftedness of our own existence, and the great poetry of an Isaiah who recognised that all flesh is grass, but had also discovered theology in the declarative mood, "Thus saith the Lord, Fear not, I have redeemed you, I have called you by name….you are mine….

Been busy welcoming the six other UK Baptist College Principals to Scotland. This is an important network of friendship, collaborative planning, pastoral interest in each other and intellectual stimulus. Twenty four hours from lunch to lunch means not much time for discretionary stuff like blogging. More than made up for by good conversation and the encouragement of work owned, shared and done.

Did get time to open my most recent Amazon package though, with one of my looking forward to reading between Semesters books – Paul Molnar, Thomas Torrance. Theologian of the Trinity. Ashgate have sensibly, even mercifully, issued it in paperback at a very fair price, around £16 and high quality production – their hardbacks are usually just too expensive, though are beautifully produced, and a joy to handle.

I'm expecting the second volume of Torrance's Dogmatics lectures on the atonement to arrive soon as well. As we move into late Advent, then beyond to Epiphany and Easter and Pentecost, I expect to be in the good company of Scotland's greatest theologian of the 20th Century. Incidentally, I think the cover photo of Professor Torrance is superb, showing him in his later years, indomitable, contented, eyes open to truth and mystery, and a smile that might be quizzical or knowing.

One of those odd coincidences that make you smile, and pray thank you, and smile again.

That AOL voice with the mid-western accent, announced "You have email" – which on checking, I discover an update from Amazon. "Your order has shipped" – meaning Jurgen Moltmann's now out of print little gem, Theology and Joy, was on its way in time for Christmas.

The coincidence? I'd just finished reading, and marking in my book, the following from Dorothy Day, just after her child Tamar was born. Maybe a self-conscious echo of Mary's heart leaping at the annunciation:

"No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship and adore."

Gratitude. Joy. Worship. Adoration. And thus the connection between Theology and Joy. 

Jesus says in his society there is a new way for people to live;

you show wisdom, by trusting people;

you handle leadership, by serving;

you handle offenders, by forgiving;

you handle money, by sharing;

you handle enemies, by loving;

and you handle violence, by suffering.

In fact you have a new attitude toward everything, toward everybody. Toward nature, toward the state in which you happen to live, toward women, toward slaves, toward all and every single thing. Because this is a Jesus society and you repent, not by feeling bad, but by thinking different.

Rudy Wiebe, The Blue Mountains of China (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), p.215-16.

Sometimes the dilemmas of yesterday come back to teach us the truths we missed first time round. In the early 1960's there was a big debate in the US on "shelter ethics". Sparked by a priest who defended the ordinary citizen's right to use loaded weapons to keep other people, neighbour or stranger, out of his nuclear fallout shelter (a more modern version pictured – attractive wee thing eh?).

Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton exchanged letters about it. Merton picked up the themes of hospitality, love of neighbour and seeing the 'other' as Christ. Three cardinal principles of Christian discipleship modelled on Jesus came to mind – welcome, love, and seeing the other as graced presence. Here Merton weaves these together in a theology of redemptive risk taking compassion:

Merton declared, "If I am in a fallout shelter and trying to save my life, I must see that the neighbour who wants to come into the shelter also wants to save his life as I do. I must experience his need and his fear just as if it were my need and my fear…and if I am strong enough to act out of love, I will cede my place in the shelter to him…It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are."

The willingness to walk in the path of another, Merton proposed, is the very essence of Christianity (and of all the world religions); and in order to see what we have in common with out enemy, "and to respect his personal rights and his integrity, his worthiness of love." He went on, " we have to see ourselves similarly accused along with him, condemned to death along with him, sinking to the abyss with him, and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved. Then, instead of pushing him down, trying to climb out by using his head as a stepping stone for ourselves, we help oursleves to rise by helping him to rise. For when we extend our hand to the enemy who is sinking in the abyss, God reaches out to both of us."

I believe deeply in the importance of such idealistic and principled theology. In our own age, 50 years after those words were written, the Church of Jesus Christ is called to a life of risky solidarity not with the status quo, but with those who look for shelter, for comfort, for a chance of life. In our own day we have our own reasons for fearing the other, seeing the world as populated by enemies. Copenhagen and climate change; Afghanistan and Iraq and the war on terror; global recession and the threat of global capitalism to the world's poorest as powerful economies plan for economic recovery; plenty of crises to shelter from.

For all our agonising about mission, its definitions and challenges; for all our wondering about what the Gospel means in a postmodern conflicted world, here are words that are uncomfortably unrealistic, ridiculously principled, devoid of that pragmatism that so often and so easily promises effectiveness. Instead, words that are devastating in their Gospel simplicity, unanswerable in their Christ mirrored grace and mercy – idealistic with ideas such as not using another's head as my stepping stone out of the abyss, but helping him to rise, and finding God reaching out to both of us, in mercy and grace.

Where are the Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton figures today who haunt and humble us by the clarity of their conviction that Jesus was serious in what he said, not deadly serious but seriously on the side of life – "inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me?"

Lord grant me grace so to live, Amen