Matthew Henry John Bartlett

I’m following a reformed chap’s ambivalent travels through Yoder’s Politics of Jesus (which you ought to read). He quotes Yoder thus:

In correlation with our sense of impossibility we tend to think of “apocalyptic” promises as pointing “off the map” of human experience, off the scale of time, in that they announce an end to history….Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom was unacceptable to most of his listeners not because they thought it could not happen but because they feared it might, and that it would bring down judgment on them.