Finding Love
A Journey through the New Testament
- Biblical Studies & Commentaries
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
FritzSearch.com earns a commission on purchases made through Bookshop.org links.
Publisher's Description
Finding Love: A Journey through the New Testament by Vernon K. Robbins is a thematic exploration of love as it emerges, evolves, and is expressed throughout the New Testament. Written during and after the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book weaves together personal reflection, biblical scholarship, and historical context. Robbins argues that love--particularly agape[set macron over e] love--is not uniformly present across all New Testament texts but gradually becomes a central theological topic. He guides readers through each book's unique portrayal: divine love hidden in secrecy and suffering in Mark; reshaped Torah love and enemy love in Matthew; prophetic wisdom love in Luke; mystical and cosmic Love in Paul's letters, John's Gospel, and 1 John; and finally a fully formed theological proclamation that "God is love." The book invites readers to consider how ancient texts about love--both divine and human--resonate today amid global crises, personal transformation, and communal faith journeys. Conveying scholarly insight with an accessible tone, Robbins creates a spiritual and intellectual roadmap for anyone interested in understanding how love became foundational to Christian identity and action, all the while encouraging personal reflection and renewed commitment to love in contemporary life.
Endorsements (6)
“Although Vernon Robbins is one of the most erudite New Testament scholars today, he writes here from his heart in language that anyone can understand. He traces the central Christian theme of love through the New Testament, showing how different writers developed the concept with their distinctive emphases. Together these emphases contribute to a fuller picture of how the New Testament invites us to love others.”
“This wonderful, encouraging book draws readers into the flow of the wisdom of love in the New Testament. Robbins shows in striking and beautiful ways the development from the wisdom of ancient Israelite and Jewish texts to the deep love for one another that never ends, that binds things together in the turbulence of human existence. The wisdom and power of love flow from this book into readers’ minds, hearts, and souls.”
“Pack your bags for a textual journey! An expert explorer of ancient texts, Vernon K. Robbins offers readers an accessible and highly personal journey through early Christian texts looking for love. Along the way he encourages us to ‘nurture love wherever we can.’ This is scholarship in the service of our shared humanity—scholarship that provides resources for living in flourishing human communities.”
“With a personal perspective and a conversational tone, Robbins guides the reader on an exploration of love across the New Testament. The journey is filled with historical, literary, and rhetorical insights on how love functions in various books of the Christian canon. The reader comes away with a sense of both the distinctive role of love in various books and the profound ways that particular configurations of love are creatively related to one another.”
“If you want to think about love in the New Testament profoundly and from new perspectives, Vernon Robbins here gives you a golden opportunity. Presented as a journey of discovery, he engages his readers at every destination with a unique blend of scholarly observation and personal reflection. Anybody can take the journey and not be lost, and scholars will be surprised that the journey takes so many surprising twists and turns. This expedition traverses the New Testament revealing how early Christians understood their newfound love in Jesus Christ.”
“Vernon Robbins’s Finding Love is a wonderful exploration of this most fundamentally important theme in the New Testament—interspersed with his intriguing reflections on his own life story and the contemporary situation. The book will be useful for many readers including adult education classes, college classes, and certainly for New Testament scholars.”
See something wrong on this page? Report a problem