Danutz, we’re always walking a fine line between clarity and caricature - and we are bound to overstep it occasionally. I accept that you have always made the argument about justice in its fullest sense a matter of supreme significance - though it seems to me that Paul has drawn similar conclusions about your program. That’s an apology - but my concern remains: can this commitment, as profound as it is, honestly be labelled ‘Christian’ - is it genuinely in continuity with the agenda of Jesus of Nazareth - if it is disconnected from the original narrative to the extent that you wish?

So I suppose that the big question we need to address - without misrepresenting each other - is something like: What exactly is lost if we take the sort of ‘liberal’ option that you recommend, and what is the impact of that loss on our claim to be in continuity with the agenda of Jesus of Nazareth? Or more simply: What does it mean to be ‘Christian’?

In responding to this I want to repeat the point I made with regard to An Emergent Manifesto of Hope that we are not addressing the difficult theological questions with sufficient imagination. I think that the modern liberal option is as narrow and unimaginative as the modern evangelical option. There are theological possibilities in a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament that we have only just begun to explore, and which I think will at least help us to formulate responses to Paul’s questions that don’t require us to take the easy of option of excluding from our theology everything that does not cohere with a modern worldview.

For example, I think we gain a very interesting perspective on the question of Jesus’ divinity if we remove it from the realm of an abstract metaphysics that crudely asserts that Jesus is both God and man and view it in relation to a narrative of confrontation with Roman imperial theology - I would suggest that we should read Phil. 2:5-11 in this way. I’m not sure where that will lead, but it is a priori a reasonable thing to do, and worth exploring much further before resorting to the liberal escape clause.