““The point was this: if Enlightenment progress is solving the problem of evil, all Jesus needs to have done is to point the way, to show people what love and compassion look like. Being reasonable, people will follow his example. If they do not, they need more teaching in reason. Much would-be Christian thought (including much would-be “biblical” Christian thought) in the last two hundred years has tacitly conceded these huge claims, turning “Kingdom of God” into “the hope for heaven after death” and treating Jesus’s death, at the most, as the mechanism whereby individual sinners can receive forgiveness and hope for an otherworldly future—leaving the politicians and economists of the Enlightenment to take over the running, and as it turns out the ruining, of the world.””
