I want to address Peter’s numerous comments about the coming of Jesus in a new post as we are getting well beyond the scope of a discussion of the Lord’s prayer. To my mind the question of perspective that arises here will be of crucial importance for us as we pursue the task of rethinking what it means to be in continuity with the biblical people of God. This is not fundamentally about which off-the-shelf eschatological schema we prefer; it is about how we make sense of ourselves biblically. My sense is that we are groping towards a new realism in how we read scripture and a new narrative framework within which to work out what it means as a community to know and serve the creator God. The whole process is immensely complex and no doubt confusing, but my hope is that through these (often repetitive) conversations we will all (I include myself!) remain sufficiently teachable for our minds to be slowly transformed by the Spirit of God. So here we go again…
And what exactly was ‘the brightness/splendour/epiphaneia’ of Jesus’s coming?
There are several instances of the use of epiphaneia in the Maccabean writings with reference to historical events (victory in battle, for example) that are a ‘revelation’ of the active involvement or presence of God. There is no reason, therefore, why Paul should not have used the term to highlight the active involvement or presence of the Lord in the historical events that led to the ending of oppression and the collapse of Roman opposition to the gospel.
Further, the destruction of the Man of Lawlessness by Jesus with ‘the breath of his mouth’ points to a latter day judgement, rather than a 1st century event.
Do you imagine that at the final judgment Jesus is going to blow on people? Surely this is to be understood as a reference either to the Spirit which will sustain the suffering community or to the word of truth that will overcome the propaganda of the imperial ideology? In Revelation 19:11-21 the beast which inspired Roman imperialism is defeated by ‘The Word of God’.
This event seems to be a combining of a 1st century occurrence, and ‘the day of the Lord’ - the final judgement - referred to in 2 Thessalonians 2-3.
The ‘day of the Lord’ in scripture is never a ‘final judgment’; it is a judgment within history. The defeat of the ‘man of lawlessness’, I would suggest, is a defeat of the figure like Antiochus Epiphanes who would spearhead the persecution of the church. Paul may have imagined a single human figure, but I don’t think we are stretching things too much to suppose that the man of lawlessness is in more general terms the institution of the divine Caesar who exalts himself in the place of YHWH and oppresses the saints of the Most High.
Nero committed suicide - no signs of judgement there…
I don’t see why Nero’s suicide shouldn’t have been interpreted as an act of judgment. Wasn’t Judas’ suicide in some sense a judgment on his actions? Indeed, that seems to be the point of the allusion to Psalm 69:25-28 in Acts 1:20. But the fundamental judgment is on the arrogance of Roman imperialism in general. We don’t need to restrict it to a single figure.
In 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, a ‘coming’ of Jesus is described which does not fit into a 1st century framework at all.
I have explained in The Coming of the Son of Man how in 1 Thess. 4:15-17 Paul uses Old Testament language to construct a prophetic narrative of hope for a church facing persecution. The passage is addressed quite realistically to a concrete historical community. It refers to their future, not ours. The only way we can make this part of our future is by ignoring both the Old Testament background and the historical setting.
The ‘coming’ of Jesus in Revelation 22 is in the context of a future consummation, which has in view the new creation order in its fulfilment…
The coming of Jesus in Revelation 22 is not part of the new creation vision. It belongs to a coda to the whole book. I think that John here reverts to the prior hope of an ending to persecution and the vindication of the suffering church, which is the fundamental reason for the book. The context for this is described in Rev. 1:4-9, where John emphasizes that he shares with his readers ‘the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance’ and offers them the prospect of Christ coming with the clouds in order to encourage them.
So I think we do need to be focused and precise in our interpretation of the ‘coming of the Son of man’. The narrative drawn from Daniel is coherent and is used coherently in the New Testament. We feel the need to speak of ‘precursive’ comings now only because we have misunderstood the prophetic idiom of the New Testament. That is a retrospective justification. That is reshaping scripture to meet our modern failure of perspective. There is simply no good intrinsic hermeneutical or theological reason for doing this.
My main point of disagreement with Andrew is that he wants to locate the ‘coming’ of Jesus exclusively and specifically in 1st century events, one of which was visible - the destruction of Jerusalem, the other wasn’t - the destruction of Rome.
