John, aren’t we more or less in agreement here? I probably need to read your comments a little more closely, but let me put my argument as simply as I can and tell me at what points you fundamentally disagree with it.

1. The seminal promise to Abraham following the repeated failure of creation to live up to expectations is framed implicitly as a restarting of creation in microcosm. As the story unfolds the descendants of Abraham fulfil this mandate by becoming a nation defined by Law, kingship, temple and geography. Thus the ‘new creation’ is shaped according to a national template.

2. The nation of Israel fails to live according to the Law, kingship becomes corrupted, the temple is destroyed and the people are exiled from the land. This state of failure persists, in effect, right down to the time when Jesus announced good news about an imminent intervention of God as king to transform this situation.

3. The dark side of this announcement is that the national template for the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham is about to be destroyed. The good news is that a new template or new covenant is emerging, defined by faith in Jesus, the life-renewing presence of the Spirit, and characterized not least by the obliteration of deeply ingrained divisions in humanity.

4. But because this is explicitly determined as a recovery of the promise to Abraham and because it anticipates a final renewal of heaven and earth, the emerging template retains creational dimensions. The blessing of the people in Christ is not a purely spiritual matter; it is the blessing of the original creation, the blessing of humanity as community in relation both to the creator and to the earth; and the renewed people of God are sent out beyond the microcosm of obsolete national Israel into the whole world to claim it as God’s ‘holy land’.

5. My reading of New Testament eschatology suggests that this process of renewal is a protracted one because of opposition first from Judaism, then from Rome. It is only once we get to Christendom that we really see the emergence of a new template by which the church seeks to express the sovereignty of Christ over the whole world.

6. The tension between Christendom and dissenting movements such as the Anabaptists is analogous to the tension between national Israel and the prophets, but this does not in itself invalidate the mainstream attempt to represent the fulness of a renewed humanity.

7. That template has also now collapsed, and we now have the demanding task of constructing a new template to give expression to the seminal promise to Abraham, to give body to the DNA of creation renewed, in a postmodern or post-Christendom world.