Re: Being a disciple of Jesus is not enough

Christ came and announced the Kingdom of God into a particular community and much of His life was spent explaining what that meant…

The point I was trying to make in the post was that when Jesus announces the coming of the kingdom of God and gathers around himself a group of disciples, he does so in the context not merely of a ‘particular community’ but of a particular story. It is the story of Israel under judgment and facing political-religious meltdown. The good news that he announces to Israel under those conditions is that YHWH is about to act decisively to overthrow his enemies and rescue his people from destruction. That is Jesus’ ‘gospel’. But he takes the further step of forming around himself, under these particular eschatological conditions, the nucleus of renewed Israel. He creates a community that must continue the story: proclaim the good news to Israel and in the wider world, survive Israel’s crisis of judgment, and seed communities of believers across the Greek-Roman world which by their very existence will proclaim the fact that not Caesar but YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is the God of the whole earth.

My argument is that Jesus forms a community of disciples for that particular historical and eschatological purpose and that we cannot simply take this as a universal model for being ‘Christian’. Discipleship in our context will have some things in common with discipleship in the Gospels, but it should also take account of two historical conditions. The first is that we have moved beyond the eschatological crisis for which Jesus prepared his disciples. The second is that the church in the West is facing a deepening crisis of irrelevance as the tide of Christendom withdraws. If discipleship today is to be effective it must be contextualized in the same way that it was in the Gospels: it must understand its place in the story.

I disagree that we are still waiting for the parousia, for reasons explained ad tedium elsewhere (see this recent comment, for example, and The Coming of the Son of Man). I do agree that it is the calling of the church to announce to the world a message of judgment and salvation, both at a personal level and at a societal level. But the storyline is still not exactly what it was two thousand years ago, and I don’t think that being like Jesus’ disciples is quite the right theological basis on which to respond to this challenge.

So while yes we have been taken beyond this narrative through both history and eschatalogy, this narrative still can be found as useful in determining our teaching and action today.

That’s fine. To my mind that gets the right sort of balance between historical meaning and contemporary relevance. I do not dismiss the relevance of the Gospel stories by any means. What I am concerned about here is the argument that we should take the early Jesus movement as a sufficient model for the missional church today. I think that it provides too narrow a basis for defining the calling of the church and I don’t think that the Bible leads us to that position.

So what would be normative? Good question. I think we have to ask ourselves fundamentally what it means to exist as God’s ‘new creation’, his renewed humanity, in the midst of the nations and cultures of the world. That is a story that goes all the way back to God’s seminal response to the persistent failure of human society to observe the terms and conditions of creation. Abraham’s family would be a ‘new creation’; they would recover the creational blessing of Genesis 1:28 and they would transmit that blessing to the world. The New Testament tells a critical chapter in that story, but it does not fundamentally alter the missional task: to live as God intended humanity to live, righteously, in relation to himself, to one another, and to the earth, as a sign to the world that he alone is God, there is no other.