Put tradition first, and scripture will be muzzled and faded. Put scripture first, and tradition will come to new life.

God is the creator and redeemer of the world, and Jesus’s launch of the kingdom—God’s worldwide sovereignty on earth as in heaven—is the central aim of his mission, the thing for which he lived and died and rose again.

Judaism always assumed that the creator God wanted the world to be ordered and ruled by his image-bearing humans.

the social, cultural, political, and even cosmic eschatology of Matthew, Paul, Revelation,

But of course neither Matthew nor Paul nor Revelation supposed for a minute that this meant that utopia had already arrived,

Whichever way you went in the scholarly debates, it seemed that Jesus had promised something that hadn’t arrived.

the one group with its social-gospel agenda and the other with its saving-souls-for-heaven agenda.

the kingdom and the cross are part of one another

breaking open the either/or in which his hearers were stuck and pointing toward a deeper reality. Perhaps it’s time for God—whose image is on every human being and whose “inscription” is written across the pages of creation and the story of Israel—to receive his due.