I suggested in my review of Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways that, in our search for a new paradigm to replace the now more or less defunct Christendom worldview, the historical moment which we should revisit for inspiration is not the beginning of the narrow path of suffering that the radical Jesus movement took in pursuit of its Lord but the end, when the faithful community, having finally overcome the opposition of Greek-Roman paganism, was in a position to ask far-reaching questions about how it should organize and define itself as God’s ‘new creation’.
In the eschatological outlook of the New Testament that path of suffering was decisive for the restoration of God’s people and does not in any fundamental sense need to be repeated: it is the journey by which the community of the Son of man is vindicated, first against Judaism, then against Rome, and given the kingdom. It is the means, moreover, by which the DNA of the promise to Abraham, which I think needs to be understood in creational terms (therefore cDNA), is preserved and brought to the point when it can regenerate God’s people, not as an oppressed, exilic community but as a people that has inherited the whole earth. The following diagram is an attempt to schematize this narrative. Click on it to see a larger image.
The creational DNA (cDNA), passed down from Abraham, is carried by post-exilic Israel. But the nation is rapidly approaching terminal judgment: in Jesus’ words, it is travelling a broad and well-trodden path leading to destruction. Through his death Jesus inaugurates an alternative narrow and dangerous path that will lead to life. The task of carrying the cDNA along that path is entrusted to the community of his disciples, who are assured that if they remain faithful, if they are willing to suffer as he suffered, they will overcome their enemies, and eventually arrive at the parousia - the vindication both of the martyrs and of the church. So when pagan Rome eventually falls, the cDNA can be reactivated: the church has the massive responsibility of working out what it means, under the prevailing cultural and political conditions, to be a viable God-centred alternative to pagan Roman imperialism.
What they came up with was Christendom - a flawed paradigm, but it lasted in one form or another for 1600 years. Now that it has collapsed, we are compelled to ask again what God’s new creation, his alternative humanity, his world-within-a-world might look like under the currently prevailing cultural and political conditions. This is, as Hirsch argues, a liminal situation: we are exiles again, homeless, insecure, vulnerable; and we have no idea how long this will last. But we are not being persecuted; so it seems to me that the emphasis should be not on imitating Jesus, who suffered, died and was raised, or on imitating the radical movement that followed him down the same path. It should be on re-imagining what it means to be a people who no longer have to fear being eradicated by a satanically inspired, imperial régime because that victory has been won, who have been called instead to embody in ourselves - actually, prophetically, proleptically - the fulness of the creational promise.
The church in the West is in decline because the Christendom paradigm has collapsed. We could choose to take the way of the flourishing global church, but for many Christendom has left a bad taste in the mouth, and it feels as though we need to find a way forward through the narrow door of postmodernism into a new zone of liminality, engendered not by persecution but by indifference, scepticism, distrust. I believe that as we go down this difficult road, we will find ourselves increasingly giving shape in our imaginations to a new way of embodying in our lives together the cDNA that was originally conceived in the mind of Abraham. This confidence arises from the belief that the one who is Lord over us is also the one through whom all things were made and are remade, and from the powerful, disturbing, creative presence of the Spirit of God within us, who so deeply wants to fashion from us a new creation.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
While I wouldn’t want to underestimate the impact the destruction of the Second Temple had on the Jewish people, we survived that destruction pretty well just as we survived the first. Jewish history as I look at it certainly didn’t eclipse at that point - it had great periods of flourishing to come, as well as further catastrophes, so I think that part of the diagram is deeply flawed. The other point I would make is that Christians are most certainly being persecuted in almost every country where they/we are present. So for a theology that makes sense in our present context,surely we need a global perspective of understanding how God is working presently in history, not a Western one? It may be that we don’t want to re-create Christendom, but that dialogue must happen globally, and we must live with the consequences of what unfolds as a worldwide body of Christ.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Yes, these questions inevitably arise when we attempt to read New Testament eschatology historically.
1. I don’t really think that the New Testament has much to say about the existence of Israel following the war against Rome. The conviction was that Israel was under judgment, that this would take the form of a devastating war, the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the loss of the kingdom, the death of many, and the scattering of Jews from their homeland. These events are decisive and terminal at least to the extent that Jesus was justified in gathering an alternative community around himself as Torah, temple and king - and then he sends them out to claim the whole world as God’s holy land.
