Virgil, I greatly appreciate your comments and certainly do not wish to discourage you from referring to this post on Planet Preterist. But I hope you will forgive me if I repeat a point that I have tried to make on other occasions, which is that I do not regard this as a ‘preterist’ argument. I know this will sound disingenuous and I am aware of the overlap with various preterist positions, but I would insist that this approach to eschatology is the outworking of a critical-realist hermeneutic; it is not the product of a prior eschatological position.

It seems to me much more important to stress that for the early church the coming of the kingdom constituted an urgent and plausible future hope than that from our point of view it defines a fulfilled hope. Preterism is still a backward-looking approach to New Testament eschatology. A narrative theology requires us to look forward with the New Testament community through an exercise of the historical imagination.