Greg, thanks for taking the trouble to respond. A few random comments…

I didn’t say that identifying false teaching was crude. What I object to is the method of evaluating difficult discussions by trying to bang them into crude holes such as ‘hyper-preterism’. (It’s late. The metaphor went a bit awry there, but hopefully you see what I mean.)

The ‘open source’ analogy, as far as I am concerned, does not allow people to redesign theology as they please. It basically just acknowledges and exploits the fact that healthy theology should be responsive, contextualized, and should engage the whole community. In an open source community there is actually a high degree of discipline and coherence - otherwise the programme would be useless. The difference is simply that the process is open rather than closed. A couple of recent articles discuss the idea of open source theology: Power to the People! How Technology is Changing the Face of Theological Formulation; and New time religion.

The Einstein argument is fine, but it doesn’t always work. Some things are difficult to understand and explain. That’s just the reality. Paul is difficult to understand; he doesn’t always explain things simply. Einstein is difficult to understand, for that matter - you have to admit that the general theory of relativity gets a little technical in places. I would politely suggest that NT eschatology is more complex and subtle than you realize.

I am not trying to obscure things. In part I want to resist oversimplification. In part, I am trying to resist the pull of habitual and unchallenged ways of reading. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but I think my reasons have more to do with preserving the integrity of exegesis than with being evasive. I could be wrong, but that’s how I see it at the moment. It also probably has something to do with the fact that I am unconsciously summarizing the content of my book - a lot of the explanatory detail and context gets missed. That’s my fault. Or yours because you haven’t read the book :)

I do not think Daniel’s visions ‘culminate’ in AD 70. I have made this point repeatedly - see also the responses to Joel on this thread. The narrative, which I think in many ways is formative for NT eschatology, includes the renewal of the covenant with the people of God following a protracted period of exile, the defeat of Israel’s enemy, and the vindication of the suffering church for its resistance to the idolatrous claims of pagan imperialism. I don’t expect you to agree with that, of course. It seems to me that we are too far apart in how we understand apocalyptic language to work to have any chance of reaching agreement on these issues.

Incidentally, what is the ‘technical language and unhelpful qualifications’ that you find so objectionable?