So from our perspective perhaps the diagram is flawed, but as a representation of how Jesus, Paul and others saw the future of their people, I think it is correct.
2. It seems to me that the New Testament regards the prophetic narrative about suffering and vindication, which reaches its climax in the victory over Greek-Roman paganism, as definitive not in the sense that the church would never again experience violent persecution but in the sense that it is this narrative about Jesus and the community that suffers in his footsteps that establishes the lordship of Christ over his people in place of the lordship of Caesar.
My argument, at least, would be that the story of the Son of man, which is a story about the defeat of pagan oppression and the giving of the kingdom to the suffering community of the saints of the Most High, is used to define the nature of the transition that God’s people must make from judgment to restoration, from oppression to the reign of God over them, from second temple Judaism to the renewal of the covenant in the Spirit. Having made that transition, I think the assurance to the church as a whole is that it will never again have to face such comprehensive oppression and the threat of annihilation. Christ is now Lord over the people of God and his place can never again be usurped.
Yes, churches and believers have been persecuted and oppressed since then, and it would be appropriate to speak of their experience in the light of the New Testament narrative. But I would say, again, that the New Testament doesn’t really look that far ahead. What mattered to the churches was their immediate situation. The fact is that if these small pariah communities had not remained steadfast in the face of extreme hostility from both the synagogues and from the pagan authorities, they would probably have gone the way of countless other oriental religious movements that had attempted to infiltrate the Roman world.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Is “cDNA” supposed to be a useful metaphor/symbol or a claimed biological essence?
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
I got the idea from Hirsch’s missional DNA or mDNA. 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 clearly meant as a restatement of the original blessing of Genesis 1:28, except that it is in microcosm. If humanity as a whole will not live in accordance with the intentions of the Creator, then perhaps a single family or nation will. My argument is that this cDNA gets transmitted right through the biblical story and in particular is saved from extinction by the faithfulness of Jesus who provides Israel with an alternative path leading to life. So yes, it’s a metaphor, though I can’t believe that you seriously imagined otherwise.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
What wonderful diagrams! However did you manage to transfer them to these comment boxes - and in colour?
My original problems raised on previous threads remain. First, I question the ‘Christendom’ notion as an authentic expression or even interpretation of biblical (or even post biblical) Christianity - pace Stuart Murray - and I think many expressions of the Christian faith throughout the period would question it as a valid way of viewing the church and society - both in the past, and as something which, purportedly, has ended. It rests on a faulty interpretation of cultural and church history. In other words, ‘Christendom’ is a chimera - it lacks biblical substance as a concept, was never clearly defined, and never existed according to the confused definitions of those who coined it.
Second, the hypothesis of the cDNA needs biblical substantiation. My understanding of Paul, for instance, is that the cDNA, or the ‘seed’ of Abraham, which is another way of looking at it, was fulfilled in Christ. It is in him that the new creation came into being, and only in relationship with him that it becomes effective in his people. All the lines converge on Christ. There isn’t a cDNA line that existed independently of him, that he somehow came to facilitate in its onward journey, and that continues more or less independently of him, in his people. This is the impression that your model conveys.
We also have to ask what defined the make-up of this cDNA. In your model, the NT is merely a historical facilitator for the independently onward marching cDNA. So what constitutes the cDNA? It’s this absence of definition that leads me to describe your model as existential - with an existential Jesus who is no longer defined according to the NT in terms of application today. I believe that the NT does define and provide the DNA of the cDNA as it is seen in God’s people today. Which raises many questions of biblical interpretation latent in the broader hypothesis - including a preterism which exceeds the wildest dreams of the radical preterists.
Otherwise it’s a lot of fun to discuss. I just think it runs into too many insurmountable problems to be, well, coherent - to use a word which I don’t like as it is too often slung around amongst academic theologians as a cover for a slanging match. Maybe we do need to go back to square one. Why not?
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.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
I suppose I’m just wondering whether you see any weaknesses at all in your position, Andrew. I think a major weakness of your position is that you seem to deny the possibility of any weaknesses.
