Sublime

The praxis of the prophet invited the interpretation: he was announcing the great fulfilment, the great renewal, the time when Israel’s god would at last become king.

no longer content with the genre Theology of the New Testament, might yet practice “theology with the New Testament.”

was the new heart promised as part of the new covenant. In other words, in this ‘ethical’ teaching he was not criticizing Judaism for being concerned with ‘externals’, and focusing instead on ‘internals’. He was carrying through the entire kingdom-agenda

In a very real sense, Western Christianity is Augustinian Christianity.

Is “the gospel in the gospels” simply a matter of the bare fact of Jesus’s death, which Paul and others would then interpret as “good news” even though nobody saw it like that at the time?

‘Repentance’ in Jesus’ context, then, would have carried the connotations of ‘what Israel must do if YHWH is to restore her fortunes at last’.

It would have been taken for granted that "God's righteousness" referred to the great, deep plans which the God of the Old Testament had always cherished, the through-Israel-for-the-world plans, plans to rescue and restore his wonderful creation itself, and, more especially, to God's faithfulness to those great plans.

Once we get the goal right (the new creation, not just “heaven”) and the human problem properly diagnosed (idolatry and the corruption of vocation, not just “sin”), the larger biblical vision of Jesus’s death begins to come into view.

The Christian gospel, it is often said, is designed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.