How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

The problem is that, a century after the “social gospel” was at its high-water mark, the world, including the Western world, still seems to be a place of great wickedness.

And if in some way we believe that Jesus is exalted or enthroned, surely that is a purely spiritual reality we’re talking about?

John, then, is certainly not an exception to the generalization that all four gospels bring the kingdom and the cross into the closest possible combination. One could in principle go back to the synoptics and show passage after passage in which the same is true. Think of the kingdom agenda of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), which itself points

Nor was Israel created as a kind of worldly superpower (though it may have looked like that in the time of David and Solomon), a new nation that would beat the world at its own game. Rather—and this is something the early Christians come to with hindsight, only at that stage tracing its earlier stages in the Psalms and prophets—the point is that th

How will all this happen? Through the work of the Spirit, whom Jesus is promising to send to his disciples. In other words, it will happen through the Spirit-led work of Jesus’s followers.

When in Luke the rich young ruler asks Jesus, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (18:18, NRSV), he isn’t asking how to go to heaven when he dies.

The obvious answer to this proposal, then, is that just because I see someone, even Jesus, behaving in a particular way, that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for me to do so.

But the point is that you can do all of that without any reference whatever to “the gospels,” to the four books that, along with Acts, precede Paul in the New Testament as we have it. Thus in many classic Christian circles, including the plethora of movements that go broadly under the label “evangelical” (and we should remember that in German the w

Jesus is enthroned as king of the Jews, and from now on he is also king of the world. The cross in John, which we already know to be the fullest unveiling of God’s, and Jesus’s, love (13:1), is also the moment when God takes his power and reigns over Caesar. From now on, the ruler of this world is judged.