As regards the Christendom concept - I question it because it is being used to support the supposed need for a new paradigm, either ecclesiologically or theologically or both, because it supposedly represents an era which has just recently come to an end. So what is it? Nobody has ever clearly defined what Christendom means. Did it ever exist? Politically, one branch of the church became, from the time of Constantine onwards, a power that rivalled the political powers, and played the same power games. But the actual history of that relationship, and how the church came to influence culture and society is very complex. So I’m questioning the validity of invoking Christendom and its demise as a basis for arguing the need for a ‘new paradigm’. The reality is rather that Christianity never influenced society and politics in quite the simple way that the supposed Christendom model is made to suggest.
From my perspective, the church is in exactly the same relationship to the power structures now as it always has been, and I believe a close inspection of church history, both within the so-called ‘Christendom’ paradigm and outside it (where a substantial proportion of the church has always been, continuously throughout the period, and not just as a marginal, minority position), bears this out. So I’m against oversimplified generalisations, which then become a platform for propounding theories of church and theology.
As regards how any creational promise to Abraham is fulfilled now, the point I am making and still make from your model is this: it suggests that the activity of Jesus in the 1st century, and the purpose of the NT writings, was simply to facilitate the progress of the church through that never-to-be-repeated time. So given that that is all left behind in history, who is the Christ who fulfils creation’s purposes now, and how does he do it, if the content of the NT doesn’t describe what he is doing through the church now? So that’s why I describe your portrayal of Christ as existential. All we have left, as far as the content of his activity is concerned, is a prophetic witness and a focus on creation backed up by a very contentless and anarchic biblical hermeneutic.
On the other hand, if all the lines of the biblical story converge on Christ, including the promise to Abraham of how his seed would fill the earth, and if the NT events and writings are relevant in total for today, and not just for a 1st century survival and passage of God’s people into the so-called age to come, then we have a huge amount of content to fill out how Christ works today to renew creation, beginning in his people, of whom, as I said, he is the chief cornerstone of the temple. It is all in him, and through him, and in relationship with him. The focus is preeminently on him.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Peter, I’ll ignore the insult and simply quote what I wrote in the comment:
OK, it’s not the way you’re accustomed to seeing things, but to my mind it takes the biblical narrative and its relation to history very seriously - much more seriously than modern evangelicalism does - and I fail to see how it can possibly be dismissed as ‘existential’. It makes the whole Bible, and not just the New Testament, which is where you rather end up, relevant for the life and mission of the people of God today. It recognizes that the New Testament makes Christ pre-eminent, but it also recognizes, as the New Testament does, that the story of Jesus constitutes a decisive and transformative episode in the history of the family of Abraham.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Andrew - this is becoming very tedious for you, but there was no insult intended, and despite the quotation, your proposal still does not provide for the people of God beyond the 1st century any way of defining the content of the Jesus they believe in or the activities they are to pursue. It’s not enough to say that Jesus reigns for them, or that they are given a mandate for creation. What exactly do these things mean?
You say that the NT is no longer normative for the people of God beyond the 1st century. In what sense is the OT normative - given that for most people, the Christian faith sees the OT as fulfilled and defined by the NT? If neither the NT or the OT are normative, then in what way are they meant to be used in the lives of the people of God? Do they provide optional advice?
I think my comments are perfectly valid - and could even be seen as a compliment. I am simply pursuing your proposals to their logical conclusions. Existential - which is not intended as an insult - seems to me to describe very well the situation in which you position both God and people of God, given that the historical approach has rigorously consigned the NT material and most of what Jesus said and did to the 1st century.
None of this is meant to be a defence of any alternative viewpoint. On the other hand, I am very grateful to you and other contributors to the site for helping me to engage much more seriously and critically with the viewpoints I hold. Thinking things through with the aid of debate on the site has immeasurably deepened and enriched those viewpoints, and given me no reason to reject them. I have no political interest in defending my viewpoints come what may. I am not part of any theological interest group. I am not part of any group which sees its own theological purity threatened by the least deviation from the party line. I find the dogmatic knee-jerk reactions which some contributors have encountered and which can be seen on some other websites as distasteful as any.
