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Let me start with a good story about customer service. I started to read Jurgen Moltmann seriously in the late 1970's. I used the SCM Study editions, those sturdy not quite paperback books were intended to survive heavy use and repeated reading. My volume of The Crucified God split in several places before I finished the first reading. No, I didn't bend it back, or try to flatten it on the desk. The glue had dried – it was a first edition paperback. These were the days long before Amazon and no quibble returns. 

I phoned the publisher (only landlines in those days!) in London and spoke with a helpful Services Manager. He apologised and promised to send a fresh copy there and then. It arrived later that week, by which time my original volume was reduced to a series of several chapter sized pamphlets. But what a book! It was during Lent and I was working through The Crucified God while preparing for a series of 5 Holy Week Services.

I had never encountered such powerful writing. Reading Moltmann was a form of extreme theological diving into waters of unknown depth, at times dark, and utterly exhilarating. Not an easy read, how could it be with such a title: The Crucified God.

The problem intrinsic to every christology is not merely the reference to the person called by the name of Jesus, but also the reference to his history, and within his history, to his death on the cross. All christological titles presumably express what faith receives, what love gives, and what one may hope. But the critical point for them comes when, faced with the 'double conclusion of the life of Jesus, they have to state what it means for the Christ, the Son of God, the Logos, the true man or the representative to have been crucified. (86)

For more than 40 years I've continued to read Moltmann, have used his books in teaching, and have gone back often to re-read, especially passages I have marked, and to which for me at least, intellect assents, and heart affirms. As a Christian and theologian, thinking the faith can never be an exercise of intellect unharnessed to personal experience of Jesus Christ – Moltmann exemplifies faith seeking understanding, that is, a way to love the crucified God with heart, mind, strength and all that makes us who we are.

The underlined words above, are underlined in my copy, still that SCM Study Edition which has indeed proved durable, as has the impact of that first reading. It has survived recurring reference and reading all that time, several house removals, multiple spells on the desk, and still hasn't split into pamphlets. A true study edition.

“Truth is elusive

Truth avoids institutional control.

Truth tugs at conventional syntax.

Truth hovers at the edge of the visual field.

Truth is relational.

Truth lives in the library, and also on the subway.

Truth is not two sided;; it is many sided.

Truth burrows in the body.

Truth flickers.

Truth comes on little cat’s feet, and down back alleys.

Truth doesn’t always test well.

Truth invites you back for another look.”

Marilyn McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, page 43

I learned many things I thought I might never need to know from Jack Duncan. Perhaps that isn't surprising, considering he was (by my maths) in his 40's and I was just started school. He was the farmer my dad worked for, as a dairyman.  From as early as aged 4 until I was about 7 or 8 I remember him as a kindly, slow talking and slow walking man.

He first sat me on a tractor seat when my feet couldn't reach the pedals – I learned amazing words like throttle, clutch, gear-stick. I was his golf ball retriever when he took a couple of golf clubs into a field and practised. He said it was OK to eat the peas that were growing with the barley in the field next to our cottage. He encouraged me to take some of the rich molehill soil just over the dyke at our cottage, for my dad to make potting compost (mixed with river gravel and leaf mould.

He and his wife Nancy took us to Ayr a couple of times each summer, to the beach, for ice cream, and the amazing experience of travelling in an early Austin Cambridge A55. We inherited every couple of weeks the comics that came into the house for their two children, my first discovery of that particular literary genre.

They were generous, kindly people who made life a bit easier for us. These reminiscences are sparked by a photo I took of a Cheviot sheep, one of a few hundred grazed for a few weeks locally. Jack Duncan taught me the names of several sheep; Blackface, Leicester, Scottish Dunface, and Cheviot – the one in the picture. 

Jack Duncan was a good shepherd. His dog was unimaginatively called Shep. and sometimes competed at the sheep dog trials down Ayrshire way. I remember in the evening he took me down to the meadow, and across the main rail line to Dumfries, to look over the sheep.

He was looking for any sheep that was limping, and Shep easily separated it and cornered it. Jack the good shepherd had a sharp pen knife, a wee box of powder and a stick of keel (now called marking fluid). Once treated, he would mark it, and go looking for the same sheep some days later, and if still limping it would be taken to the farm for the vet to treat.

