….Wright, a retired Anglican bishop and now chair of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, is author more than 80 popular and academic books about Christianity and the Bible. The latest — co-authored with fellow scholar Michael F. Bird — is “The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians.”....

Many Christians look to the kingdom of God as an escape in the next life and are hesitant to upset the status quo in the here and now, leaving that to politicians and social workers, he said. Others believe Jesus and his followers expected the kingdom of God to be the literal end of the world, and since they were wrong about that, they must be wrong about other things, reconstructing those things for themselves in ways that have “often led to quite radical theology.”

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“Actually, the kingdom of God at hand means God’s kingdom coming in unexpected ways on earth as in heaven — not away somewhere else and not destroying earth, but transforming it.”