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Jesus’s resurrection as the climax of the Bible’s story. See Bartholomew and Goheen, The Drama of Scripture, 3018, Kindle, for an example of this (I argue, inadequate) perspective. Throughout their book, the authors consistently refer to Jesus as the climax of the Old Testament narrative. For Bartholomew and Goheen, Jesus’s first advent forms the pinnacle of God’s work in redeeming the world. The era of the church, then, is a kind of nascent version of the final cosmic order, but it exists in the abstract (contained in the followers of Jesus) and only in part in the concrete (in whatever kind of good or flourishing society those followers can create).

Additionally, the intervening time between the ascension of Jesus and his return is kind of an odd, inexplicable lull that fits the story only because it’s our present circumstance and must fit the story. Ultimately, it reduces our participation in the story to a kind of assisting God in fixing the world, but it lacks any sort of concrete trajectory beyond an ultimate restoration of all things “one day.”

Where my presentation here will also highlight the ongoing work of God through humanity to bring about the cosmic kingdom, it’s not the end-in-itself. It’s part of the story’s plot line and has a terminus as a result.

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Baptism as immersion in water and rising up out of it. That’s not to insinuate that other forms of baptism as practiced by the church are incorrect, only that the symbolism of baptism revolves around it picturing the death and resurrection of the believer.

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We have to read the contents of Matthew forward into Romans. That’s not to say that Paul (and the other epistle writers) doesn’t re-interpret the Old Testament for his purposes. There’s a massive scholarly conversation around the way that New Testament writers understand and use the Old Testament—particularly Paul. It’s not a problem I’m going to even begin to try to solve here, but I will explain my thoughts that undergird what I’m doing in this chapter.

I approach the New Testament use of the Old from the perspective that each New Testament writer was a product of their environment. Paul’s training in early rabbinical interpretive methods shaped how he chose to approach and leverage the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. Much of what Paul does with the Old Testament seems to fundamentally violate the principle of authorial intent, or, at the very least, to completely miss the point of the original text. However, I see Paul’s work as leveraging the authority of the Old Testament to buttress his arguments about the person and work of Jesus.

For Paul, Jesus is central and everything else points to him. His interpretive methods, however, aren’t something that we can or even should replicate when it comes to accessing the meaning of the Old Testament, because that wasn’t Paul’s goal in the first place. In this, I agree with Peter Enns about what Paul is doing, but I disagree that it can or should be replicated today (see Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 159–60).