Hi, Peter, I thought I might here from you on this one!

I think there are very good reasons for resisting the ‘preterist’ label. I don’t mean to diminish its insights, but it carries far more baggage with it than is helpful for reading the New Testament. It defines a particular modern dogmatic tradition which is quite different to my own intellectual tradition, and I think it is of crucial importance (for me at least) to preserve that distinction. It is not enough to say that we should call a spade a spade. My argument would be that preterism is not using a spade to dig over the soil of scripture. It is using some other implement, not particularly well designed for the purpose.

Obviously, if the reign of God over his people is established through the eschatological narrative of the New Testament, then we now live under that reign. This is a dynamic experience: we are always seeking to live in obedience to Christ as Lord, and in that sense there remains a present and future aspect to the kingdom of God. But what the Gospels emphasize is the coming of the kingdom of God as an event, a turning point, a transition, in the life of the people of God. That event is in the past. That is no more a sectarian dogmatic judgment than to say that the exodus of the Jews from Egypt is in the past.

My argument is that the coming of the kingdom in the Gospels is to be understood in essentially the same terms as it is understood in Isaiah: God comes to deliver his people from oppression and restore their political and religious integrity (cf. Isaiah 52:7). But if you proclaim that ‘good news’ in the Roman world, you inevitably come into conflict with the pagan ‘good news’ that Caesar is the world’s saviour and lord. Why do I have to keep repeating the point that the coming of the kingdom is not confined to the first century?

The motif of the coming of the Son of man very easily encompasses judgment on Rome. The heart of Daniel’s vision is the destruction of a pagan power that makes war on the saints of the Most High. Jesus’ focus is on the confrontation with the Jewish authorities, but Paul in 2 Thessalonians certainly speaks of judgment on the enemies of the early churches in terms drawn from the larger narrative of Daniel 7-11.

I would not argue, however, that the Son of man narrative is the only way in which the New Testament speaks of the rescue of the people from oppression. The other motif is that of YHWH descending from heaven either to judge his people or to deliver them from their enemies. This is a thoroughly political hope: Israel believed that God would directly intervene to change concrete circumstances. It makes perfectly good sense to think that the early church expected its Lord to ‘descend from heaven’ to bring persecution to an end.