Thanks. Your comments are much appreciated. So now I can counterattack?

When I say “these people have thought this through” I mean a much more broad collective debate that has gone on even before our own lives began.

But isn’t that just another way of saying that they haven’t thought it through? Again, my point is that the emerging church is extolled as wonderfully innovative and radical, and it puzzles me that that doesn’t show up in the way they use the Bible. What’s so cool about throwing in a handful of biblical platitudes, like stale cherries into a cake mix?

Remember, my objection was not to what they were doing in terms of missional or pastoral praxis - it was to the half-hearted and trivializing way that they were invoking scripture in support of the praxis.

The problem we still face (it’s not going to go away that easily - and we shouldn’t let it) is put very sharply by your statement ‘the gospel is about social justice’. That simply does not serve as an adequate account of the New Testament. We can certainly choose now to announce to the world a message of good news about social justice - rather as a couple of years back Tony Blair and Bono proclaimed good news for Africa (we would have to make sure we had some basis for our optimism). But neither John the Baptist nor Jesus nor Paul nor anyone else in the New Testament writings announced such a gospel. Their message certainly had implications for social justice, and we cannot afford to neglect those implications. But it is a fundamental and serious distortion of the biblical narrative to reduce the gospel to these terms. Even Crossan does not make that mistake - he recognizes that the gospel had to do with sovereignty over the people of God.

I’ve read his God & Empire and made passing reference to it in the ‘Eschatology and global warming post’. I agree with much of his biblical analysis (it’s a very biblical book). I agree with much of the ethical and theological outcome. I don’t, however, agree with the way he connects the two. I think there is a better way of integrating the biblical narrative and the ideological commitment to a non-violent God, one that does not force us to wreck the texts in the process.

To be honest, Crossan’s book rather gives me hope that we don’t have to settle for mutual respect across a wide spectrum of theology. That’s better than nothing - and certainly better than what we’ve got. But I believe that there is still considerable scope for rethinking and reintegrating what are currently divergent and often antithetical positions. The biblical narrative as it is - not as we would like it to be - has to be a generative and catalytic part of that synthesis. How it does that is the interesting question.