Peter, nice to hear from you!

I’m rather inclined to think that the conceptual and spiritual hollowness of popular thinking (or non-thinking) about the parousia is a very good reason for checking that we’ve actually got the notion right. Thanks to NT Wright and others we are increasingly learning to read, or reread, the New Testament historically - even as evangelicals, postmodern evangelicals, or whatever it is that we want to call ourselves. But if we are going to inquire into the early church’s ‘parousia consciousness’ historically, we have to take seriously the possibility that they were talking about their future rather than ours. So the argument runs, for example, that the ‘coming of the Son of man’ refers to the vindication of Christ at the time of the destruction of the temple.

If this is correct (and the jury is only beginning to pack up its stuff and go out on this one), then we will have to revise our motivation for mission perhaps, and probably a few other things. But it seems to me that we are also beginning to find that the historical rereading can in many ways prove more compelling than the traditional notions.