Jesus Victory of God V2: Christian Origins And The Question Of God

But fourth, looming up behind and beyond all of these was the sense we find in the very earliest Christian documents that all of these pointed to a strange new reality: that, in Jesus, Israel’s God had become present, had become human, had come to live in the midst of his people, to set up his kingdom, to take upon himself the full horror of their

This is an eschatological message, not in the trivial sense that it heralds the “end of the world” (whatever that might mean), but in the sense that it is about something that was supposed to happen when Israel’s hopes were fulfilled; and Israel’s hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God’s glory.

the possibility, which the gospels were strenuously proposing, that in Jesus the God of Israel, the creator God, really did confound the Epicureans and everybody else as well by becoming king on earth as in heaven. Theocracy—but theocracy of a radically different kind from anything anyone had imagined for a very long time—was the name of the game.

the gospels are consciously telling the story of how God’s one-time action in Jesus the Messiah ushered in a new world order within which a new way of life was not only possible, but mandatory for Jesus’s followers.