The destruction of blasphemous Roman imperialism was not a first century event and it wasn’t invisible. I do not claim that Daniel 7:13 is applied exclusively to a first century scenario: it encompasses the whole eschatological transition from Israel under judgment to the defeat of Israel’s enemies and the vindication of the suffering church in Christ.
I argue that apocalyptic language cannot be taken so completely literalistically.
It is not a matter of taking the apocalyptic language of the New Testament ‘literalistically’ - after all, much of the language is both borrowed from the Old Testament and symbolic. It is about taking it realistically, about asking how the New Testament communities interpreted the immediate future that they faced.
We are in a postmodern smorgasborg of pick-and-mix religion par excellence.
This comment is really quite unfair. The last thing I am advocating is pick-and-mix religion. The much bigger danger, as you yourself point out, is that the New Testament story is made irrelevant to us today, though I don’t at all think that that is the case. For a start, the exodus story did not cease to be relevant to Judaism just because it described events in the past. Because they remained a story-telling people, the exodus was always part of their political-religious identity. The New Testament describes a new exodus transition from oppression to renewal. We don’t gain anything by imagining that the renewal described in the New Testament is somehow still in the future. The people of God was renewed through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ and the faithfulness of the community that suffered as he suffered, empowered and sustained by the Holy Spirit, culminating in the vindication that came with the victory over Rome. We are not still waiting for that to happen. We have inherited it. But we remain under the lordship of Jesus Christ who died and was raised for the sake of the future of the people of God. How is that a matter of irrelevance to us?
We are a community that has been re-formed by the experience of eschatological transition and everything that went with it; but we don’t have to pretend that we are still in that transition for the re-formation to have continuing significance for us. If people go through a crisis, it leaves its mark on them - they are different because of the experience, even when they have come out the other side and re-established their lives. We are not the same ‘people’ that went into the eschatological crisis described in the New Testament. We are radically different and we live that difference out on a daily basis. It is in that historical and narrative sense that the New Testament remains profoundly relevant and meaningful to us.
Re: The coming of Jesus and the relevance of history
This is the fullest and clearest version of how ‘the coming of the Son of Man narrative’ affects those who did not live through the 1st century events which, supposedly, formed the narrative. I apologise if the comments on ‘smorgasbord religion’ seem unfair - but if the NT writings don’t have any direct relevance to us, I still don’t really see what precisely forms the identity and practice of the faith community today. I don’t see Andrew’s version of the Son of Man narrative as a way into a ‘new realism’; I see it as ignoring what was real enough to the early faith communities, and is real enough today.
It’s always interesting, and sometimes helpful, to know of antecedents to a word like epiphaneia. These still do not provide an explanation of an obscure passage like 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, and I am rather wary of claims to any single definitive meaning. I never did imagine that Jesus destroying the Man of Lawlessness with ‘the breath of his mouth’ meant literally that he blew on someone, and it is much closer to Revelation 19:11-21, 13-15 especially, as applied not only (if at all) to the destruction of Roman imperialism, but also to a judgement to come, as is the rest of Revelation 19, and 17 & 18.
The ‘day of the Lord’ means, in my understanding, both judgements in history and final judgement, the former only insofar as they are precursors to or anticipate the latter. However, in 2 Thessalonians 2:2-3, I disagree that “the day of the Lord” was an event, or events, which could be associated exclusively with judgement on the Roman Empire - simply because they cannot be confidently located in any known historical events or occurrences. 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 sounds like a much more climactic event than any which is known to have occurred. I am inclined to see it as a perspective on a final event to come, which did not occur in the lifetime of the Thessalonian church, but might have been suggested in the church’s lifetime through more immediate occurrences. In that sense, it could have referred to the death of either Nero or Domitian; but the deaths of neither were sufficient to represent an adequate fulfilment of Paul’s language here. And there does not seem to have been a corporate demise of the Roman Empire in history which could be said to have fulfilled the verses. The personal/corporate interpretation has been extensively rehearsed by others, and my recollection is that the ‘personal’ interpretations seemed to have the greater weight.
I seem to remember that the discussion of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 in COSM conceded that this was one of the more difficult ‘coming’ passages to fit into a 1st century or ‘already fulfilled’ interpretation.
Andrew’s comment that “the coming of Jesus in Revelation 22 is not part of the new creation vision” attempts, I presume, to locate it in a different context from the rest of the passage (ie 1st century or whenever, not future). Is that right? I assume we agree that most of 20 - 22 are future, albeit, I would argue, a vision of the future which informs the present. I would say the same of chapters 15-19.
