Re: Being a disciple of Jesus is not enough

No, I mean more than that ‘we should take the narrative given to us and then adopt an expression that fits into our current context’. My argument is basically that the Jesus discipleship model provides us with the wrong overarching framework for our understanding of Christian praxis today. It is not by any means irrelevant, but it is contextualized at a certain point in the storyline, it is a response to a particular historical-eschatological state of affairs, which is not reproduced in our own context. So I think we need to define identity and praxis with reference not to the Gospel stories - or to the story of the early church, for that matter - but to the trajectory of the whole narrative.

It’s rather like Tom Wright’s five act play analogy. We’re are in the position of the actors who have to improvise the unwritten fifth act in a way that properly continues and completes the story from the preceding acts. If all we did was perform act three again, we would end up with a very unsatisfying narrative.

Are you saying that along with us being new creations this is the new heavens and the new earth we find in Revelation and Isaiah? Or are you specifically talking against a pre-millenial style rapture? Do you see there still being an eschatological crisis, albeit a different one than faced by the first disciples of Christ?

I would say that the new creation motif in Isaiah is basically a metaphor for the restoration of the people of God, who are called in Abraham to be an alternative humanity, to succeed at being creation when mankind as a whole had failed. Possibly, however, the metaphor presupposes an absolute expectation - that the whole of creation will be ontologically remade, which is the hope that I think is expressed at the end of Revelation. So the ultimate hope that we have is of a final justice, a remaking of heaven and earth, and the defeat of evil and death.

My argument in The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission is that within that framing creational eschatology is a limited eschatology that has to do with the victory of the early church over its ‘enemies’: the story of the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven to receive a kingdom states the urgent hope that the disciples would not be overcome by persecution but would eventually, like the persistent widow in Jesus’ parable, be vindicated against their enemies. I think that the ‘rapture’ motif (basically 1 Thess. 4:16-17) forms part of that inner eschatological narrative and is therefore, from our point of view, a thing of the past.

The church may face similar eschatological crises today where its existence is threatened by an oppressive régime. I think the church in the West faces the crisis of the eschaton of Christendom, a crisis of irrelevance; and we are currently going through the ‘birthpangs’ of a ‘new age’, as a new paradigm takes shape. But the fundamental crisis to which we are called to respond is the crisis of creation, which takes us right back to Abraham. The problem is that the church has got stuck trying to re-enact the eschatological crisis of the early centuries and has missed the seminal missional task, which is to show the world how God intended his good creation to be.