He is With us in our Crying Out to God

When the great theologian Jürgen Moltmann was sixteen years old in 1943, he was drafted into the German army and was soon captured by the Allied forces. He wound up in a prisoner of war camp in Scotland and, having had no religious upbringing, was given a Bible by a chaplain. Moltmann later said he would have preferred to have been given some cigarettes.

Nonetheless, he started reading the Bible in the evenings in his barracks, returning again and again to the Gospel of Mark. In particular he found himself mesmerized by…