On a separate note, I’d like to read more about how Andrew and others see what he has written as distinctive from, if it is, the preterist view.

Eric, this is an inevitable question and one that I would much rather avoid. Eschatology more than any other area of theology has been bedevilled by labels. As soon as you ask something like ‘Is this a preterist position?’, you find yourself having to deal with a whole set of assumptions, concerns, anxieties, etc., that have very little to do with biblical interpretation and a lot to do with the promotion and defence of entrenched theological positions. Don’t take this personally - and maybe I’m just being naïve - but what does it matter whether this is a preterist position (partial or otherwise) or an amillenialist position or whatever? The question that I have been asking myself as I have read the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament is not ‘Which of the numerous schemata that the febrile theological mind has devised does this or that text best fit?’ but simply ‘What is he talking about?’

I think there are two fundamental assumptions that you have to make when you read New Testament apocalyptic texts. The first is that they nearly always invoke, by quotation or allusion, a larger Old Testament context - perhaps by way of a mediating tradition of interpretation - which should be allowed to guide interpretation. The second is that these texts are about something: they address real circumstances, real fears, the insecurities and dilemmas of real communities; they explore the implications of real events. In this sense apocalyptic is very realistic - perhaps this is what Justin is getting at when he says that ‘the genius of apocalypticism is that it recognizes this world (in the sense of the physical creation) as being the stage for God’s salvation plan’. We have to keep asking ourselves: ‘What really mattered to the people who heard this or read this?’

So when we read Jesus’ assurance to the disciples as they sat on the Mount of Olives, just across the valley from the temple mount, that people would see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven, we must ask: why does he think that Daniel’s vision of a human figure coming on clouds, trailing with it a whole argument about the oppression of the saints of the Most High and the defeat of the fourth beast, would be of such crucial significance to this group of people? I really don’t think he was giving them a parcel and saying, ‘Here, pass it on from generation to generation until the music stops and someone finally gets to open it’.