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

Daniel, I’m really not sure what conclusions to draw from the fact that the Christendom paradigm in other parts of the world. It seems to me that a significant part of the Western church has gone too far down the postmodern road simply to turn back. Global Christianity is migrating into Western Europe and building large churches, often with a strong ‘prosperity’ focus; but they remain largely isolated both from indigenous forms of Christianity and the indigenous culture. It also seems likely that sooner or later global Christendom will run out of cultural and intellectual space and fall off the precipice of modernism in the same way that the Western church has. There are certainly cracks opening up already. The emerging church is becoming increasingly a global and not a purely white, Western phenomenon.

So a lot of questions. But I agree with you that the post-modern church needs to take positive account of global Christendom.

On the cDNA point… I argued in Re:Mission that the calling of Abraham, which is God’s creative response to the comprehensive failure of human society, is conceived in creational terms: it is that God would bless him, that he would make him fruitful and multiply him, and that he would fill the land. This is the language of Genesis 1:28 and it is found throughout the patriarchal narratives. So God’s foundational missional act is to bring into existence a new creation, an alternative to corrupt and idolatrous human society, that has recovered the original blessing of creation.

Because Israel persistently sinned, as a nation it came under a final judgment. So how would the promise, the cDNA, the hope of new creation, of justice and righteousness, be preserved? The answer that the New Testament gives is: through the faithfulness of Jesus, who gave his own life so that Israel might live and not perish. The announcement of that answer to the world is the proclamation of the ‘good news’, the gospel. If you like, the good news is that God has kept his promise to have for himself a new creation people in the world. But to characterize either the cDNA or the gospel as a universal truth risks missing the point. What matters is not some universal truth but the concrete existence of the people, because it is in the corporate life of that people that God’s intentions for his creation are embodied, lived out, and the recovered creational blessing is transmitted to other peoples and cultures.