The Kingdom That Never Came: Jesus' Apocalyptic Delusion and Christianity's Drive for Secular Power

The Kingdom That Never Came
offers a startling new look at Christian beginnings that is bound to stir up
controversy and debate for years to come. Historians, philosophers, religious
writers and cultural critics have never solved an age-old question: How could
the radical, otherworldly vision of Jesus have been transformed into a
world-historical drive into the earthly, temporal realm?

The author argues that the answer
to this question has been staring all of us in the face across a span of 2000
years, in the New Testament itself, for all to see, but it has remained buried
in history. Christianity owes its very existence, as well as its drive for
secular power on earth, to the failure of Jesus' prediction of the coming of
the Kingdom of God within the lifetime of his own generation. Christianity was
essentially a rebound against this dead-end wall of failed prophecy, and the
impetus of this great turn towards the realm of Caesar has carried down to our
own day. This is the history of Christianity in a nutshell.

Jesus' apocalyptic delusion and
Christianity's ensuing rebound against this failed prophecy is the key for
understanding the union of church and state and the struggle for religious
freedom in the history of the West.