"It should never be forgotten that Christianity entered human history not as new creed or sapiential path or system of religious observances, but as apocalypse: the sudden unveiling of a mystery hidden in God before the foundation of the world in a historical event without any possible precedent or any conceivable sequel; an overturning of all the orders and hierarchies of the age, here on earth and in the archon-thronged heavens above; the overthrow of all the angelic and daemonic powers and principalities by a slave legally crucified at the behest of all the religious and political authorities of his time, but raised up by God as the one sole Lord over all the cosmos; the abolition of the partition of Law between peoples, the proclamation of an imminent arrival of the Kingdom and of a new age of creation; an urgent call to all persons to come out from the shelters of social, cultic, and political association into a condition of perilous and unprotected exposure, dwelling nowhere but in the singularity of this event—for the days are short.
To be frank, it was a command that left little to no room for such things as ’historical consciousness.’ The church was given birth in something like a state of crisis, of mingled joy and terror, in a moment out of time, as one age was passing and another was coming into existence. The Kingdom was drawing near; the Kingdom had already partly arrived; indeed, the Kingdom was already within, waiting to be revealed to the cosmos in the glory of the children of God.
The Kingdom was preached, but it was the church, with its often almost comically corrupt and divisive form, that arrived."
- Bentley Hart, David, 2022: Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. Grand Rapids: Baker Academics. S. 135-136, 138.
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