“This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” Mark 1:15

Christianity is not primarily about ethics, “being a nice person,” or, to use Flannery O’Connor’s wry formula, “having a heart of gold.” Bishop Robert Barron writes that when Christians grant that Christianity’s ultimate purpose is to make us ethically better people, they cannot convincingly defend against the insinuation that if some other system makes human beings just as good or better, Christianity has lost its purpose. Immanuel Kant argued that, at its best, religion is not about dogma or doctrine or liturgy but about ethics. In the measure that the Scriptures, prayer, and belief make one morally good, they are admissible, but in the measure that they lead to moral corruption, they should be dispensed with. The problem with this old and new Kantianism is that it runs dramatically counter to the witness of the first Christians, who were concerned, above all, not with an ethical program but with the explosive emergence of a new world. We can read the letters of St. Paul, the earliest Christian texts we have, and are particularly instructive on this score. The central motif of all of Paul’s letters is Jesus Christ risen from the dead. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus is the sign that the world as we know it—a world marked by death and the fear of death—is passing and that a new order of things is emerging. The inaugural speech of Jesus, as reported in the Gospel of Mark, commences with the announcement of the kingdom of God and then the exhortation to “repent and believe the good news.” We tend automatically to interpret repentance as a summons to moral conversion, but the Greek word that Mark employs is metanoiete, which literally means “go beyond the mind you have.” In Mark’s telling, Jesus urges his listeners to change their thinking to see the new world that is coming into existence. Anyone with any theological persuasion or no persuasion can be “good people.” But only followers of the risen Christ can witness to an earthquake that has shaken the foundations of the world and turned every expectation upside down.

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