I wouldn’t say ‘up for grabs’. It does seem to be the case that biblical prophecy is intrinsically recyclable. So the ‘Son of man’ narrative could perhaps be re-used in localized situations in which the church is again oppressed and persecuted and awaits vindication. But I would hesitate to claim that these further applications of the motif are somehow contained in or intended by the original usage. I just don’t think that biblical prophecy is that ‘clever’ or sophisticated.

If the church in China, say, constructs for itself a narrative of hope out of these biblical texts, I would say from the perspective of a critical-realist hermeneutic that this is not so much a fulfilment of the biblical motifs as a new prophetically inspired insight articulated through the language of scripture. In that way we do not need to compromise the historical integrity of the original vision. The story of the Son of man in the New Testament, to my mind, has a specific narrative-historical application, but it can be re-applied paradigmatically or analogically to express hope in later situations.

Your suggestion that the imperialization of Christianity was a satanic strategem to safeguard his influence is intriguing, but we would need to be careful how we classify it. I don’t see how we could call it exegesis. Would a retrospective interpretation count as ‘prophecy’? Perhaps we need other categories of discourse to encompass more creative, playful, imaginative and not necessarily ‘true’ readings of the story about the people of God.

You could say that Satan got the best of the church, but that seems to me to contradict a consistent theme in the New Testament which says that with the coming of the kingdom of God Satan or the principalities and powers is defeated. Perhaps this needs to be nuanced somewhat. Does the ‘binding’ of Satan mean that he is completely powerless?

Alternatively we could argue that our attempts to construct a ‘new creation’ people of God are always going to suffer from the flaws inherent in the historical context. Christendom sought to base a renewed humanity on the imperial model because it was ready to hand, had a certain inevitability given the role of Constantine, and in some sense at least appeared to give a proper place to the lordship of Christ exalted to the right hand of the Father. For all sorts of reasons that paradigm has collapsed and we are groping around for a new template for the new creational existence of the church.