What God did in the redemptive career of Jesus of Nazareth was a consummation of events of God’s doing from eternity past, through all of the preparatory history of the Old Testament and up to the point when in ‘the fullness of time … God sent forth his Son’ (Gal. 4:4). Christianity, one may justly say, is a history, in the sense of a finished work of redemption performed in a certain period of linear time. The events of redemption may be precisely located in time and place. The first four books
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