Re: We have to go back, but not to square one

Peter, I don’t really understand your problems with the Christendom idea - is this just another instance of you feeling obliged to disagree with everything I say? From Constantine onwards Christianity existed in close alliance with political, cultural and intellectual power structures. That alliance is what I understand by Christendom. Where am I going wrong? Of course, the whole thing was immensely complex and variable, but I find rather general agreement amongst historians that this was the case - and that the situation has radically changed over the last hundred years or so.

Whether Christendom should be understood as an ‘authentic expression or even interpretation of biblical (or even post biblical) Christianity’ is another matter. It seems to me that most of Western Christianity over the last 1600 years has functioned within the Christendom paradigm - under the assumption that we either are or should be a Christian society. I’m reluctant to dismiss all of that as simply inauthentic. My limited reading of Augustine suggests that at the point of ‘regeneration’ (the green band in the diagram) the dominant model adopted for Christian society was that of a City of God analogous to the City of Rome: thus you have the foundations for a Christian imperialist mindset. Was that biblical? Presumably Augustine thought it was - but I’m no historian, so don’t quote me on this. The point is that at this critical juncture the church had to reinvent itself.

I don’t equate the cDNA with the ‘seed’ of Abraham. As I said in a comment above, the ‘essence of it is the promise to Abraham that God would bless him, that he would make him fruitful and multiply him, and that he would fill the land’. That is a creational promise. The question then is: How is it fulfilled? Yes, it is fulfilled in Christ - and as Paul argues in Romans, it is only through the faithfulness of Jesus that the promise to Abraham is preserved. I don’t have a problem with that. But fulfilment in Christ is meaningless unless that immediately includes a people - because God’s creation is a matter of human society. It is not all about Jesus: ‘the children of the promise are counted as offspring’ (Rom. 9:8).

That is why in the diagram the cDNA must pass through the narrow passageway breached by Christ in the wall of Israel. How can you say that it exists independently of him? My recent comments on John 14:6 make it clear that this was the only way for Israel to be saved - and therefore for the promise to Abraham, the cDNA, to be preserved and regenerated.

Where we chiefly differ is over how a people comes to be included in the Christ who is both firstborn from the dead and firstborn of all creation and comes to embody again the full potential of the cDNA. My argument is that this is not all neatly accomplished in the crucifixion-resurrection-pentecost event; it comes about over a much longer historical period - the narrow path in the diagram - that culminates in the vindication of a community that participates in the Christ story in a quite specific sense.

The significance of Christ is that he makes it possible for a community to make the difficult journey from second temple Judaism to victory over Roman paganism. They make that journey in him because victory can be achieved only through a corporate obedience that is willing to suffer for the sake of the good news. When that victory has been achieved, the testimony of the New Testament is that they reign with him over God’s people throughout the coming ages. That is the fulfilment of the kingdom of God expectation. So we now exist as God’s ‘new creation’ people under the lordship of Christ, under the sign of redemptive grace.

To argue that this is an ‘existential’ model seems to me absurd - it is not about ‘existence’ in the abstract, it is about history. The whole point is that as a people we are defined, as we have always been defined, by a historical narrative, that the truth that sets us free and gives us purpose has been ground out in the mill of painful historical experience, that the story about Jesus is not an existential or gnostic myth but a deep backward-looking and forward-looking engagement with the story of the people of God.