"What I miss, right across the Western tradition, at least the way it has come through to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is the devastating and challenging message I find in the four gospels: God really has become king - in and through Jesus! A new state of affairs has been brought into existence. A door has been opened that nobody can shut. Jesus is now the world's rightful Lord, and all other lords are to fall at his feet. This is an eschatological message, not in the trivial sense that it heralds the 'end of the world' (whatever that might mean), but in the sense that it is about something that was suppose to happen when Israel's hopes were fulfilled and Israel's hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God's glory. It is, however, an inaugurated eschatological message, claiming that this 'something' has indeed happened in and through Jesus and does not yet look like what people might have imagined. This is the story the gospels are telling." -- N. T. Wright, When God became King, pages 37-38.
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