Please tell me if I am coming at your comment wrongly.

Maybe. The comment was a response to Ken’s suggestion that our thinking needs to anticipate cultural and intellectual change – it wasn’t meant as a denial of our theological and ecclesiastical past. I fully agree with you that we need to acknowledge the failings – and perhaps also understand exactly what role allegorical forms of exegesis played in the development of theology (the issue here may be which category of theological activity the allegorizing method of interpretation belongs in – it may not be exegesis).

The question I wanted to address, however, had to do more with the perceived value of our worldview, belief system, theology. This value will be established partly through the integrity with which we deal with our history; but it also depends on the intrinsic worth of what we are saying. In a post-Christian world it seems essential that we construct and embody the ‘truth’ in such a way that it feels like a step forward rather than a step back. In a way, this is largely a matter of perception, but I have talked to a lot of people, Christians and non-Christians, who sense that they have left Christianity behind, which is very different to never having known it. At a personal and missional level, therefore, I think that being proactive, anticipatory, is not so much a question of guessing what the big questions will be next year but of offering people a viable future with God.