The gospels offer us not so much a different kind of human, but a different kind of God: a God who, having made humans in his own image, will most naturally express himself in and as that image-bearing creature;

Judaism always assumed that the creator God wanted the world to be ordered and ruled by his image-bearing humans. The world, heaven and earth, was created as God's temple, and his image-bearers were the key elements in that temple.

Once we get the goal right (the new creation, not just "heaven") and the human problem properly diagnosed (idolatry and the corruption of vocation, not just "sin"), the larger biblical vision of Jesus's death begins to come into view.

Sin" is not just "doing things God has forbidden." It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings. That is what Paul sums up in 3:23: all sinned and fell short of God's glory. He is referring to the glory that, as true humans, they should have possessed. This is the "glory" spoken of in Psalm 8: the status and responsibility of looking after God's world on his behalf.

We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (All

The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold—and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed.

He did not want to rescue humans from creation any more than he wanted to rescue Israel from the Gentiles. He wanted to rescue Israel in order that Israel might be a light to the Gentiles, and he wanted thereby to rescue humans in order that humans might be his rescuing stewards over creation.

It ignores the New Testament's emphasis on the true human vocation, to be "image-bearers," reflecting God's glory into the world and the praises of creation back to God.

There were no other groups in the ancient world going around claiming to be the human race.

Heaven's rule, God's rule, is thus to be put into practice in the world, resulting in salvation in both the present and the future, a salvation that is both for humans and, through saved humans, for the wider world. This is the solid basis for the mission of the church.

humans finding themselves called to play a vital role in the larger purposes of the creator for the creation.

We are his poi?ma', his 'poem', his 'workmanship', wrote Paul (Ephesians 2.10), 'created . . . in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared' — not simply 'good works' of moral behaviour, but the fresh creativity whose rich variety reflects the lavish creativity of God himself, thereby offering a sign to the powers of the world that Jesus is lord and they are not (Ephesians 3.10—11).