to recognise that the gospel is God acting in history more specifically, through the history of Jesus. Mediaeval theology had internalized and subjectivized the gospel to such an extent that the basis of acceptance with God, of justification, was no longer what God did once for all in Christ, but what God was continuing to do in the life of the Christian. This de-historicizing of what God had done once and for all in the gospel went hand-in-hand with the allegorizing of the history of the Old Testament.