I’d like to suggest viewing the NT documents as “artefacts from the ancient church” - clues to help us understand what it means to be a follower of Jesus, in any time or place, based on the experience of the first ones to walk that path.

Justin, I think that’s a very helpful way of putting it. I’m not too worried about the risks involved. I’m pretty sure that in the long run a contextualized historical hermeneutic will allow us to understand the NT better because our reading of it will not be blown off course by the strong winds of modern dogmatic commitments, which means in turn that the story will become more credible, which means that we will read it on the same plane of reality as our own lives, which means that we will want to discover for ourselves what the ancients learned as they allowed Jesus to redefine their relationship to God.