I am sometimes perhaps not as aware as I could be of the frequency of my contributions to the site. For me, it is really an exercise, which I have very much appreciated, in being forced to think theology through clearly and at greater depth than I am able to do anywhere else. And seriously, contributing to the site is often for me a means of mental refreshment as a diversion from other tasks which are less appealing! I do think you have a problem, which does not have a rational basis, with anything which can be labelled ‘evangelical modernism’. To me, this is caricature, and not a basis for serious argument. But not wishing to cause you greater problems, I will ration my in-put more robustly.
Mind, I did not say I will retire from the site entirely.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Peter, the dialogue is frustrating at times but it is invaluable. Thank you.
Did I say somewhere that the New Testament is no longer normative for the people of God? Possibly, but not in this conversation. Anyway, let me clarify.
The question is (or should be) not whether scripture is normative but how it is normative. My argument, which I think is an appropriate outworking of a realistic, historical hermeneutic, is that the people of God is defined in its life and mission by the whole biblical narrative. The story from Abraham onwards is ‘normative’ for us: it tells us who we are, why we exist as a covenant people, how we should behave, what we represent, how we should engage with the world, what we should hope for, and so on. Obviously that needs unpacking - these discussions have operated on a rather theoretical level - but I really don’t see that that would be a problem.
What I want to avoid is the flattening of the narrative and the loss of historical realism that occurs when we read scripture as immediately accessible, directly relevant sacred text. I think that there is plenty of content for us to be found in asking the question: What does it mean to be heirs of this particular historical narrative? What does it mean to be incorporated into a people that has been defined in this way, that has had its self-understanding filtered through the traumatic eschatological crisis of the early centuries AD, that has been forced to find life along a difficult narrow path. But I don’t have a problem with then asking how the historical narrative can be used indirectly and creatively to define our present, existential spiritual experience.
So, for example, I would argue that the New Testament by and large regards Jesus’ death as the means by which i) Israel was saved from its sins apart from the law and the promise to Abraham preserved from oblivion, and ii) Gentiles were brought into the restored community of God’s people. We are the historical beneficiaries of the fact that Jesus died for the sins of Israel. That seems to me to be a matter of good biblical interpretation - it allows scripture to say what it wants to say, not what we feel we need it to say.
However, if then take the narrative of Jesus’ saving death and apply it analogically or metaphorically to the personal experience of the individual who wants to say, ‘Jesus died for my sins’, that’s fine. There may even be some marginal New Testament precedent for that. What I object to is the prevalent habit of reading back the highly reductive, ahistorical, personal narrative into scripture. What I believe we need to recover is precisely the broad, concrete, political, corporate, social, historical scope of the biblical story, which calls us fundamentally not to know Jesus as our personal saviour but to represent the full extent of what it means to be God’s new creation.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Hmm I definitely agree with your basic premise that there needs to be a new paradigm to replace Christendom and that essentially with Hirsch (I have no read TFW, only the Shaping of Things to Come) , we do not have a new paradigm. It seems that he is advocating new forms rather than a new paradigm.
I also agree with Ilana that any new paradigm for the church must consider the global church and not just the dying western one. While the Christendom paradigm has collapsed in Europe, is it still alive and kicking in other parts of the world? Postmodernity is tied irrevocably to globalism through postcolonialism and therefore any new paradigm that “seeks a way forward through… postmodernism” needs to take the global church into account.
Another question about cDNA similar to Peters… Hirsch outlines his mDNA, I am assuming based on your review, with those 6 points including communitas, organic based systems etc. What exactly would cDNA be? Is this the creation mandate? Is the cDNA the essential message that must be carried through all generations? The universal truth? It seems like the cDNA is the core to all of your diagrams since it is the only thing that is being passed on.
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.
the obligation to object
(Note: though I don’t presently have time to involve myself in discussion, I actually follow practically ALL of the OST discussions using google reader, which allows me read the post more quickly and to miss very little…)
Andrew, I was sorry to pick up your apparent frustration with Peter’s input in this post: I think it a matter of observation that you exercise the right to disagree with others as a matter of course.
I value the dialogue you and Peter have considerably. As I made clear in my considerable review of your CoSM thesis, I can see your argument and have sympathy for it, even though I am not convinced that it should be considered de facto.
For this very reason, I’ve appreciated Peter’s robust theological challenge to your thesis. And I think you should too (Do you see any weaknesses to your thesis!?).
