My research into the origins and future of Christian forgiveness over the past seven years has explored the nature and normativity of early Christian forgiveness by understanding what motivated early Jews and Christians to place ethical and theological weight on the concept and practice of interpersonal forgiveness in a world where forgiveness was not yet an ethical ideal. While biblical scholars have commonly characterized early Christian teaching about love of enemies, forgiveness, and other elements of Jesus’s radical ethics either as hyperbole or “interim ethics” (i.e., an unsustainable way of life inspired by misguided apocalyptic expectations of imminent divine judgment), a careful consideration of the relevant historical evidence indicates that this characterization is overly simplistic. Against scholarly tendencies to reductively attribute early Christian ethics to apocalyptic zeal—assumptions, I suggest, that are reinforced by the hyper-individualism of the modern social imagination—I put forth a new framework. Drawing on theorists of social epistemology and religion, I contend that worldview does not simply beget behavior; worldview and behavior are strongly and dialectically interrelated; and ethical behavior—and the experience of living in communities shaped by ethical norms—has the power to shape worldview, even one’s ontological imagination of that which is possible with respect to human nature and history.