What would Jesus do—if he ever saw what you and I are doing in his name? Weep, as he wept over Jerusalem. What would Christians do? Head for the doors.

simmering potency

In short, were Jesus to return in the flesh, he would be executed again, not by

“happening” (arriver) without ever quite “arriving” at a final, fixed, and finished destination. We cannot simply “derive” (dériver) direct instruction from it, but we must instead allow it a certain drift or free play (dérive), which allows that tradition to be creative and reinvent itself so that it can be, as Augustine said of God, ever ancient

where the Messiah never actually shows up, where the Messiah is the name of the pure structure of hope and expectation. In that understanding, if the Messiah did show up he would ruin everything, for then there would be no future, which is a way of saying that history would be over.

the world but by the church.

a possibility that inhabits the name, what that name is trying to express while never quite succeeding, something that the name recalls but never quite remembers, promises but never quite delivers.

like a long-term substitute teacher—praying for the kingdom, whose coming Jesus announced and which everyone was expecting would come sometime soon.

a theo-poetics—as opposed to a “theo-logic,”