God, as creator, intends his world to be looked after by humans, and that even when the humans who are supposed to be exercising that vocation are self-serving brutes, the mandate still stands, though they will be judged more severely for what they have done with their commission. Jesus’s affirmation of Pilate’s subordinate but God-given authority

To put it simply, most Jews of Jesus’s day did not believe that the exile was really, properly over. Yes, they’d come back from Babylon—well, some of them, anyway. Yes, they’d rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem. But pagan foreigners were still ruling over them. They were still slaves even in their own land,

Think again of the poems at the start of Luke’s gospel. God has fulfilled the promises to Abraham; now things can proceed in a new way.

And of course the reason the Enlightenment has taught us to trash our own history, to say that Christianity is part of the problem, is that it has had a rival eschatology to promote. It couldn’t allow Christianity to claim that world history turned its great corner when Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again, because it wanted to claim that world hi

All stories are told from a point of view; without that, you have no principle of selection and are left with an unsorted ragbag of information.

But there is no sense that this “age to come” is “eternal” in the sense of being outside space, time, and matter. Far from it.

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?

And, to put it the other way around, God rescues his people from their sins, through the work of the Isaianic “servant,” precisely in order to establish his rule, his own very different kind of power, in all the world.

“Jesus’s teaching on church and state.” And that “teaching” is taken to be that they are two distinct spheres, to each of which Jesus’s followers must give their due, in quite separate compartments of life, without confusing the two. I think it is safe to say that nobody until the late eighteenth century ever took it like that; in other words, we a