John, these are helpful questions. Thanks.

1. No, I’m obviously not suggesting that the church should get its own territory. In an important sense the spread of the church throughout the world represents YHWH’s claim to sovereignty over the whole world. But all I had in mind in this essay was the fact that the renewed people of God exists at many levels as a community in the midst of the diverse cultures and societies that otherwise make up the world, and that it is our calling to explore how on that basis we may best embody and present an authentic humanity in the fullest sense.

What I think is important here, as we’ve discussed before, is the need for a renewal of the collective prophetic imagination in search of ways of fulfilling this responsibility. It may be that in most instances we must represent a right relationship to the earth in symbolic ways - rather than, say, by fencing off a piece of the Côte d’Azur and calling it heaven on earth.

2. Again I think I would put the emphasis on the responsibility we have to re-imagine, re-present, bring into existence something that we may not fully see or understand yet. We can no longer attempt what Christendom sought to achieve - cultural hegemony. But we don’t want to withdraw into seclusion, turn our backs on human culture, creativity, progress, ambition, and so on. So this is the situation we are in: the challenge that the church in the West faces is to find ways to be new creation in a way that is genuinely human (ie. not narrowly pietistic or dualistic). How do we do that? Not, I would have thought, by denigrating human creativity, not least because we are too feeble to offer an alternative that isn’t, frankly, subhuman.

Perhaps a big part of the approach would be integrative: we find actual and prophetic ways to bind together in the midst of the nations the various elements that make a good world: justice, respect for the earth, human creativity and ingenuity in all their forms, and the dynamic presence of the living God. Then I would suggest that this inevitably entails a complex engagement, interaction, dialogue, with what exists around us - much as Israel interacted with the nations around, procuring cedar for the temple from Tyre, for example. So we might ask: How can the church exploit or subvert the macrocosm for the sake of the micrcosm?