I argue elsewhere that the apocalyptic language of Daniel can be taken to apply to the overthrow of pagan empires at all times and in all places; that there was never a clear fulfilment of such an overthrow which satisfied national Israel’s expectations of how her history would work out (on which Andrew bases a great deal of his OT interpretation of the NT); I also argue that Daniel 7:13 can be taken to apply to the whole nexus of the death, resurrection, ascension and outpoured Spirit of Jesus, and that this, rather than judgement on the enemies of the people of God, expresses more powerfully and completely the authority and rule of the Son of Man, Jesus. It is these events which form the focus of the NT - the destruction of Jerusalem and a contemporary (whenever) destruction of Rome hardly at all. Which is why some revision of the significance of Matthew 24 as an exclusively 1st century event needs to be brought into the frame.
The ‘realism’ of how we interpret OT apocalyptic prophecy as applied to the NT depends somewhat uniquely on what we understand by the victory of Jesus. Overwhelmingly, the message of the NT is that this was not a victory which the OT narrative might have led us to expect - a physical and violent overthrow of pagan nations opposed to the people of God - but a victory which enabled the people of God to overcome death through this life as well as in the life to come. God’s kingdom was implanted in his people within suffering and hardship, as well as overcoming it. It was a victory which was even held out to those who were the enemies of God’s people - hence the culture-shock of the inclusion of the gentiles. The COSM narrative seems to be taking us back to an earlier stage in the understanding of God’s activities.
This leads to the final point: I don’t see a COSM narrative which can be compared to the Exodus narrative in a like-for-like way. The NT narrative does not focus on liberation from physical persecution and oppression (although these are arguably essential by-products of it) - but does provide access to an actual experience of life-transforming power and membership of God’s people through the cross, resurrection, ascension and outpoured Spirit of Jesus. This remains as true today as it was in the 1st century. These elements of the story seem to be sidelined by the COSM narrative, and not surprisingly - because they are the most damaging to it. Who would want a narrative instead of a life-transforming experience? Or instead of setting one against the other, who would refuse a narrative which also held out the offer of life-transforming power and participation in the renewed community of God?
The 'rapture' in its literary and historical setting
I have added some comments on 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 in a separate post. I am not as hesitant about its historical setting as you suggest.
Re: The coming of Jesus and the relevance of history
A central issue in how we are to understand and apply the New Testament’s teachings revolves around our understanding of eschatology. Is there any sense within the NT writings that “The people of God was renewed…culminating in the vindication that came with the victory over Rome. We are not still waiting for that to happen” ? One is almost arguing that the NT being somewhere within this process of transition, somehow warps our ability to tease out the historical setting properly.
Certainly there are progressions of theological and interpretive thought within the NT writings but I don’t get the sense anywhere that this implies that the NT authors were looking forward to major theological changes still in the offing.
The divide between the world and the people of Christ did not come to an end with the destruction of Rome, nor with the Christianisation of the RE. In fact the battle became more intense as the world crept into Christian institutions. The suffering servants of the Suffering Servant is a continuing theme and a continuous one in history, whether one thinks in terms of physical suffering or in terms of the larger battle that is being waged in and for the minds/hearts of the people of this world.
In whatever way the NT is ‘transitional’ surely still applies today.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: The coming of Jesus and the relevance of history
I’m not sure it’s a matter of major theological changes still to come. You could argue that the theological changes have already taken place in Christ but the religious and political implications remain to be worked out in practice. In Jesus’ death and resurrection the powers that held Israel captive are defeated, but for the community of the Son of man that victory needs to be lived out through faithful suffering in the conviction that nothing in all creation, not even death, could finally overcome those who are in Christ Jesus. It is essential to see that in Romans 8:31-39 Paul is talking about the hardships and sufferings that come with being a hated and persecuted minority in the pagan world.
The prophetic account of judgment on Rome that we have in Revelation is another way in which the concrete outworking of Jesus’ victory is envisaged.
Certainly the problems don’t come to an end with the fall of Rome. But my argument is that the New Testament uses the story of the Son of man to give expression to one particular big historical problem - the threat that Rome posed to the survival of the people of God. The eventual victory over Rome has implications for the future life of the people of God (I don’t think the New Testament becomes irrelevant), but the question of perspective must also be taken into account. The New Testament doesn’t foresee the future Christianization of the empire or the development of the institutions of Christendom - these are too far ahead. What it foresees is victory over the immediate oppressive power, and it uses centrally the story of the Son of man to define that hope.
