Andrew, my thanks for this, joining with the others.

I’m not really that fussed about whether or not your piece exemplifies the emergent position (viz Danutz comment) although he is probably right, because he would be right in different ways about almost any attempt to assume the voices of emergent!

But your piece does exemplify, I believe, a thoroughly interesting and valid statement about church. I used to be confused by the emergent debates, until I realised that I was really looking at American Emergent. And I am far from convinced that American Emergent, in this sense, is representative of all the swells and eddies in the church generally.

Whether you intended point 2 as a sort of analysis of a trend or a prophetic statement also doesn’t matter much to me. It resonates, deeply, and I hope it serves to take some of the steam out of the ‘debate’ about the relationship between emergent and the rest of the community of faith. Much of which, it seems to me, is conducted like the dying emperor trying to fight off the pretender, as if what was at stake was the church’s throne!

But I think you have done more than this in this piece. As a writer I am intrigued at how our voices work. And yours is very different on this sort of topic than it is in the biblical theology sections. That’s probably just my lack of technical ability and scholarship showing through. But in this piece I do think you have gone closer to a description of how you see the implications of your eschatology than ever before.

Now, to read it more carefully, and to think about some implications.

Great stuff!