So when I read the Johannine Jesus saying, "I am the good shepherd…the good shepherd looks after the sheep," I already have a stock image in my head of a slow talking, slow walking, kindly man with a bunnet on backwards, a couple of golf clubs, a clever sheepdog, and the wherewithal to deal with foot rot.

I know. It isn't a bible land Ladybird book picture – but it works for me.   

"Lord, have mercy. The sea is so vast, and my boat is so small."

When life seems too much – too complex, too scary, too unpredictable, and yes, too exhausting, I come back to this prayer. It's traditionally called the prayer of the Breton fishermen. 

It's a prayer for those who feel out of their depth. A cry of the heart when the waves keep coming and every one of them gets bigger. 

It may have come as a prayer of desperation, hope clinging to an old story of disciples in a storm, the sea of Galilee a frenzy of destructive forces. And Jesus asleep.

The photo was taken the other day, the sea calm, and a small fishing boat overtaking a platform service vessel, both heading for harbour and home.

Like the sea, long periods of life can be calm, navigable, predictable, and relatively safe. Then weather patterns change and the sea transforms into threat, and we rediscover our finitude, our limits, our humanity; we are reminded of what we can't do, what we don't know, and what we cannot control.

This brief one line prayer asks for mercy, but does not tell God what to do. At most it points out the obvious, the vast realities we face, and the limited resources at our disposal.

God already knows all that. But it is deeply human to cry out for help, for mercy, for something that pushes the balance of fear towards faith, despair towards hope, and transforms that sinking feeling into a sense of being held.

The Psalms are full of such one line prayers. Cries for mercy, recognition of risk and danger, words of complaint at how hard it is – and thanksgiving for a rescue still to come but already promised by the God of mercy.

Does life always turn out like that? Does what we dread never happen? The sea is indeed vast, and our boat exceedingly small. And I guess that's where faith becomes more than, not less than, certainty.

Trust grows out of, and into, our relationship with God, forming bonds of love, trust, hopefulness and purpose. God's mercy is not a guarantee against storms at sea, but of God's presence in the boat. 

"Lord, have mercy. The sea is so vast, and my boat is so small." Whatever we face each day, "the Love that moves the sun and other stars" is on our side.

"Here is love, vast as the ocean, loving-kindness as a flood…" The instincts of the translator are precise; mercy and loving-kindness are English translations of the Hebrew word for mercy, Hesed.

"Lord have mercy…" 

Now and again a moment and a place coincide. A photograph is a way of capturing the intersection of what we are thinking, and what we are seeing. 

Walking through campus on my way to a public lecture, I was still thinking of what I'd spent the last hour reading. Slow reading. The kind of reading that is a conversation with occasional interruptions, and the occasional significant silence.

I was reading an essay by my friend, and Doktorvater, Professor David Fergusson, "Kenosis and the Humility of God." Reading theology has become both lifelong discipline, and a way of loving the God of whom we think, to whom we pray, and whom we seek to serve. So reading theology is a form of prayer, the mind kneeling, the heart attuned to hear what James Denney called "the plunge of lead into fathomless depths."

Here's the two or three sentences I was mulling over as I walked:

"Can divine love be stripped of divine power without weakening its capacity? Paul's insight is that divine power is manifested in the foolishness of the cross, not that it is abandoned or lost in this event. If the fullness of God is here to be revealed, then kenosis, whatever else it is, cannot be construed as a divestment of divine identity in the incarnation. If Christ reigns from the tree, then he reigns." (Kenosis. The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture & Theology, eds. Paul T Nimmo, Keith L Johnson, Eerdmans, 2022, page 195)

"If Christ reigns from the tree, then he reigns." That was my thought as I walked down the brae and looked at the King's College Crown and Cross through the trees. Thinking and seeing coincided in a moment, not so much of intellectual clarity, as of spiritual acknowledgement.

Oh the thinking must go on, as must the praying. And the reminders, first, that worship is expressed in the form and content of our thought, and second, our best thinking is done on our knees if not always physically, then certainly intellectually. 

I've said it often now, my camera often becomes and enables reflection on the "sacrament of the present moment."

Once a week I go to my happy (learning) place. I mean this University library. People who know me are aware I have admiration, affection and a long-standing regular attendance at this particular library. This edifice to education polarises opinion – love it or hate it, not many are neutral. 

