Well, yes, it’s all very fascinating. But it’s not new. Dispensationalism proposed, for instance, the sermon on the mount as an ‘interim ethic’ to meet the unique circumstances of the disciples to whom it was given. But history has delivered the verdict - historically, very few indeed bought this viewpoint.

To take the interpretation here offered, one wonders that the NT didn’t come with a health warning - so that we wouldn’t have misread it all these years. And that is the problem: is it really credible that a body of literature which has formed the community of faith from one generation to another should now be regarded as largely of historical interest only? Not only that, but the events central to that literature also of historical interest - applicable to people then, but not to people now.

However, the main reason that I have taken up my pen is to object to the way ‘Christendom’ (or its demise) is invoked to reinforce this wholesale revision of how we are to frame the faith for today’s world. ‘Christendom’, or something like it, has been hailed as dead for at least 150 years, long before the term post-modern was a twinkle in Andrew’s eyes, as I have pointed out in previous posts. And even if it was only now in its terminal stages (whatever it is), that would be no reason for accepting the necessity of Andrew’s reinterpreted version of the faith. It would be an argument for the church finding itself once again in the difficult situation of ‘pre-Christendom’ - in which the original context of the NT would become more alive to its adherents, not less.

In fact, ‘Christendom’ is a myth, in my opinion and reading of church history. The church as the community of faith has always been on the margins of society, as it is of the world - in every context in which it finds expression. Life is rather more complicated, I think, than the mythologised view of current history within which Andrew is placing his re-reading (and of course he is not alone in taking this ‘post-Christendom’ view - otherwise he wouldn’t be making it!).

Having said that, and another reason I have picked up my pen: we were looking at the subject of ‘discipleship’ in the home-group I am part of last night. ‘Discipleship’ seems to be as alien a concept to my fellow home-group members as Andrew suggests it should be - as an outmoded historical phenomenon. I’m assailed from all sides. But acting as ‘new creation’ people calls, to my mind, just as much for a contextualised interpretation of the teaching (and practice) of the gospels now as it did for Jesus’s followers then. It has both personal and corporate ramifications (let’s not be misled by the canard of setting one against the other). Or how else are we to obtain our bearings - other than from gnostic sources which have no particular yardstick of accountability?