If you thesis is ‘right and proper’ (sic) then challenge in the areas it is or appears weak is to be valued. If it’s not so, then equally challenge is to be valued, since it may save a lot of us from going too far down a fruitless or dead end route.
I am under no illusions that Peter needs me to defend him. But it saddened me when I read your apparent annoyance followed up by Peter’s apparent concern that he ought not to intrude so often into the fray with you. I think the OST site and community would be lessened if that happened.
Proverbs says it’s a fool who intrudes upon an argument between two men, so I offer my gentle concerns with no expectation of their being welcome, only the hope that one of the really important overarching theological tussles which OST has elicited, won’t be undermined in the long run.
And by the way, yes, lovely diagrams. Especially from someone who’s on record as not liking theological diagrams!
shalom! - john (eternalpurpose.org.uk)
Re: the obligation to object
Thanks, John. Frustration is just part of the process; it doesn’t have to put an end to dialogue. I still think the jibe about a ‘very contentless and anarchic biblical hermeneutic’ was uncalled for, but your gentle rebuke is well taken.
If Peter and others like him weren’t there to challenge the argument, I would have to do it myself. That might make for better scholarship on my part, but at the moment I think it would be less fun.
Peter knows that the dialogues have helped me think through the implications of this historical hermeneutic. I admit that I have a rather tendentious and blinkered approach to biblical interpretation at times, but I do keep the questions in mind. My aim is to see if a coherent, comprehensive and practical account of what it means to be church can be developed in light of a consistent and realistic narrative-historical reading of the texts. And to be honest, I’ve got a lot of intellectual (and even spiritual) satisfaction from watching this perspective evolve. Whether the church - or even that part of it that thinks it is emerging - will ever agree with me, however, is another matter. I am only one minor voice in a cacophonous clamour.
The diagrams were just to impress Alan Hirsch, who does that sort of thing much better than I do. They are slightly tongue-in-cheek.
Re: the obligation to object
Putting words onto a screen tends to remove the sense of personal interaction which comes from face to face encounter. Cyber conversations have to work very hard to convey tone - which otherwise can easily be misinterpreted.
‘Very contentless’ was a repetition of a serious point I have been making - perhaps too insistently. ‘Anarchic biblical hermeneutic’ was how the use and application of scripture to life and practice seemed to me in the light of Andrew’s interpretive model. It’s the exact opposite of the exegesis which has gone into constructing the model - which is detailed and methodical.
Neither phrases were intended as a jibe - but the larger point is that the pursuit of debate has been getting obsessive, in hindsight almost like stalking, and I think that calls for greater restraint on my part.
Say a little prayer for me as I plod up Guildford’s High Street in my thermal underwear and Arctic weather gear on the annual ‘walk of witness’ this morning.
but not to square one?
One of the things that has excited me about "emerging" is that rather than taking the NT church (in Acts and the episltles) as the ultimate paradigm, there has been a concerted effort to rehabilitate our founder to his Lordship during his own earthly sojourn.
In other words, there has been a significant revival of interest in the gospels as themselves being gospel and having sometihing to say about who and what we are as followers of Jesus.
Andrew seeks something of an opposing hermeneutic that would perhaps be more comfortable with Constantine than with Jesus. In other words, Paul seems to look longingly towards a culmination of history that would be fairly well fulfilled with the triumph of "Christianity" over pagan Rome: " …the community of the Son of man is vindicated, first against Judaism, then against Rome, and given the kingdom."
With Pannenberg, it seems to me that it is the cross that is at the heart of all eschatological thinking. The resurrection is the final vindication of Jesus way, which is always opposed to the worldly way, and which always will result in a cross - and in a resurrection.
The beauty of Christendom is that it successfully sublimates this concept into a purely spiritual one whereby the bite of the actual way of the gospel is nullified as far as daily living is concerned and we are free to remember the cross for an hour of contrition once every seven days, which makes everything that we do the rest of the time magically ok.
I believe that we can spot this fairly soon after the church’s "victory" over Rome. I would argue that the organization of the body of believers into just one more human organization - that inevitably has to follow on its symbiosis with empire - is surely both a terrible nadir and an ironical mockery of whatever gospel Jesus preached and lived out.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Jesus is not the whole story
Sam, I think I understand the significance of the shift in focus from church to Jesus. It reflects negatively a disillusionment with church and positively a desire for a more down-to-earth, humane, personally relevant and committed form of Christianity.
