Sublime

This is not simply a problem for Israel; it is not simply a problem for the world (though it is of course both of those as well). It is a problem for God, as Romans 3:1-8 makes clear. God's single saving plan has apparently been thwarted. How is he then going to be faithful not only to the promises made to Israel but to the promises made through Is

The story of judgment and vindication which Jesus told is very much like the story told by the prophet Jeremiah, invoking the categories of cosmic disaster in order to invest the coming socio-political disaster with its full theological significance.11 The ‘normal’ way of reading these passages within the Christian tradition has been to see them as

We have got over the old idea that law-keeping was an early form of Pelagianism, by which Pharisees and others sought to earn their justification or salvation by moral effort. Sanders has expended a good deal of effort in demonstrating that such a picture is thoroughly false to first-century sources, and, though this notion will no doubt reappear f

Paul believed Jesus was already reigning; you can’t understand Romans or 1 Corinthians or Philippians unless you take that as basic.

There is, in other words, a clear line all the way from Genesis 11, via Isaiah 40–55 and Daniel 7, to Mark 10, and thereby in turn to Mark 14–15, where Jesus meets his captors, his judges, and his death. He not only theorizes about the difference between pagan power and the kind of power he is claiming; he enacts it.

The vital difference between this view and those we find in non-Christian second-Temple literature is that the kingdom is in a sense already present, as well as in another sense still future. Here the shorthand of Ephesians 5:5, cited above, is spelled out: the ‘kingdom of the Messiah’ is already established, while the ‘kingdom of God’, in this str

It is as though Paul cannot get tired of saying it: if you want to know who we are, we are people in whom God is at work, because of and according to the pattern of the Messiah, for the benefit of you and of the wider world.