If Jesus had defeated the powers of the world in his death, his resurrection meant the launching of a new creation, a whole new world.

Since Paul knew that his own hard and bitter heart had been changed by God's grace, he also knew that there was nobody this side of the grave who could not in principle be similarly reached and changed.

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).

The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God's purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos.

The purpose of forgiving sin, there as elsewhere, is to enable people to become fully functioning, fully image-bearing human beings within God's world, already now, completely in the age to come.

The mission of the church must therefore include, at a structural level, the recognition that our present space, time, and matter are all subject not to rejection but to redemption.

Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not "saved souls" being rescued from the world and taken to a distant "heaven," but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

New creation can happen because the power of the satan, of Babylon, of Pharaoh has been broken. That is how the story works. That is what is different by six o'clock on the evening of Good Friday, though Jesus's followers don't realize it until the third day, which is the first day of the new week, the start of the new world.

And what if Israel's God had done in person, in the person of this man, what he said he would do, defeating death itself and launching his new creation?

One of the great New Testament words is Now. That was then, this is now.

One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.

But in scripture itself God's purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world. This is the unfinished story in which readers of scripture are invited to become actors in their own right. "The authority of scripture" is thus a sub-branch of several other theological topics: the mission of the church, the work of the Spirit