When Jesus begins to talk about his coming death, resurrection and vindication, he tells a story about the Son of man: the Son of man must suffer many things, be rejected by the Jerusalem hierarchy, be handed over to be killed by the pagan oppressor, be raised from the dead on the third day, and then come in his kingdom. This coming in his kingdom is a future event. The question is: What sort of event is it? My argument is simply that given i) the Old Testament background and ii) the historical context the motif should be understood to refer to the vindication of Jesus and the community that followed him against the actual historical power that opposed and oppressed them.
Re: The coming of Jesus and the relevance of history
Having been re-reading N.T.Wright’s ‘The Resurrection of the Son of God’ recently, and stepping aside slightly from my fixation on Andrew’s particular take on narrative theology, I’ve been impressed in a fresh way by the importance of the future aspects of eschatology - particularly the resurrection of the dead, as inaugurated by a future return of Jesus. Especially I’m impressed with the importance of the resurrection (not just life after death) as a formative influence on the life and lifestyle of the people of God in the present. The various eschatological scenarios on offer at the moment don’t seem to me to bring the same emphasis, and the popular ‘modernist’ conception of the immortality of the soul still less.
Many of the issues which have surfaced over time in different threads on this site are addressed by Wright - eg the condition of the dead in the ‘intermediate state’, the meaning of the title ‘Son of God’ as applied to Jesus (which Wright does include as a description of his divine being), the final return of Jesus (which Wright affirms) to mention a few. But more significantly, Wright highlights the unanimous voice of the NT on the resurrection of the dead, tracing this back to Jesus’s own resurrection, and the significance of the resurrection in moulding and shaping the life of the Christian community in the 1st century. At least, in the case of the church at Corinth, how the life of the community should have been moulded and shaped.
I’m struck by Wright’s handling of the resurrection in this way, because I feel it is something that the church lacks - at all points in the spectrum! If anything, we see the resurrection as somewhat disconnected from our lives now, a kind of reward for holding onto correct belief perhaps, but not a major formative influence on the lifestyle and ethics of the believing community, and its whole relationship to the public sphere - at heart, a creation theology.
Much of the raison d’etre of this site, which the theme of this thread illustrates, is the focus on historic contextualisation of the faith. It seems to me less successful at suggesting how the faith should be lived in the present, in the light of a theological base slanted towards the past. It’s arguable that this focus discourages contextualisation of the faith in the present. I’d like to pursue, perhaps in a separate thread, the implications of Wright’s line of thinking about the resurrection of the dead as a major, perhaps the major formative influence on the life of the believing community in the present. The future return of Jesus seems to me not disconnected from such a position.
In examining the resurrection, Wright brings to life in a fresh way the passion of a person like Paul in the NT. This passion needs to become our passion. That’s if he is right, not ‘seriously wrong’. ‘Seriously formidable’ is still my take on Wright - especially in this particular aspect of eschatology - which has, it seems to me, huge implications for belief, in which a ‘resurrection future’ bears down on all aspects of life as they are to be lived by God’s community today.
Rome = the world?
Andrew, I can see the force of your arguement and certainly agree that in our usual thinking on the second coming we do tend to strip that out of it’s proper context.
Still, I wonder though whether the extreme localisation that you propose within the immediate history of the NT itself is justifiable. For most of the NT, the assurance of victory over Rome has to have been seen in the resurrection itself. Furthermore there is a good deal of confusion as to what to make of the somewhat violent rejection of Jesus and His followers by the Jewish leadership. The resurrection itself forces a new look at the Son of man concept and we can see a part of that reinterpretation in the gospels, at least in the redactional comments that are appended to the traditions themselves.
John certainly takes the concept to a more universal plane even while grounding ‘the battle’ in the incarnation. Then there is a sense within the NT in passages like Rom 8 and in Ephesians - Colossians that as long as we are “in the world” we will suffer regardless of the particular larger political reality but eventually we will be vindicated as God’s children.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Rome = the world?
