What occurred over the following decades and centuries was a slow loss of the eschatological faith held by the earliest disciples of Jesus. What we have come to know as ‘church history’ is the process of detethering the Bible from this explicitly apocalyptic hope. The decades following the Messiah’s resurrection turned into centuries. The redemption’s delay increasingly required explanation. This dynamic gave rise to the spiritualization of the redemption in Christian theology. The inconvenience of needing to wait for Israel’s redemption for their own redemption proved too much to bear theologically—especially in periods when persecution ceased and the church gained influence and power.  -Bill Scofield, The Biblical Narrative and the Inconvenient Existence of Israel