Re: New creation and the kingdom of God

I think that the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is different to the distinction between the Son of man and new creation themes. Wasn’t the point that we can only know the Christ of faith and that the ‘Jesus of history’, whom we supposedly encounter in the Gospels, was really only a retrojection of the Christ of faith?

The Son of man story as it develops in the New Testament extends beyond the life of the historical Jesus to encompass his vindication at the parousia, at his symbolic coming on the clouds of heaven to receive the kingdom following judgment on the fourth beast.

My general argument is that we can best test the historical coherence and credibility of the New Testament documents by reading them historically - by asking what sort of sense they make if read in the light of i) the memories and concrete experience of the communities that generated the texts; ii) the Old Testament texts that are so widely and consistently used in the New Testament writings; and iii) reasonable historical reconstructions of how these communities might have thought about their future.

So let’s take a simple example from the Sermon on the Mount. I would suggest that when Jesus tells a story about two men who build houses just before storms and floods come, we must take into account i) the fact that this is addressed to historical Israel under Roman occupation; ii) passages such as Ezekiel 13:8-16, which describes the storm of God’s wrath coming against Israel and the false prophets (cf. Matt. 7:15) who promise peace; and iii) the prophetic insight that Israel could well be heading for a catastrophic war against the occupying force. In light of those assumptions, the parable is a warning to Israel that their ‘house’ (possibily the temple) will be swept away in the coming war, and that only the community that is obedient to Jesus’ teaching will survive the destruction.

This hermeneutic is driven not by a dispensationalist schema but by what I think is simply a search for historical coherence and plausibility. There is, I admit, something a little illusory about this approach - in the sense that it is really more of a literary than a strictly historical undertaking, which would require a much more rigorous critical methodology. But I think, nevertheless, that it has much greater exegetical and intellectual integrity than traditional readings and somehow has to be taken seriously. The big question is whether a viable ‘evangelical’ narrative can be derived from this approach that will help the emerging church reconstruct its worldview, theology and whole approach to mission in a post-Christendom context. For all the adulation of Tom Wright that we hear, it seems to me that emerging theologies are still little more than warmed-over modern evangelical constructions spiced up with some kingdom language and lashings of postmodern gobbledygook. I sometimes think that the emerging church lacks intellectual courage.