My question, however, is whether Jesus really provides us with the model for being Christian community that we think he does. Or perhaps more accurately, it seems to me that there is far more to being God’s people than is really manifested either in the life of the disciples around Jesus or in the early churches. My argument is that in both cases what was being shaped was a form of covenantal community designed specifically to survive the disruptive and painful transition from the old age to the new. I think that this is what Jesus meant when he called Jews to take up their cross and follow him; it is what Paul meant when he said that the churches had to be constructed out of material that would survive the ‘fire’ of distress and persecution (1 Cor. 3:10-15).
This is not to say that there is nothing of interest for us in those two paradigms. The eschatological crisis stretching from Jesus to the victory over Rome had a profound reshaping impact on the people of God, and we should live consciously in the light of that. But it seems to me that a narrative theology must place that extended episode within the larger biblical story about a people called not just to survive an eschatological crisis but to be an alternative to a creation in crisis. I think that it is right to see that creational potential summed up in Jesus, but I don’t think we see it adequately expressed in the life of Jesus because i) the path he walked was too narrow, and ii) it is his resurrection, not his earthly ministry, that marks the beginning of the new world. If we stay with our Lord ‘during his own earthly sojourn’, we never get to new creation.
So I would agree that the cross is at the heart of New Testament eschatology; but I would also argue that the New Testament eschatology of suffering and vindication is at the heart of a larger story about the renewal of creation, which is expressed not in the cross but in the resurrection. That is the thesis of Re: Mission.
I regard (tentatively, questioningly and perhaps too benevolently) Christendom as an attempt to give concrete social and cultural form to the conviction that God called his people to be an alternative humanity, a City of God, expressing in itself not just the capacity to suffer but also the capacity to experience the blessing of creation, shalom. I also think that Christendom was a fundamentally flawed experiment - and I certainly would not be more comfortable with Constantine than Jesus. But for better or for worse, that’s what happened - and we are still to varying degrees its victims and its beneficiaries. I don’t share the full extent of your negative assessment of Christendom.
In any case, Christendom has collapsed as a framing paradigm, so I suggest that this whole emerging church phenomenon is a sign that we are searching - consciously or unconsciously - for a new paradigm. Naturally, in order to find that new paradigm we go back to our origins, and it is certainly instructive to go back to the Gospels - or to an understanding of the early church as a radical Jesus movement (cf. Alan Hirsch).
But I think it is a mistake to regard either the Gospels or the Letters of Paul as constituting a frozen ideal or blueprint. They are part of a dynamic, unfolding story: indeed, they are aware that a crucial part of that story lies in their future, that it is not all fully captured in the story of Jesus and his disciples or in the encounter of the church with Judaism or Rome - or even, for that matter, in the cross and resurrection. I think that New Testament eschatology takes account of this historical dynamic, and that if we pursue that trajectory again now, it will bring us to a point at which we need to reimagine what it means to be a people called not fundamentally to imitate either Jesus or the early but to be God’s new creation in the risen Christ in the midst of the nations and cultures of the world for the sake of the creational blessing.
My guess is that in place of the political-rationalist paradigm of Christendom we will have a much stronger sense of the existence of God’s people as an organic movement dispersed throughout the world with a correspondingly organic mindset, worldview, belief system. We can be pretty sure, however, that this will also be a deeply flawed experiment in being new creation - just in different ways.
Re: Jesus is not the whole story
Andrew, that’s a very clear statement.
I think most folks here would generally agree with a methodology that tries not to start with a set of formulaic "ready made" solutions, but to rather dig into the narrative with an attempt at openness to the original historical context.
In this endeavor, I think your own exigesis of the NT is refreshingly different. Yet, we have failed to go far enough and hence the feeling that "there is far more to being God’s people than is really manifested either in the life of the disciples around Jesus or in the early churches".
We have tended to look at Paul (or more generally anything in any of the epistles) as one who always has an apt theological formula for whatever problems we are facing in our attempts today to live as God’s children. Paul certainly did take up the task of constructing a people for God, a realised new creation, in his own time.
But, I think this idea of seeking a "model" whether within or after the NT, is part of the problem.
