How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

The point, to repeat, is not whether Jesus is God, but what God is doing in and through Jesus. What is this embodied God up to?

The significance of the Temple as the fulcrum of ancient Jewish theocracy, actual and eschatological, cannot be overemphasized. And with the Temple we find, of course, the priests who offered worship in it and the king who was to build and restore it. Israel’s institutions thus instantiated, however imperfectly, the vocation, named in Exodus 19, to

To take a step back once more, when people write about “atonement theology,” the tendency has been to go to Paul and Hebrews and to come to the gospels only for those detached phrases that will support (or so it seems) the kind of “theological” construct that has already been culled from Paul.

The underlying reason is that the wrong questions have been asked, by “liberals” and “radicals,” by “conservatives” and “orthodox” alike. Questions have been asked of the gospels that they were not written to answer; and the questions the gospels were addressing—questions as much political as theological—have been ignored. It is time for a fresh lo

The question we have to face about the gospels is the question of where they are coming from and where they are going, not simply the various things we can use them for along the way.

Thus we find the famous passage in Matthew 10, which, despite some clauses that seem to have been only temporary, can hardly have been intended to refer to a mission entirely restricted to the time of Jesus’s own ministry:

it is in the four canonical gospels, not in some dodgy reconstruction behind or beyond them, that we find the great emphasis on the coming of God’s kingdom in the actual events of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension. But the coming of the kingdom is conspicuously absent not only from the great creeds, but also from “the gospel” as envi

The aim is still to get us to heaven, but Jesus is not just the moral exemplar—his perfect life means that he can be the perfect sacrifice.

God is the creator and redeemer of the world, and Jesus’s launch of the kingdom—God’s worldwide sovereignty on earth as in heaven—is the central aim of his mission, the thing for which he lived and died and rose again.