Not sure of your point here. Yes, the ‘assurance’ of victory over Rome (and over death and satan) is there in the resurrection. But there is still the question of what that victory actually means for the community that is called to identify itself with Christ in his death, resurrection and vindication. That third element is important. It seems to me that the story of the Son of man, when it is retold in the New Testament, has the same historical coherence and relevance that it has in Daniel. It describes a single crisis in which the people of God are confronted by a pagan oppressor. As in Daniel the story is not completed until the oppressor is overthrown and the suffering community vindicated.
The rejection of Jesus and his followers by the Jewish leadership is also prefigured in Daniel’s narrative - in the betrayal of the covenant by those Jews who form an alliance with Antiochus Epiphanes.
Yes, we are accustomed to reading John as a more universalized version of the story, but that aspect can be overstated. I find it rather impressive how frequently reference is made to the apocalyptic Son of man narrative and how well that fits with the synoptic version. I would also argue that the thought of suffering as a result of being ‘in the world’ strongly presupposes a narrative about opposition and persecution. Romans 8 does not speak of suffering ‘regardless of the particular larger political reality’. It describes a suffering like Christ’s suffering as a result of Jewish and pagan opposition that will lead to a glorification like Christ’s, which I think must be understood within the eschatological narrative about the end of the age of second temple Judaism and the emergence of a renewed and transformed people of God.
This story can certainly be retold by the church facing similar persecution after the victory over Greek-Roman paganism, but this is not envisaged by the New Testament. More importantly, if we think that we are still living within this story about the Son of man, we are in danger of missing the larger story about about the renewal of creation.
I have a book coming out later in the year called Re:Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church (Paternoster) which argues that the historically limited Son of man story about suffering, death, resurrection and vindication is the means by which the larger story of God’s calling a people to be a creational microcosm is recovered following the failure of second temple Judaism. We are not meant to be a New Testament people designed to respond to the eschatological crisis defined by the Son of man story. We are meant to be an alternative, authentic humanity (rescued from destruction by Jesus) designed to respond to a creational crisis.
So I would say that the issue of the suffering of the church today as a result of persecution is important, but not half as important as the calling of the church to be in all respects an authentic humanity visible to the nations and cultures of the world.
Re: Rome = the world?
The drift of this thread, and the use of the ‘vindication’ concept, reminds me of my reply to Andrew at http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/888 on the ‘Somewhere in betweenism’ thread. In this reply, I set out what I see to be the divergence between the narrative which is being developed through all of Jesus’s actions and history in the NT, and the narrative provided by Andrew in his ‘Son of Man’ interpretation.
Andrew is right, it is possible to construct a ‘Son of Man’ narrative, in which a version of a fully realised parousia provides a controlling interpretive metaphor. The problem which arises, for me, is that this sets at a considerably lower premium the accomplishment of Jesus at the cross, and immediately ensuing events. I am much more impressed by these as controlling interpretive events than the ‘parousia’ which Andrew constructs, mainly through Daniel 7:13 and Matthew 24, as a central event.
Cross, resurrection and parousia
I wonder how much this is simply because for polemical or corrective reasons I have been focusing too much on the closure of the Son of man narrative. Would it not be possible now to reassert the primacy of the cross and resurrection as the ‘pioneering’ moments in the story without completely losing sight again of the longer historical outworking of the prophetic narrative?
But I would also argue that even in Jesus’ own teaching the ‘coming of the Son of man’ is an integral part of his vision and not less important than his death and resurrection. In the exchange with the disciples following Peter’s confession (eg. Mark 8:31-9:1) he tells a three-part story of the Son of man into which is inserted an invitation to the disciples to share in that story. i) The Son of man will suffer and be killed. ii) He will be raised from the dead. iii) He will come in the glory of his Father to receive a kingdom. The disciples are asked to take up their own cross and perhaps lose their lives for the sake of the gospel with the expectation that they will be acknowledged by Jesus (cf. Lk. 12:8) before the throne of the Ancient of Days at his parousia. They share in the whole story, not just in the first two parts.
I think you could make a decent case for the view that the vindication of the Son of man actually features more prominently in Jesus’ teaching than his death and resurrection. If that’s true, why is it such a problem that my argument about the Son of man story in a certain sense delimits or contextualizes the significance of the cross and resurrection? The point will still be that the path of faithful suffering, trusting the God who is God of the living and not of the dead, is the only means (cf. John 14:6) by which Israel will be saved and the remnant community eventually vindicated.
