Thanks for the response, Andrew.

I think that your last paragraph sums it up perfectly: ‘the New Testament, I think, tells a story about the salvation of a people, which secondarily is seen to have implications for individuals.’

I don’t quite understand why so many of those who challenge any of the preteristic approaches to the NT, do so by suggesting that it leaves no application for us today. We don’t approach the OT in the same way, do we?

I personally think that I would further stretch your second point above. Though we are not a part of the same first-fruits community, we are living on the same roots. (Forget that, I’ve just re-read your fourth point!)

This may seem tedious, but I really do disagree with the statement that "The core narrative of the New Testament is that Jesus chose a path of suffering and death so that Israel as God’s people might survive the wrath of God that was coming upon the nation in the form of war against Rome." It is a narrative, but not the narrative.

If we take the Exodus narrative, which Jesus was celebrating with his disciples at the last supper, it is a narrative which, within the framework of narratives which form the biblical story as a whole , is overshadowed by - and derives greater significance from - the creation/fall narrative, and is a staging post, however important it may have been in itself, to addressing the far deeper and more overarching problem which that earlier narrative highlighted.

Andrew’s handling of the issue of narratives in the NT does something very ingenious, but which I think is fundamentally flawed. Instead of interpreting the flow of the narratives towards finding their fulfilment in Jesus, in a person, he finds Jesus to be the means to an end, the end being the continuity of the narrative in the people of God. But this runs counter to the emphasis of the New Testament, in which the supreme focus is given to Jesus as a person, and in the deeds and events he accomplished.

As far as the gospel is concerned, the person of Jesus, and the events which took place through him, became relevant not simply for Israel, but for all nations. These nations are first represented by Jews from all parts of the Roman empire and beyond on the day of Pentecost; subsequently by people who had some connection with Israel (Cornelius and his household), but increasingly by those with very little direct connection - as evidenced in the church at Antioch, Corinth, and the gentile portion of the church at Rome. Primarily, the flow of the proclamation is towards a person, in whom the narratives find their fulfilment, not towards Israel and the narratives in themselves. Jesus of course was, and will always remain, the supreme expression of all that Israel was intended to be.

This is why, when reading Andrew’s accounts, for all their detail, Jesus remains opaque, or at best a shadowy figure, really an adjunct to the stories which he is said to serve. He is not, in himself, presented as directly relevant to anyone outside the stories. He would not have been relevant, in this form, to the young man I met on the train. He is truly locked up in history.

In Andrew’s presentations, I see emphasis being given to narrative, to the people of God, to renewed creation. As I read the accounts he gives, emphasis on the person of Jesus becomes secondary. To me, as it seemed to be also to Paul, the emphasis on the person of Jesus is primary. Jesus gripped Paul with every fibre of his being. Reading Andrew, it seems that the narrative grips him with greater fervour. The narratives find their fulfilment in a person. The narratives do not thereby disappear, but move us to a new level of significance, in which Jesus as a person becomes the central hermeneutical key, to the texts, to our lives. History has witnessed the exploration of that significance. The narratives are scaffolding, the building is the person. We should not reverse the emphasis. When Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples, he pointed to himself as its fulfilment - not to the narrative as having some kind of independent life outside of himself, which he merely came to facilitate.

So why provide a historical interpretation of Jesus - locating him within the thought-forms and events of 1st century Israel? The exercise throws up surprising insights, and is a basic tool of consistent exegesis. But different and later historical contexts test the significance of historical meaning in people and times far removed from the original historical contexts themselves. Christian faith has always provided a world-view in which Jesus, in himself, has continued to be directly significant and relevant in all times and to all people in wide varieties of contexts. The moral requirements of the ten commandments have always provided a template which works not simply for Israel, but for all peoples. It is Jesus in himself who provides, through his death on the cross, not simply Israel’s physical survival in the 1st century, but access for Israel and all peoples to new creation realities.

I find the distinction between individual and corporate emphases of the significance of the work of Jesus to be helpful only in a secondary and corrective sense. Of course there is an emphasis on the continuity of a people of God in the biblical narrative. But this emphasis never by-passes individual realities and responsibilities. Paul did not meet Jesus on the road to Damascus as a people but as an individual. The stories of the conversions of Acts are a mixture of people in group and individual settings - but the responses described never by-pass the individual. The gospels are full of Jesus’s focus on the individual as illustrating God’s value of the individual person, and how God’s compassionate restoration of Israel works out in practice. The OT is full of accounts of how individual people and their faithful actions had an impact on the corporate life of the nation.

An emphasis on the corporate is always healthy in an age in which individualism has become a distorted value. The bible draws us back to the significance of the corporate in God’s dealings. But the corporate values of the bible are never emphasised at the expense of the individual, nor to the extent that individual values and responses are submerged.

One of the reasons why, I suspect, in Andrew’s approach, the significance of the individual may be downplayed, is that it takes us back to the hugely important issue of personal responsibility to God, and the personal changes which God wishes to bring about in our lives - which the gospel, in its multi-contextual, pan-historical emphasis, brings about. I find some postmodern theological thought to be very coy about personal response, about confronting individual moral weakness. Could it be the old canard dressed up in modern intellectual form: pride refusing to concede that it needs to be put to death; do anything rather than concede that we are severally and jointly deeply flawed, that Jesus’s death on the cross might be addressing that unpalatable possibility?

I would like to see a mature theology for the postmodern age in which creation realities are not emphasised at the expense of our personal need for renewal - for freedom from the underlying realities which are destroying creation. I would like to see a mature balancing of the respective roles and claims of the individual and the corporate in our responses to God - and not a misleading setting of the one against the other. I would like to see a mature balancing of historic contextualising of the faith with its contextualisation in all ages and peoples. At the moment, I do not see this - rather, too much locking up of the faith in history in historic contextualising, too much misleading argument in which simplistic dichotomies are set up to promote one view or emphasis at the expense of the other - such as people v. individual; and the use of words such as mystical, metaphysical, universal, timeless as codewords for dismissing out of hand unexplored and often caricatured and trivialised versions of what they represent.