Sam, I think I understand the significance of the shift in focus from church to Jesus. It reflects negatively a disillusionment with church and positively a desire for a more down-to-earth, humane, personally relevant and committed form of Christianity.

My question, however, is whether Jesus really provides us with the model for being Christian community that we think he does. Or perhaps more accurately, it seems to me that there is far more to being God’s people than is really manifested either in the life of the disciples around Jesus or in the early churches. My argument is that in both cases what was being shaped was a form of covenantal community designed specifically to survive the disruptive and painful transition from the old age to the new. I think that this is what Jesus meant when he called Jews to take up their cross and follow him; it is what Paul meant when he said that the churches had to be constructed out of material that would survive the ‘fire’ of distress and persecution (1 Cor. 3:10-15).

This is not to say that there is nothing of interest for us in those two paradigms. The eschatological crisis stretching from Jesus to the victory over Rome had a profound reshaping impact on the people of God, and we should live consciously in the light of that. But it seems to me that a narrative theology must place that extended episode within the larger biblical story about a people called not just to survive an eschatological crisis but to be an alternative to a creation in crisis. I think that it is right to see that creational potential summed up in Jesus, but I don’t think we see it adequately expressed in the life of Jesus because i) the path he walked was too narrow, and ii) it is his resurrection, not his earthly ministry, that marks the beginning of the new world. If we stay with our Lord ‘during his own earthly sojourn’, we never get to new creation.

So I would agree that the cross is at the heart of New Testament eschatology; but I would also argue that the New Testament eschatology of suffering and vindication is at the heart of a larger story about the renewal of creation, which is expressed not in the cross but in the resurrection. That is the thesis of Re: Mission.

I regard (tentatively, questioningly and perhaps too benevolently) Christendom as an attempt to give concrete social and cultural form to the conviction that God called his people to be an alternative humanity, a City of God, expressing in itself not just the capacity to suffer but also the capacity to experience the blessing of creation, shalom. I also think that Christendom was a fundamentally flawed experiment - and I certainly would not be more comfortable with Constantine than Jesus. But for better or for worse, that’s what happened - and we are still to varying degrees its victims and its beneficiaries. I don’t share the full extent of your negative assessment of Christendom.

In any case, Christendom has collapsed as a framing paradigm, so I suggest that this whole emerging church phenomenon is a sign that we are searching - consciously or unconsciously - for a new paradigm. Naturally, in order to find that new paradigm we go back to our origins, and it is certainly instructive to go back to the Gospels - or to an understanding of the early church as a radical Jesus movement (cf. Alan Hirsch).

But I think it is a mistake to regard either the Gospels or the Letters of Paul as constituting a frozen ideal or blueprint. They are part of a dynamic, unfolding story: indeed, they are aware that a crucial part of that story lies in their future, that it is not all fully captured in the story of Jesus and his disciples or in the encounter of the church with Judaism or Rome - or even, for that matter, in the cross and resurrection. I think that New Testament eschatology takes account of this historical dynamic, and that if we pursue that trajectory again now, it will bring us to a point at which we need to reimagine what it means to be a people called not fundamentally to imitate either Jesus or the early but to be God’s new creation in the risen Christ in the midst of the nations and cultures of the world for the sake of the creational blessing.

My guess is that in place of the political-rationalist paradigm of Christendom we will have a much stronger sense of the existence of God’s people as an organic movement dispersed throughout the world with a correspondingly organic mindset, worldview, belief system. We can be pretty sure, however, that this will also be a deeply flawed experiment in being new creation - just in different ways.