Andrew Koperski, in reviewing some historical inaccuracies in N. T. Wright and Michael Bird’s Jesus and the Powers, makes this important concluding point about the social activism—or lack thereof—of the apostle Paul (and, by extension, the earliest Christians):

Paul’s social and moral reasoning is…firmly in friction with how modern democracies and contemporary media acculturate us to think about pressing moral questions, namely, at a huge and impersonal scale. If Caesar wields sword and scepter, it seems to me that the Church itself is directly called to be something much subtler: salt.