The sublime title "Christ" is an adjective which only receives its specific value from the specificity of the noun, Jesus of Nazareth. If Jesus is fo… - Jon Sobrino

The ideal person cannot be thought of as the whole person developed from the possibilities of the present-day person, but as the "new man" who, to become such, has to pass through the critique and negation of the present-day person.

God is not simply power, as most people were inclined to think. God is love, and he manifests himself in the dialectics of an impotent love. ... The emperor is not God. Jesus desacralizes that kind of power and its claim to be the absolute mediation of God. The pax romana is not the kingdom of God. The political organization of Rome might dazzle the world with its power, but it was oppressive; hence there was nothing sacred or divine about it. ... In Jesus' eyes God's ultimate historical word is love, whereas the ultimate historical word of power in the human world is oppression. Jesus' journey to the cross is a trial dealing with the authentic nature of power.

On the one hand, there is the type of sinner whom, in present-day language, we would call ‘oppressor.’ Their basic sin consists in oppressing, placing intolerable burdens on others, acting unjustly and so on. On the other hand, there are those who sin ‘from weakness’ or those ‘legally considered sinners’ according to the dominant religious view. Jesus takes a very different approach to each group. He offers salvation to all, and makes demands of all, but in a very different way. He directly demands a radical conversion of the first group, an active cessation from oppressing. For these, the coming of the Kingdom is above all a radical need to stop being oppressors.