Re: Cross, resurrection and parousia
Andrew - I agree with you that ‘the coming of the Son of Man’ is an integral part of Jesus’s vision. I simply don’t see it as being a completed 1st century occurrence, though Mark 8:31 - 9:1 could be said to provide a narrative template of the kind which you are arguing for. In asking critical questions of your point of view, I would not want to ignore Jesus’s references to AD 70, and through that to a parousia of the Son of Man. I do want to explore the implications of adopting the template, and in this I don’t think you have explored as fully its flaws as you have the case for its adoption.
In your comment to which this is a response, you make the vindication of Jesus to be something separate from his death and resurrection. I simply think this is untenable. Jesus’s vindication was through his resurrection, and it is this which is invoked time and again in the NT by his followers, and also as the source of their own vindication - their justification, their righteousness/acquittal in the court-room metaphor. So Jesus’s vindication cannot be emphasised more prominently than his death and resurrection - it’s a contradiction in terms.
The path of faithful suffering modelled for the disciples by Jesus was one aspect of the cross. You adroitly side-step the cross as God’s way of bringing the broader narrative to its climax - sin dealt with, the new creation inaugurated in Jesus, conferred on his followers through the gift of the Spirit, a completion to come through the resurrection, new heavens, new earth, and an interim of great significance in the spread of new creation life around the globe. In this narrative, a 1st century ‘coming of the Son of Man’/judgement on Jerusalem-Rome occurs, but occupies a lesser place; the focus has moved to the final ‘coming of the Son of Man’ which will complete the creation purpose.
If there was a decent case to be made for a vindication of Jesus which was more prominent than his death and resurrection, it would illustrate to me something rather staggering, that Jesus’s death and resurrection were of secondary importance to us now. I don’t think such a weighting is sustainable from the evident heartbeat of the NT faith, both in the NT text and in the lives of those who have experienced it.
Re: Rome = the world?
Andrew, in “the historically limited Son of man story” the histoical limitation in the NT is for the start of the story in Jesus, linked strongly as you point out, to the Daniel account. However, the denouement that you see for this tradition in the collapse of Rome is quite speculative.
It seems to me that the response to the preaching of the gospel, especially by Paul to the gentiles leads to a much more generalised contrast between the followers of Christ and the world. Paul is able to argue quite generally that the gospel is foolishness to unregenerate man precisely because the gospel is the way of the cross and therefore antithetical in very nature to the way of the world.
The NT offers ‘the ministry of reconciliation’ as the major purpose for the people of God who are and always will be ‘in but not of’ the world. I don’t see that any of this changes with the destruction of Rome and one could argue that even if your reconstruction of the parousia is correct, it makes no material difference for how we are to read and apply the gospel today.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Rome = the world?
Why speculative? The Son of man story in Daniel is a story about judgment on the pagan oppressor of God’s people and the vindication of the suffering saints. If you tell that story again in he context of first century Judaism and the spread of Jesus communities throughout the Greek-Roman, it doesn’t require a massive leap of the imagination to think of pagan Rome as the oppressor that will come under divine judgment and be destroyed
I would still argue that if we read Paul carefully, we will find that his argument is much more dependent on, or sensitive to, the historical-eschatological narrative about suffering and vindication than we usually realize. Romans 8 is a perfect example. Nevertheless, I would probably agree that the association of the parousia with judgment on Rome and the whole realignment of eschatology around that do not necessarily affect some of the core ‘evangelical’ functions of the church, such as reconciling people to God.
However, I do think it makes a big difference whether we see our mission being worked out within a story about the Son of man or within a story about the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham to be an authentic humanity. Yes, God redeems elements of a dysfunctional creation through Christ, but what story are they brought into? I don’t think now that people are normally incorporated into a story about the vindication of a people suffering under oppression who are given the hope of overcoming death and being with Jesus in heaven at the right hand of the Father. That, roughly speaking, is the story of the Son of man and it centrally defines the hope articulated in the New Testament. I think people are rather incorporated into a story that is for historical reasons marginal to the New Testament but which is actually much bigger: the story about God bringing into existence a creational microcosm.
There are also questions about what we mean by ‘gospel’. This is a matter for discussion elsewhere, but I would venture the opinion that what the New Testament means by ‘gospel’ is somewhat different from what modern popular Christianity means by ‘gospel’.
to bind or to loose?
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