Andrew, I don’t wish to belabour the point but I do not agree with your assessment of the relative importance given in Paul’s letters to past/present as opposed to present/future leaning texts. The fact is that Paul constantly alludes to the "incarnational" and (relatively) only occasionally jumps to the future. I did have this doubt and ran through just Romans and came up with an incarnational (vs future) focus in: Rom 1:1-6, 3:21-26, 4:23-5:21, 6:1-11, (6:22-23), 12:1-2, (13:11-14) while in the whole of Romans 8 only vv18-25 could be considered ‘eschatological’. I don’t offer this as proof positive and I hope I’m not here misunderstood to be doing a variety of statistics or of prooftexting, but that’s a lot of stuff to ignore!

You could still argue that Paul’s view of the future conditions his work in the present, or that Paul had an interregnum approach wheras we should have a fulfilment approach (that’s closer to what you do seem to argue I think) but as far as Paul’s own written emphasis goes, I don’t think that there’s much doubt.

So, a big question is; was all that just a historical foundation, important but not at all binding on Christendom, assuming that somewhere along the way this preparousia period has mysteriously faded out altogether? Is discipleship now something that is not similar to what Paul and Jesus enjoined (for the most part) but is rather to be derived from those bits of whatever parts of the NT and OT actually seemed to be peering into a hazy future?

If nothing else, the very fact that late 1st C fellowships felt driven to record the ethical and kingdom teaching of Jesus as normative, even in a post Jerusalem world, seems to me to argue against such a wholesale discarding of a definition of discipleship that is tied to the way that Jesus and Paul themselves lived out their lives - and to be replaced with what?

Live to serve : Serve to live