The World

This selection of texts from the Fourth Gospel represents the New Testament posture toward the “world” as the unredeemed realm of human affairs, a realm into which Jesus is sent and out of which he saves his own. The point I am making, then, is that Jesus didn’t come to make the “world” a better place or to “influence” or “transform” the world. He came to redeem people out of the world. Trying to make the world a better place is a species of worldliness, and “worldliness,” to quote Hauerwas and Willimon, “is a hard habit to break.”— Kingdom Conspiracy, page 17