How God Became King

faith-and-doubt

• There is nothing there about what Jesus did, or why he did it — an enormous gap at precisely the point where Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John say most.

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• Have we even begun to hear what the gospels are saying? It isn't just that we've all misread them, though I think that's broadly true.

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obedience-and-authority

• The gospel writers saw the events concerning Jesus as kingdom-inaugurating — far more than fulfillment of prophecy in any simple sense.

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• This wrong reading has gained credibility from expressions the Western church has taken to refer to heaven in the traditional sense.

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calling

• The story of the gospels is told so as to indicate that Jesus's followers now have a mission going way beyond anything they had during his lifetime.

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• There was an opening of their minds that had to happen — people would need to search the scriptures day by day to see if what they heard was indeed the case.

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