The narrative within which Paul plays such a key role is not in itself "the answer". Rather, we could look at the first crop of disciples (including Paul) as those who have imbibed much of Jesus, in turn are now faced with needing to recontextualise "the gospel" and "the way" for strangely different cultural contexts. The original narrative (that of Jesus himself) then becomes of primary importance and it’s my feeling that the NT church as a whole recognised their need to both anchor themselves and to simultaneously reinterpret the gospel for their own varying situations. Hence I think we have a good reason for just this combination of books in the NT period - gospels, and epistles - the anchors and the interpretations.
If we recognise the narrative for what it is, our hermeneutical questions can focus more on how the gospel came to be applied in the specific epistolic ways, and we would also be less inclined to elevate these individual applications (as found in the epistles-yes even Romans) into something like an end in itself.
And in saying this I do agree with part of the quote above!
It’s my feeling that because of our fascination with the permutations of the epistles, we never really have realised the importance of the gospel traditions themselves in shaping the young believers’ attempts to contextualise. A hermeneutic that tries now to go from the gospel traditions to what a people founded on this tradition should look like now is exactly what is missing for me.
A primary problem with your broader proposal is that it tosses us into an even later period, with greater distance from key historical events and still fails in the attempt to find something that would resemble a "people of God" on which we could safely model ourselves.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Jesus is not the whole story
I take your point, but:
1. Perhaps that’s just indicative of the fact that we don’t know our church history well enough - that we’re too much focused on the events of the New Testament period. I think it might be a really instructive exercise to gain a better grasp of what was happening when Christianity shifted from persecuted minority to imperial religion. Why shouldn’t we regard this as an event of similar importance to the exodus or the exile or the destruction of Jerusalem or the Reformation?
2. I think that this later event (the victory over Rome and the emergence of Christendom) is intimately connected by eschatological narrative to the events of the New Testament. It is simply again a matter of historical myopia that we have overlooked that.
3. I’m not suggesting that we model ourselves on the Christendom people of God. It seems to me that we need to draw our identity from the whole biblical narrative, beginning crucially with the renewal of creation with the call of Abraham. It helps to understand how Israel organized itself, how it sought to maintain obedience, how it shaped its life, how it lived in the land, how it interpreted events - and how that whole experience was reinterpreted by Jesus. And then we ask how that narrative trajectory takes the people of God into a difficult future, when its very existence is threatened by the power of Rome. And so on…
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Andrew, this is really intriguing, thanks for your efforts here. I strongly identify with a number of elements:
1. the way forward is the way back, but we start from the end. In this sense our ecclesiology really must be shaped by telos.
2. We aren’t going to get anywhere apart from a renewed imagination. Yet that imagination must be formed by the story we inherit. It is both a missional and a covenantal imagination, and it is profoundly storied.
3. what must survive, as Brueggemann put it, is not just the physical community but an alternative community.
4. We are going to need a new hermeneutic that is both imaginative and rooted. Some of Paul Fromont’s posts are helping me here, and Rowan Williams work seems deeply promising.
Oddly.. perhaps so appropriately.. the way forward may be greased by Father Jacques and a post-Derridean approach. (See Jeffery McCurry’s paper). Différance tells us that meaning is always postponed in language. It is always coming into being — and never simply here or there. That sounds to me like an echo of kingdom theology, living in the presence of the future — and in a space where genuine participative theological creativity is actually invited by the Lord.
“The holy texts are full of holes, holes waiting for informed and imaginative readers to fill them in, to make present what is absent, that being some other part of the interacting canon. Vast portions of the Bible are mnemonic triggers, set to create intertextual exchanges.” Dale Allison
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Hi Len, nice to hear from you. Are there some links missing - ‘Paul Fromont’s posts’, ‘Jeffery McCurry’s paper’?
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Paul Fromont posts at Prodigal Kiwis.. http://prodigal.typepad.com/
The paper by McCurry sadly is not online; but if you drop me a note I can send you a copy. It is published in Modern Theology, July 2007.
Re: We have to go back, but not to square one
Now that I’m registered, I’m anxious to tell you that this was an excellent post! When it showed up in my rss feeder, the title grabbed me right away. It’s quite bold to say “the Church should do this or that”, but it’s an important enough topic that we should try.
I love the diagrams, and the placed worth on history in general.
Thanks.