Adam S. Miller and Rosalynde F. Welch. Seven Crossings: Encounters with Christ in the New Testament. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2026.

Seven Crossings is the fourth volume in a series that began with Seven Gospels and continued through Seven Visions and Seven Songs. It keeps the earlier format. Miller, a philosopher, and Welch, a literary scholar, exchange fourteen letters on seven passages from the Gospel of John: the prologue, Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, Lazarus, the foot washing, the Intercessory Prayer, and the resurrection appearances of John 20. Their organizing idea is the “crossing,” an encounter with Jesus.

Methodology and Prose

The book makes a methodological claim before a theological one. Miller argues that scripture cannot be read as scripture without friends, so the epistolary form of the book enacts the thesis. The theological claims Miller makes follow from John’s own vocabulary. Miller reads the Gospel through its prepositions, especially “in.” He holds that the logos (word/reason) is already in the arché (origin/beginning), meaning that God’s “life-light” already indwells all life, emanating from Christ, and that conversion consists in recognizing this.

Welch supplies the communal and ecclesial counterweight. She finds a community in the pronouns of John 1:14, since “we beheld his glory” is testimony and not omniscient narration. She reads the foot washing as a “service-atonement” that grounds consecration in friendship. Her closing chapters answer the question that organizes the second half of the book: where is Jesus found after he departs? Her answer is that Christ is present through three agents: covenant community, the indwelling Spirit, and scripture’s signs. She casts readers as “overhearers” of the Intercessory Prayer.

Throughout, the authors display beautiful but readable prose. Welch’s opening volley is a word picture about the sacrament, reflecting on how bread captures the light of the sun to become the staff of life. Thus, when we eat the sacramental bread, “We eat the light in recognition—that his nature shines in our embodied life, that we are filled by and through it. Of his fullness we have all received, and grace for grace” (p. 22), which takes on additional significance because, “Life and light are, in this Gospel, so closely linked as to be virtually synonymous, a kind of compound ‘lifelight’: the life of the world was its light” (p. 28). Later, when reflecting on the role of the Spirit and its description as being like wind in the story of Nicodemus, she paints a picture of the Spirit “as a breeze that carries with it a divine pollen, the spiritual ‘seed’ of God. When I inhale to receive this Spirit-borne seed, a new life is planted within me” (p. 51). 

There are many delightful turns of phrase along the way. For example, Welch notes, in a moment of reflection on the project, that “There is something absurd in the project of spinning the gold of God’s ineffable light into the straw of commercial theology content” (p. 45). Miller, meanwhile, argues that Jesus approaches time differently than most of us do, with His focus being on people and salvation, creating a contrast between “World Standard Time” and “Kingdom Savings Time.” (I enjoy wordplay, so the savings being both a reference to Daylight Saving Time and the salvific mission of the Savior brought a smile to my face.)

 

Wrestling and Resolving

The authors wrestle with various topics along the way, at times engaging in friendly disagreement. Welch’s discomfort at Jesus’s use of Lazarus’s death as a teaching moment is resolved through Moroni 7 and Kristine Haglund’s reading of “loose him.” Her alternative reading of the Beloved Disciple’s belief in the tomb, and her admission that she doubted the Intercessory Prayer in John 17 fit the “crossings” theme, show friendship working as an interpretive practice and not merely a theme.

The authors also make good use of Restoration scriptures and the teachings of Church leaders. They read D&C 93, for example, as an intensifying echo of Genesis and John, and they bring Moroni, Mosiah, and Doctrine and Covenants 130 into dialogue with John. Latter-day Saint readers will recognize the Restoration’s habit of reworking biblical language, and the authors treat it as a hermeneutical resource.

The scholarship behind their writing is real but carried lightly. The book draws on Greek word studies (arché, logos, kairos, sk?no?, mnemeion), narrative criticism, Sandra Schneiders’s work on the foot washing, and even Karl Barth’s writings. While the authors claim that they make “no effort” to grapple with two millennia of Johannine interpretation or to synthesize historical-critical scholarship, they are aware of the scholarship, and it remains part of the discussion. This is the scholarship side of the “disciple scholarship” of the authors, and it is offered accessibly. Leaning into the discipleship side of things, however, the book is primarily pastoral, aimed at believing Latter-day Saints who want deep reflection on scriptures and their effect on discipleship without their faith being challenged. This is a rare combination that reflects the skill of the authors in reaching a lay Latter-day Saint audience while doing fascinating theological and interpretive work.

 

Market Comparison

Seven Crossings appears in the same year as Alex Douglas’s The New Testament for Latter-day Saints (Signature, 2026), so they are competitors on the market meant to coincide with the 2027 “Come, Follow Me” curriculum. Both treat the Gospels as products of communities, and both resist harmonization. But they start from different places and reach different conclusions. Douglas reads early Christianity as a contest among competing communities and Christologies. Miller and Welch read John’s community as bound by friendship and as the vessel of a revelation that continues in the Church. The two books also reflect different assumptions about what a reader needs. Douglas wants readers to understand how the texts arose from a historical-critical perspective, while Miller and Welch want them to meet Christ in the text. Both are valuable in their own right, but readers wanting historical-critical engagement drawing upon a secular approach to scholarship will prefer Douglas’s book. Meanwhile, readers who want a model of faithful, friendly, but rigorous reading of scripture will find one in Seven Crossings.

 

Conclusion

Seven Crossings is a thoughtful, pastoral reading of John for Latter-day Saints who value careful thought about scripture. Its central insight is that knowing God and knowing one another are linked, and the authors demonstrate it as much as they argue for it.