Here's why I like it. Think of architecture as a power statement. Then think of the large and tall glass temples built in the City of London, and other cities. Most often they are owned or leased by huge finance or corporate companies. They are about wealth and wealth creation, they are statements of power, using the constructive rhetoric of architecture. This University library would not look out of place in such company. Except.

Except that this building is about education and learning, the creation of knowledge, encouraging understanding and facilitating discovery. The end product is not finance but intellectual capital, social capital and the transformation of minds, and hopes, and possibilities. I love the statement that this building makes – a place of learning is a place of power, possibility and riches that can last a lifetime.

When I come here I head for Level 2,4 and 7 – Humanities Journals, English Literature and Art History, and Theology and Philosophy, respectively. I recently borrowed 4 books that would have cost me about £150 to buy.

Most times I avoid the lifts and take the stairs – just under 200 to the top floor – there are 9 floors and I've never really understood why the first two are un-numbered and the top floor is numbered 7. In any case it is often my scala sancta, the long climb towards theological illumination!

Yesterday I chose to take the lift, and discovered why I don't. On the way up, crowded. It stops at Level 1 and two get out; stops again at level 2 and 1 gets out, and 1 gets in, only to get out again at 3. Every floor it stopped. By the time I got to Level 7 the time it took, I could have climbed the stairs and been the fitter for it!

But. I then had just over an hour of reading, browsing and came away with a half page of notes. Was it worth it? Depends what dividends you think you get from the investment of thought. Yes, actually, it was worth it.  

Why? Look at the two photos. The second one shows the football goals in the foreground. Life has many goals, most of them worthwhile. The goal of good learning is amongst the best goals we ever score. 

2 Peter 1.3 “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.”

Godliness isn’t a cosy, spiritual feeling. It means respect for God’s will and obedience as a way of loving God.

Godliness is about how we behave, think and relate to other people.

Everything we need to obey God’s will is already ours by divine power – the Holy Spirit in our hearts and the risen Jesus at our side, and God’s glory and goodness underwriting his call on our lives.

“The Gospel is greater than the words that describe it…” Nijay Gupta is a creative and productive scholar who moves with ease between academic scholarship, and the kind of teaching and wisdom that nourishes Christian community. For him the New Testament is “thought provoking, captivating and worldview shaping.” His aim in this book is to help his readers experience the same transformative encounter with Scripture.

Gupta chooses fifteen key words, explains their use and meaning in the New Testament, and explores the ways each word encapsulates Christian faith in experience and practice. The words are chosen carefully, though none of them are a surprise: righteousness, gospel, life, forgiveness, cross, grace, faith, fellowship, hope, salvation, peace, religion, holiness, love and witness.

Fifteen word studies, but much more than that. Each word is attached to a New Testament Gospel or Letter, which is then used to explain and illustrate not only the meaning of the word, but the spiritual experiences and practical impact of such powerful theological words.

The result is a very different kind of New Testament Theology. The word list touches on almost all of the New Testament books. But Gupta isn’t trying to cover everything. The social and historical context, then the theological content of each word, is skilfully and persuasively presented. In the process the implications for Christian living are spelled out for obedient and faithful Christian existence. The lexical, grammatical, exegetical and theological work is all done, but the end result is a series of practical essays on the “load bearing concepts” that cumulatively spell out the Good News of Jesus Christ. There is much pastoral wisdom and spiritual insight woven throughout this volume

So, a book on New Testament Theology that both draws unifying threads, and yet affirms the diversity of New Testament voices. Gupta demonstrates the practical shaping impact of each of these words on the spiritual experiences that shape Christian existence in community and its witness to the world. Theology and praxis, semantics and spirituality, grammar and grace; Gupta achieves a creative balance of careful scholarship and practical coaching, supporting the reader towards a more confident and trustful improvisation of what it means for us to live into the Christian story.

I warmly recommend this book to those needing more than how to spiritual advice and wanting a deeper understanding of the dynamic core of New Testament faith. It will also serve very well for those seeking a tour of New Testament theology with a well informed and good natured guide. And preachers? They could profitably take and use the fruits of the learning on display in all or some of these exegetical essays. I could see much value in an occasional series applying what is learned here to their hearers, opening up the riches of God’s grace, the joy of witness and worship, and the theological potency embedded in the “load bearing” vocabulary of our faith.

Nijay Gupta is Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary, Illinois, and author of several New Testament monographs and Commentaries.